.bodytext {float: left; } .floatimg-left-hort { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right: 10px; width:300px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-caption-hort { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:300px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-vert { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right:15px; width:200px;} .floatimg-left-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; font-size: 10px; width:200px;} .floatimg-right-hort { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px;} .floatimg-right-caption-hort { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px; font-size: 10px; } .floatimg-right-vert { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px;} .floatimg-right-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; font-size: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; border-top-style: double; border-top-color: black; border-bottom-style: double; border-bottom-color: black;} .floatimgright-sidebar p { line-height: 115%; text-indent: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar h4 { font-variant:small-caps; } .pullquote { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 150px; background: url(http://www.dmbusinessdaily.com/DAILY/editorial/extras/closequote.gif) no-repeat bottom right !important ; line-height: 150%; font-size: 125%; border-top: 1px solid; border-bottom: 1px solid;} .floatvidleft { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatvidright { float:right; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} Last week, Conan Smith, executive director of the Michigan Suburbs Alliance, visited Greater Des Moines and led two workshops hosted by 1000 Friends of Iowa, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 7 and Smart Growth America.

Smith, an activist on regional collaboration, land conservation and transportation issues in the Detroit and Ann Arbor areas, first worked with Greater Des Moines leaders on ways to implement smart growth principles through regional land use planning, transit-oriented development and zoning code provisions. He then worked with transportation leaders on ways development can be planned to support public transportation and be cost-effective for governments and developers.

In addition to serving on the Michigan Suburbs Alliance since 2004, Smith is a Washtenaw County commissioner and serves on the Southeastern Michigan Council of Governments, which is similar to the Des Moines Area Metropolitan Planning Organization. He also is a Smart Growth America board member and formerly served as land programs director for the state of Michigan.

We caught up to the smart growth advocate and asked him a few questions about regionalism and transportation issues.

Having been here for 24 hours, what is your initial impression of Greater Des Moines?

There is a city councilwoman from Waukee, Darlene Stanton, who put a challenge in front of me that I had never heard before. I asked about what design changes would make your community a better place than it is today. She and some city staffers started talking about cul-de-sacs. In a smart growth context, cul-de-sacs are typically a nightmare; it impedes connectivity. They explained there’s a sense of community that develops around these spaces. When you talk about connectivity from a smart growth standpoint, what we tend to talk about is connectivity for automobiles, and if what we really want is connectivity for people, we need to think about how you design a community around these clusters.

I’m not sure what the right answer is, but I can say that a really neat idea was posed to me. That’s one of the things I’m going to walk away with: There are people who are willing to consider things that are nontraditional here. There’s going to be a real benefit over the long haul the more we can foster that thinking.

What has been your biggest challenge in bringing 14 of Detroit’s suburban cities together to form the Michigan Suburbs Alliance?

Michigan has a tradition of local control. This is common throughout the Midwest. We don’t like to let other people tell us what to do. So getting community leaders to recognize that they have a common destiny and shared interest in creating regional policy has been the biggest challenge in the southeast Michigan area. We have a challenge in finding new ways to address issues that really are greater than local concern, such as water and air quality.

What works in terms of encouraging communities to work together in the Midwest?

Financial pressure leads to a lot of cooperation. I think that is rooted in a fiscal conservative value that we have throughout the Midwest region. We’re very cautious about how we spend our dollars, and there are places inside municipal governance where you can realize significant efficiencies by collaborating without compromising the character of your community. For example, who cares whether your city is collaborating with another city to buy desks and paper if it’s cheaper? Areas like police and fire, too. If they can get a fire truck to a fire 30 seconds faster, that’s significant.

After Detroit’s inner ring suburbs faced crumbling infrastructure, declining populations and decreased funding, they decided to band together. Is there anything Greater Des Moines could do now to prevent the same problems?

My hometown is Ann Arbor, Mich. We’re separate from Detroit by about 45 miles and I think people would call the area its own small metropolis. We have a strong core city and a couple other cities around us, and the metropolitan area is somewhere between a half to three-quarters million people. So there are probably greater parallels between my hometown and the Des Moines area.

What we’re doing in Ann Arbor in order to not become the Detroit region is thinking about this idea of collaboration early on. Everybody had their own parks plan, and what we had been doing before is setting those plans next to each other. Then we got together and said, “There’s got to be a more efficient way to do parks management and prioritizing what open lands we want to protect and preserve.” Through that process, we identified green infrastructure, those places where protecting our water quality became our highest priority. The same thing could have happened in Detroit 50 years ago. The consequence is we have rivers channeled with concrete. Many of our cities don’t have significant amounts of open space.

Des Moines is at a place in your development where there’s still a lot of opportunity to do things that are visionary and will have an impact on the character of your community for centuries. Think of Central Park in New York and the vision Frederick Law Olmsted had about that space: that this island in New York was going to be densely populated and needed an open area for its citizens to go. That kind of vision is exactly what we need in the Midwest now.

After a long history of not thinking about regional planning, what did it take to turn people around in Detroit?

We have a great foundation base that is helping transform a legacy of industrial development and pollution into something that’s going to be much more sustainable over the long run. Admittedly the Henry Fords of the world were true visionaries. They saw a way to bring prosperity to the region and provide jobs and give the world a different way to move around through the automobile. Their legacy is economic and that’s only one leg of that three-legged stool, the other two being environmental and social. You really have to do all those things if you want to have the kind of community that lasts for the ages.

Des Moines is often competing with its suburbs to attract new businesses. How do you get city leaders to put competition aside and work together?

It’s up to our political leaders to look at the underlying causes of competition. In most cases, it’s rooted in money, the desire to increase their tax base so they can provide better services to their citizens. If that comes at the cost of the neighboring community, so be it. But that doesn’t result in a cycle of prosperity, and the development of the economy becomes haphazard.

What we’re talking about in the Detroit metropolitan region now is how do we work with our cities, so when development happens inside City A, it’s not a harm to City B. One thing we’re looking at is to create a regional pool so a portion of the taxes [generated from the business] gets tucked away for regional issues, whether we want a regional arts alliance or do something for parks and greenways.

What role does transportation play in the development of cities?

We have a challenge, I think, in the Midwest of breaking out of that mindset of going to the car for everything. In southeast Michigan, we’re trying to put a commuter rail system between Ann Arbor and Detroit, which I’m excited about, but I recognized we could have a significant impact if half the people on that road decided to carpool or were given options for telecommuting. There are ways to address the transportation challenges that a growing urban area faces without necessarily making the huge investment. If people realize they have alternatives for trips – they can ride their bike or walk to a nearby office – they start to think about transportation in a different way.

How do you go about encouraging that change?

I think that’s where government can provide some really good incentives. There are live/work tax policies in place, so you can get a tax credit for living within a half mile of your place of business. We can work with employers to provide transit incentives. In exchange for parking, buy employees a bus pass.

The city of Des Moines is considering putting in a transit system between the west and east ends of downtown. What should leaders consider when looking at a major investment like that?

One, will it have a cultural impact? Where are you taking people from and taking them to on that system, and how does that encourage people to use alternatives? In downtown Detroit, we have the People Mover. It is a widely renowned debacle. It is a circle of the downtown and I don’t know anybody who rides it. You can walk that circle in 15 minutes from side to side.

It’s not just about laying the track; it’s about getting people from one place to another, and there have to be places for people to go. It’s about creating the regulatory environment for those places to be developed. We’re starting to look at how you create more density around those stops so within a half-mile radius of the transit stop, you want to see diverse and more dense housing. You want to see mixed-use development and offices.

How do you set the foundation for that development?

The first thing that needs to happen is the prioritization of the routes that you’re going to serve, and that’s really the responsibility of the metropolitan planning organization or the regional transit authority. Their job is to know what the traffic pattern is, and where are you going to get the most bang for your buck. Then hand that to municipal planners and say, “In order to make transit really work, we need your community to help with the planning and zoning that’s going to support good transit ridership.” Then you have to go to the citizens themselves and say, “We think there’s an opportunity here that can give you greater mobility, but we also have the opportunity to design your neighborhood in a way that really reflects its culture and character.”

Once you have some buy-in from the neighborhood, then you have to get the developers, because those are the ones that are going to do the heavy lifting behind a transit supportive plan. You’ve got to show them that the market will be there and the government investment will be there. If the builders come in and build to people’s values, they’re going to use that transit system more, and that’s what’s going to make it ultimately viable.

A really fun exercise is to go to Google Earth and do a fly-by of Washington, D.C. You can see the subway system because of the development. You’ll get these explosions of development at each of the subway stops and it’s because they serve people and businesses well.

Are there some immediate things Greater Des Moines could do to help promote smart growth?

Improve your public participation policies. When you get your citizens involved in envisioning your community, then it makes it 10 times easier for a developer to come in and build to that. Most developers I’ve worked with want to know one thing: Will the community support it? When you want to foster redevelopment, the threat of citizen opposition can be enough to kill a project. In a smart growth context, it pushes developers out where it’s easier to do business, which tends to be the more rural areas, where regulations aren’t as complex.

The contrast is when a developer comes into a neighborhood that’s already done visioning and the leaders can articulate those values to the developer. We have a program called Redevelopment Ready Communities. What we’re finding is developers will engage the citizens and get them to come to the city council and argue for a project. I’ve got city council members saying, “I have never had a citizen come and argue for a project. I expected them to come to argue against it and I’m thrown for a loop when they come in and say this is the vision we have for our community, this developer is going to build it and we should let them.”