During the past four years, we’ve charted a more fundamental approach toward Smart Growth, one that encourages job growth and revitalization in existing communities and that more closely monitors our policies and progress.
Last year, with the help of the General Assembly, we passed Smart, Green and Growing Legislation to ensure that local land-use laws align with comprehensive planning. This session, we successfully passed the Sustainable Communities Act of 2010. It will stimulate growth in towns and cities with an expanded tax-credit program that over the past 12 years has already created hundreds of jobs and leveraged more than $1.5 billion in rehabilitation spending, returning more than $8 in economic output for every $1 of credit invested. And after our predecessors effectively shuttered Maryland’s most effective land-conservation tool, we've reinvested in Program Open Space and used its funds exclusively for land conservation, as it’s intended.
It’s not enough to hope for a greener, more sustainable future. We need to plan for it now and act decisively for the stewardship of our precious natural, cultural, and historic resources.
“We stand now where two roads diverge,” wrote Rachel Carson, the noted environmental author from Maryland. “But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road / the one less traveled by / offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”
In Maryland, it took 300 years to develop the first 650,000 acres and a mere 30 years to develop the next 650,000. We have a responsibility to chart a Smart, Green and Growing future for this Maryland we cherish.
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