EPA nominee advocates ‘quality growth’

Utah Governor Michael O. Leavitt, President Bush’s nominee to head the US Environmental Protection Agency, has earned a reputation in the Beehive State as a forceful proponent of “quality growth,” but some observers fault him for not having made state government actions conform with those ideals, which revolve around well-planned, land-conserving development. “Gov. Leavitt has been remarkable in promoting smart-growth principles,” said Keith Bartholomew, a University of Utah law professor and environmental attorney who previously was staff attorney for 1000 Friends of Oregon. Leavitt convened a “growth summit” in the mid-1990s to examine how the steady expansion of population at one of the fastest rates in the nation was affecting Utah’s future and its quality of life. He became a strong proponent of Envision Utah, a nongovernmental effort that brought in Peter Calthorpe and John Fregonese to help people in northern Utah understand the impact of development trends and choose among alternatives for handling growth. “This is an important issue to Governor Leavitt,” said Harriet Tregoning, executive director of the Smart Growth Leadership Institute in Washington, DC. “He’s very passionate about the process they went through in Utah.” The method that Envision Utah introduced, called “scenario planning,” is “now going on in about a dozen places around the country,” she noted. However, Barthomew said, “his actions have not been as good as his pronouncements.” Leavitt has remained doggedly in favor of building the Legacy Highway, an expressway that would run for 120 miles on the west side of metropolitan Salt Lake City and “would probably do more to spur sprawl than just about any other decision the government could make,” according to Bartholomew. In addition, Bartholomew said, the governor has not turned quality-growth standards into “criteria for state budgets and for departments like transportation and water agencies.” Robert Grow, a lawyer and businessman who has chaired Envision Utah and the Coalition for Utah’s Future, credited Leavitt with pushing changes that by 2030 will have saved 100 square miles from urbanization. Grow emphasized that Leavitt favors a “bottom-up, grassroots, consensus-based” approach, carried out by local governments, not imposed by the state. To promote that strategy, Grow said, Leavitt got the state legislature to establish a Quality Growth Commission, which has worked with local governments on how to do better planning. If confirmed as head of EPA, Leavitt will oversee the federal smart growth program. “I don’t think he’ll be as assertive as Christy Todd Whitman was” during her tenure as EPA director, Bartholomew said.