What Price Home Rule?
Jim Gomes, Boston Globe Op-Ed, June 8, 2002
A cynic, said Oscar Wilde, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. However, one need not be cynical to ask if Massachusetts is paying too high a price for its tradition of home rule.
Home rule does have its value. The system whereby our 351 cities and towns each control their own schools, public safety departments, land use decision-making, and most other public functions does put government close to the people. Local residents often do know local conditions best, and, in theory at least, can keep a watchful eye on spending.
But a clear-eyed look at the challenges confronting us makes it apparent that we are paying dearly for placing so much reliance on municipalities to meet the needs of the 21st century commonwealth:
Spreading sprawl. Dramatic changes in our landscape caused by unplanned development are all around us. Dozens of acres are bulldozed and paved every day. We consume more than twice as much land per person as our grandparents did in 1950. Yet many cities and towns have embraced sprawl as the only way to increase their revenues without overriding Proposition 2 ½. And, of course, if a town can site new development near its border it will reap all the property tax revenue for itself while sharing the resulting traffic and other ill effects with its neighbors.
The affordable housing crisis. Increasingly, families are struggling to find decent housing in Massachusetts. In only nine of the 127 cities and towns in Greater Boston can a median income family afford a median priced house. But under home rule communities scheme to keep young families out, since most homes don't generate enough in property taxes to pay for the services, especially education, that families require. So municipalities welcome McMansions and housing for the over-55 and childless while homes for middle and working class families are discouraged.
Running out of water. The recent drought is getting peoples' attention, but the root causes of impending water shortages are overdevelopment, lack of wastewater and stormwater management, and failure to conserve. Cities and towns aren't solving this problem, but exacerbating it by racing their neighbors to see who can drain dwindling water supplies faster.
Inadequate public transit. It is hard enough, with so much money being sucked up by the Big Dig and the power of the highway lobby, to get the state to make adequate investments in mass transit. But municipalities make matters worse, as one town fights against commuter rail service for more than a decade in the part of the state with the worst traffic. Other towns with parking lots near rail stations close them to commuters, hoarding spaces for local residents. The result: more air pollution, more wasted energy, and a lot more cars crawling into Boston.
What is state government's response? The executive branch produces "build-out analyses" to exhort cities and towns to raise their property taxes to buy open space and build housing, but washes its hands from taking a position on the deeper causes of our ills. The legislature has begun to consider "smart growth," but in the meantime it's business as usual as everyone votes for each other's "home rule petitions," even when the petition is to sacrifice more open land to development, adding to traffic and increasing the demand for water. It's hard to believe, but Massachusetts has no coherent policies that link protecting our natural resources, insuring affordable housing, getting to and from our jobs, and revitalizing our older cities.
What is to be done? One step would be to give communities more revenue sources so that their development decisions will not be so revenue driven. A local option real estate transfer tax, killed by the realtors lobby two years ago, would help. Giving cities and towns funds to prepare local plans and requiring them to conform their zoning to the plans, as the proposed Livable Communities Act would do, also makes sense.
But giving cities and towns more resources won't solve all the problems. It is time to consider an enhanced role for regional entities, whether today's regional planning agencies or some new form. Home rule defenders and the development industry dismiss regions as irrelevant or dangerous, but we can't go on relying on municipalities to make decisions whose impacts will be heavily felt beyond their borders. Their incentives are to disregard such impacts and to focus only on local costs and benefits. But, to paraphrase Pogo, we have met the people who suffer those impacts, and they are us.
Finally, the state must stop hiding behind home rule as an excuse not to address public problems. If Massachusetts has become family-unfriendly, if open space is being lost, if cars are multiplying and water disappearing, it's up to state government, not town meeting, to fix things. If the state is serious about affordable housing - and it should be - it must stop passing the buck to developers under Chapter 40B and start using its own power of the purse and tools like inclusionary zoning to make communities comply with the law's requirement of 10% affordable units. If the state is to avoid chronic water shortages, it needs to reject applications for withdrawals that cannot be sustained, and act to insure that stormwater is allowed to seep into the ground and replenish water supplies rather than being whisked to Boston Harbor for treatment.
Conventional wisdom says home rule is here to stay. That may be fine if you are lucky enough to live in one of those towns with a healthy tax base, great schools, plentiful open space, and historic character and charm. But for most of the commonwealth's citizens home rule as we know it is not working. Perhaps in this election year, leaders will step forward who are willing to ask uncomfortable questions about the way we've always done things rather than simply muddle along. Maybe one of them will even come right out and ask, "What price home rule?"
Jim Gomes is the President of the Environmental League of Massachusetts, a Beacon Hill advocacy and policy organization.