Gambling on our future
THE GATHERING in Middleborough last weekend may look like a morality play about casino gambling in America. Yet at its heart, the vote was just another municipal decision about land use, like thousands of votes taken every year by planning boards, city councils, and town meetings across Massachusetts.
As such, it is the latest and most sensational example of how Massachusetts has lost its way in deciding how best to use those gifts that come in firmly limited amounts: land, air, and water.
Using land always causes some disruption, sometimes small and inconsequential, sometimes large and requiring what planners call "mitigation," a payment to help the public cope with the increased traffic, noise, or pollution caused by the development. Our system for deciding how much mitigation is paid to whom and for what is seriously broken.
Under Massachusetts law, local governments make almost all decisions about how mitigation will be structured. Towns push developers for as much as they can get and hope the developers don't sue. Developers agree to pay whatever they think their project can afford. A web of court decisions represents the only rules in this strange game.
On the one hand, this system can treat developers unfairly, absorbing months of time in negotiation with multiple local boards. Often, towns insist that developers buy things the town needs or wants: fire trucks, playing fields, and community centers -- worthy goods, but often with tenuous links to the real impacts of the project.
At the same time, localities often fail to negotiate the best deal. Smaller towns lack the professional staff to evaluate the true impacts of development. Desperate for cash now, they often forgo longer-term benefits for short-term payments. Economic development -- from factories to malls to casinos -- generates the most revenue for cities and towns. But new homes often bring that most awful of negative impacts: children! Children need schools, and towns don't want to (or can't) pay. So local decision makers push unabashedly for economic growth, but often oppose the smallest housing development. Any public policy -- intended or accidental -- that turns children into a "negative impact" is morally unacceptable, but the lack of affordable housing also hurts our economy because companies will not locate or expand in a state where their employees can't afford to live. For example, will thousands of casino employees, earning relatively low wages, be able to live near the new casino? More likely, they will use cars or buses to travel to and from work, adding traffic to already congested roads.
This traffic demonstrates another failing of our system of land use planning: development impacts are regional, but mitigation payments are almost always local. A casino in Middleborough will generate traffic in dozens of communities, increasing air pollution, raising the costs of maintaining state roads, forcing nongamblers to spend extra hours behind the wheel. The project will need lots of water, probably from aquifers and wells beyond Middleborough's town boundaries. Public safety departments in surrounding towns will need to prepare for mutual aid response in the event of a fire or other disaster at the casino. And secondary economic development around the casino will further raise the demand for housing, causing rents and sale prices to rise.
But the town leaders of Middleborough are negotiating for themselves, not surrounding communities, and not for the Commonwealth. At some point, most large-scale projects will be reviewed under the Massachusetts Environmental Protection Act, but the law has limited reach, and developers and their legal teams have become adept at keeping mitigation requirements to a minimum and short-term in nature.
Generally, developments grow in rapid succession along a roadway or rail line, causing impacts up and down the corridor. But the state and its municipalities negotiate mitigation payments with one developer at a time, project by project, making it hard to solve the overall problems along a major corridor. The state needs a way to bring multiple developers and municipalities into a room at the same time, to examine the long-term impacts of developments that may be miles from each other, and to come up with a mitigation package that works for everyone.
The vote in Middleborough made good political theater, but it was really a theater of the absurd, with the voters of one small town making decisions for the rest of us who will bear the long-term impacts. Until Massachusetts reforms its system of making regional land use decisions, this play will have a long run in the Bay State.
Marc D. Draisen is executive director of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council. 
