June 2003

PIRGIM Education Fund

Download the report. (2.1 MB, PDF) | Read the news release.

This report highlights eight natural heritage areas in Michigan that could soon be irrevocably lost. These open spaces and special places are just a small sampling of Michigan’s natural heritage that is increasingly threatened by uncontrolled development. Michigan has lost more than one million acres of farmland since 1982. If current trends continue, the state will lose two million acres of open space by 2040, including one quarter of the state’s orchards and one quarter of South Michigan’s forests.

The destruction of Michigan’s natural heritage areas is a consequence of poor land use planning and regulations that encourage developers to sprawl into the countryside, abandoning the state’s urban centers.

These current development trends are not inevitable. Specifically, well-designed growth management policies could:

• Prevent the degradation of important water resources like the Thornapple River from stormwater runoff; maintain the marshes and fens in Oakland County, which serve as the headwaters of five major rivers, from ecologically damaging development; and safeguard the world-class fisheries of the Boardman River Valley from an expensive and damaging transportation project that will not solve Traverse City’s traffic problems.

• Preserve the ecological integrity of pristine coastal treasures like Saugatuck Dunes State Park, maintain undeveloped urban oases like Humbug Marsh, and help prevent beach contamination from runoff and bacterial pollution at Metro Beach on Lake St. Clair.

• Rescue uniquely fertile and scenic agricultural lands, such as the blueberry farms of Ottawa County, threatened by an unnecessary highway project that would cut through the heart of the most productive agricultural region in the state; and the picturesque cherry orchards near Traverse City, facing intense development pressure that is transforming orchards into housing developments.

To protect our natural heritage areas, as well as enhance our quality of life and create a prosperous future for our children and grandchildren, Michigan must make a new commitment to effective growth management. This commitment should include:

1. Development of a Comprehensive Land Use Planning Law
The state should replace current land use planning legislation with a comprehensive regional land use planning enabling act. This law should:

• Focus state resources in Priority Funding Areas.

• Create effective processes to encourage local coordination of land use plans, and explicitly authorize joint or sub-regional planning committees.

• Give local communities the tools they need so that they—not developers—can determine future growth and land use.

• Encourage long term planning (20 years) and 6-year capital improvement planning.

2. A Commitment to Sustainable Transportation
Transportation funding should be shifted away from roads towards rail, bus, bicycle, and pedestrian options.

• The state should only engage in highway expansion projects that facilitate well-planned growth within priority development areas.

• Highway funding should be focused on maintaining and repairing existing roads.

• Compact, transit-friendly development should be promoted.

3. Tools To Promote Open Space Preservation
Our most valuable farms, forests, open space, and wetlands should be permanently off limits to development.

• Provide state funding for open space acquisition.

• Set high taxes for conversion of open space, low taxes for working farms.

• Provide protected status to ecologically and culturally important areas.

• Allow transfers of development rights.

• Do not sell state-owned open space to developers.

• Allocate money for urban parks.

4. Policies To Ensure Developers, Not the Public, Foot the Bill
Taxpayer subsidies for sprawl should be terminated, and developers should be required to pay for new roads, water and sewer infrastructure, and public services.

• Authorize counties to assess impact fees.

• Exempt compact, targeted development from impact fees.

• Require infrastructure to precede development.

5. Decisionmaking Based On Citizen Participation
Citizens should be provided with opportunities for meaningful input and involvement in all land use decisions.

For all of these policies to work well, there must be statewide goals and an overarching plan to guide decisions and measure success. The Land Use Leadership Council, launched this March by Gov. Granholm, offers an historic opportunity to develop a growth management strategy that can preserve the natural treasures that make Michigan great, while creating livable communities where people can thrive. Gov. Granholm should create an Office of Smart Growth to establish land use protection goals, coordinate state investments in open space and infrastructure, seek federal funding for Smart Growth projects, and provide local governments with the resources they need to reclaim growth decisions from large developers.