ABSTRACT

The Denver, Colorado region is working to address growth issues in a collaborative regional planning process using the Metro Vision 2020 regional plan as a guide. This paper provides some background about the planning process and lessons learned about its implementation to date.

Context for the Denver Regional Planning Experience

The decade of the 90s was one of great change for the Denver, Colorado, metropolitan region. This eight county, 49 municipality, region of 2.28 million now holds over 56% of the state’s population. The change was fueled by sustained population growth and marked by a resurgence of support for planning at the regional level. In the early 90s this support was brought, in part, by the passage of ISTEA and the Clean Air Act Amendments, and, in part, by the expectation and hope by local decision-makers that an effective regional planning process could make a difference in how the region would develop. In 1997, the Denver Regional Council of Governments, or "DRCOG", adopted a new regional plan called Metro Vision 2020 creating a physical growth framework for the region. Since then, the regional council has worked to engage local governments to implement a policy framework and growth action strategies without specific state-enabled legal authority for growth management.

The plan was visionary, changing current policy to shift the projected future to a desired future. It also integrated elements affecting growth, urban form, transportation infrastructure, open space, and the environment in a way that hadn’t been done before. Four years were spent preparing the plan with an interdisciplinary task force and involved the creation and analysis of alternative urban form scenarios using GIS. This planning process provided a basis of information and political support from which to frame a preferred future urban form. The plan is organized around six core elements: a commitment to holding the urban portion of the metro area to 700 square miles in size over the next 20 years (a 28% increase); fostering urban centers that are transit-serviced, mixed use concentrations of households and jobs throughout the region; a balanced transportation system of rail and bus transit, highways and bicycle and pedestrian systems that offer a variety of different ways of getting places; maintaining four free-standing communities that retain their identity and don't physically blend into other urban areas; creating a connected regional open space system; and the protection of air and water quality through careful land development.

Regional Planning and Decision-Making at DRCOG

The planning approach in the Denver region has been largely an incremental and advisory form of growth management to influence the timing, location, and extent of growth and land development. The Denver region historically has had little political support for direct regulatory approaches to regional growth management. There has been some support for regional development planning at DRCOG, partly as a result of the agency’s dual role of a state designated regional planning agency and a federally designated Metropolitan Planning Organization which distributes federal transportation funds to the region. In the past, regional planning tended towards DRCOG staff taking on the role of "experts". Planning relied on using complex modeling tools to arrive at "the answer" to specific regional problems, primarily transportation, which were then presented to local government leaders in a take it or leave it fashion. Often the answer was "we could fix that problem if we only had more money to spend". In the case of traffic congestion and sprawl, this answer didn’t provide local governments with much to work with. Moreover, the expert approach to decision-making was not conducive to collaboration among communities — it frequently created a perception of winners and losers. Thus, many of our constituents were distrustful and cooperation was rare. Recent regional planning under Metro Vision 2020 has employed a more collaborative problem solving approach than before. Local government buy-in of the planning concepts presented in Metro Vision 2020 has increased as a result.

The Implementation Challenge

Critics of the DRCOG regional plan have expressed concern that it lacks traditional enforcement mechanisms. Lacking legal authority, the plan relies on incentives, education, awareness, and public pressure to act. The DRCOG Board of Directors adopted the tenets of "Flexible, Voluntary, Collaborative, and Effective" to support implementation of the concepts found in the plan. Initially some local government leaders were wary of how the plan was to be implemented. They were particularly concerned about DRCOG staff playing a major role under a non-collaborative, expert-based, decision-making system that marked DRCOG’s past history.

Since Metro Vision 2020 was adopted, we have spent the last two years working to further detail and implement strategies to achieve the plan’s core elements. A significant amount of time has been spent convening and working with the right mix of both concerned, and effective, local government, business and environmental leaders - first as the Metro Vision Policy Committee and more recently as the Metro Vision Action Group. Emphasis initially focused on the first two of the four tenets (voluntary and flexible) as local elected officials expressed their concerns about DRCOG staff doing the decision-making. These leaders first tackled the issue of getting local governments to map and agree to their future urbanized areas and delineating them as urban growth boundaries or "UGBs". The committee also prepared a set of flexibility provisions that further provided them the comfort that local governments themselves controlled their own urban growth boundary delineations. The flexibility provisions also provided a process for changing the urban growth boundaries. This work culminated in the adoption by the Board of Directors of the regional urban growth boundary map and the agreement to abide by the self-administered flexibility guidelines in December of 1997.

Perceptions about Growth and Metro Vision 2020

The public perception of our regional planning efforts is somewhat vague and more likely negative, i.e. "How did we let things get this bad?" or "why can’t they stop all of this growth?’ As a relatively small organization, DRCOG is not in the public limelight on these issues but our member local governments are. Population growth has certainly become an urgent public policy issue, as the region has been busy growing by over 40,000 people per year for the last seven years. A consensus of public opinion has emerged across the region about the need to plan better to address the issues of sprawl, transportation, and loss of open space. Unfortunately, there is far less consensus about how to go about doing it. A gap exists between the public perception of growth problems and possible solutions compared to those of local government leaders. While public, and leadership, acceptance of New Urbanist design concepts, mixed - use development, and the need for increased transit service and pedestrian accessibility is slowly growing, other concepts such as infill and redevelopment and increasing taxes to pay for parks and open space are more difficult to find consensus and support for.

Implementing Metro Vision 2020

We are starting to see progress in implementing Metro Vision 2020. By early this year 23 out of 49 local governments have either adopted an urban growth boundary into their comprehensive plans or enacted an ordinance or resolution establishing an urban growth boundary. The participating 23 local jurisdictions contain 92% of the region’s current population. While many local governments are using their UGB as a planning tool, some are just now realizing its implications and have expressed concern over their long-term supply of urbanizable land.

In 1999, DRCOG began using transportation funds as incentives for good land use planning. Faced with the need to make relevant connections between good planning and transportation investments that can lead to sprawl, local elected officials enacted a major change to the existing process for competitive programming of federal capital transportation funds via the Transportation Improvement Program (TIP). For projects to be funded beginning in 2001, 20% of the total competitive evaluation points could be allocated to a jurisdiction’s project proposal based on whether the jurisdiction requesting funds has enacted an urban growth boundary and prepared a narrative statement indicating how the project or the community is consistent with or implementing the elements of Metro Vision 2020.

Also in 1999, DRCOG convened an adhoc committee called the Metro Vision Action Group composed of leaders that were not elected officials but included business representatives, environmental advocates and non-profit organizations. They were tasked with addressing and detailing specific steps that should be undertaken to implement concepts of Metro Vision 2020. The group prepared ten action strategies that were discussed with local leaders at a well attended metro-wide Summit on Regional Cooperation meeting in late fall of 1999. These action strategies focused on encouraging urban development within urban growth boundaries, broadening multi-modal transportation funding, increasing average net densities of communities through compact, mixed-use development, achieving jobs/housing balance within subregions, aggressively protecting more parks and open space, and making comprehensive plans more complete and consistent, increasing their reliability as decision making documents that work to locally implement the concepts presented in Metro Vision 2020.

Very recently, local elected officials have advanced some of these action strategies by drafting a region-wide intergovernmental agreement (IGA) on comprehensive planning and urban growth boundaries. This significant step reflects a changing perception on the part of local elected officials. They are aware that more active steps are needed to better manage growth in the largely urban Denver region, as opposed to the rest of the state. They are also motivated by the concern that if they fail to act on this important issue, citizen satisfaction with local leadership will be compromised and their decision-making authority challenged by citizen legislative initiative. The IGA, if successful, may demonstrate coordination between local governments to manage growth without the need for statewide enabling legislation. DRCOG planners and staff are working to provide information on how to go about implementing the growth action strategies at the local level but will need to adopt more close working relationships with our local governments if we are to be most effective.

Other Related Events

This past fall’s election exhibited both public and local government support for two major transportation funding initiatives that help implement the regional plan. The passage of two referendum issues, one for bonding of highway projects and another for the regional transit district "RTD" to build another light rail line, have been seen as evidence of public support and consensus about solutions to the problems of population growth in the region.

State legislative interest in planning issues has recently heated up. Over 40 bills addressing growth issues, planning, and open space, were introduced in the state legislature this year. Unfortunately, all but a handful died either in committee or on the floor. In response, environmental advocacy groups have promised that a citizen initiative will appear on the ballot in the near future to address strengthening comprehensive plans, providing for urban growth boundaries and preserving open space if the legislature fails to act.

DRCOG the organization is evolving. Beginning last year, DRCOG gained a new executive director and began reorganization. A big part of the reorganization process was to align the agency around Metro Vision 2020, clarify the role of the organization in finding solutions to regional problems, and conducting decision making through collaboration and consensus. Working under the mission statement of " To lead by serving as a local government forum for collaboratively addressing and resolving regional issues", the agency is exploring how to become more of a convenor and facilitator for regional decision-making.

Lessons Learned

DRCOG’s work with local governments has changed perceptions and increased awareness about growth and planning. This has led to a better-developed sense of the problems and effective solutions with local government leaders. We now have local elected officials beginning to think more about planning proactively for growth. We have also revitalized the role of comprehensive plans and the need for concurrent and integrated planning for open space and development, water and air quality, and transportation infrastructure. One observation is that this type of planning is somewhat new to the Denver metro region. Metro Vision 2020 is now moving from a growth vision framework to a set of regional growth strategies. Staff realizes that the plan established a preferred physical framework but lacked compelling stories, images, and in some cases specific tools on how to achieve the vision. This made it hard for elected officials, and the public, to visualize their preferred future and is an area we need to work on. We also know we need to do a better job of preparing reasonable action strategies that make sense to the local governments for they are the ones that will need to implement them.

We have also learned some things about how leadership fits in the regional planning process. First, it’s imperative to involve key leaders in order to build and maintain support, credibility, and momentum. The business community carries a lot of clout in implementing solutions, but are hard to engage and keep at the table. The public policy process is often too long and indecisive for these action-oriented individuals. The challenge is to bring them in when they can be part of fashioning solutions and then fully utilize their contributions in a short period of time. With local elected leaders, a big challenge has been finding ways to empower them to think beyond their jurisdiction’s boundaries and to plan for a longer period than their term of office. We’ve found that local elected officials that we serve are used to operating in their self—interest. This means they will work on regional planning solutions when local benefits are apparent and local control is respected.

Metro Vision 2020 remains a continual work in progress. Local governments are starting to work with many of its concepts. We are learning as we go and progress has been slow, but we are starting to definitely see results. Public sentiment has finally caught up with the regional plan’s identification of the region’s growth problems. Local solutions to these problems are also growing, from communities adopting urban growth boundaries, planning for compact urban centers, and adopting neotraditional design guidelines, to jurisdictions creating or increasing public funding for parks and open space preservation. All of these activities have a link to the concepts put forth in Metro Vision 2020.