Massachusetts’ 26 Gateway Cities are home to more than a quarter of our state’s population and represent some of our most promising opportunities for economic revitalization. These small to mid-sized cities – from Lawrence to Worcester, Fall River to Springfield – have the infrastructure, workforce and location advantages that should make them magnets for new development and investment. Yet they consistently struggle to compete with suburban and greenfield locations when it comes to attracting projects that could help transform their economies.
The problem isn’t a lack of vision, or local leadership, or property owners who resist investing in their deteriorated properties. Instead, our state and local permitting processes create an uneven playing field.
Rules to Protect Now Serve to Restrict
Over the last 60 years, reformers have sought to curb the abuses of centralized authority by empowering residents while constraining government decision makers. They accomplished this by adding rules and requirements while diffusing power across multiple agencies and processes.
Not surprisingly, the communities most damaged by deindustrialization and environmental contamination accumulated the most “protections,” but these rules also made development more difficult and expensive.
As Brockton’s director of planning and economic development Rob May likes to say, the requirements have become a “six-layer dip.” Most investors turn their attention elsewhere.
Easier to Build in a Forest Than a City
Today’s manufacturing facilities are far cleaner than the factories of 50 or 60 years ago. Today’s housing projects are more likely to restore neighborhoods and downtowns than hollow them out. Given today’s strict and comprehensive building code, new development will almost certainly improve the environmental, social and economic characteristics of a community.
Yet we have not only kept rules in place designed to solve yesterday’s challenges, but have doubled down on them in the belief that more process will create a better product.
The perverse result: it’s often easier for an investor to build a brand-new structure on farmland or forest than in a downtown with existing infrastructure.
Consider one example of how well-intentioned environmental regulations can become a obstacle to urban improvement.
As a result of the 2021 Climate Roadmap Act, the Massachusetts Environmental Protection Act (MEPA) began to require expanded environmental review for urban renewal plans – the very planning documents designed to revitalize historically disinvested neighborhoods.
The real-world impact is striking. Brockton’s urban renewal plan for the Lovett Brook area originally cost $16,000 to develop. Under the new requirements, the city must spend $75,000 for the expanded environmental review and single environmental impact report (SEIR). Other communities have been quoted even higher amounts for similar projects. These represent planning dollars that the municipalities don’t have. Meanwhile, all this process can add more than a year of delay.
Even more troubling, the MEPA review of urban renewal plans is speculative and redundant. Paying consultants to estimate the environmental impact of projects that might not happen seems absurd, since development projects that materialize under the plan almost always trigger their own MEPA review.
Beyond urban renewal plans, the Climate Roadmap Act extended MEPA jurisdiction to any project within 1 mile of an environmental justice community, and within 5 miles if a project triggers air quality impacts. This blanket coverage affects every Gateway City and most population centers in the state, adding new expenses and delays even as the administration seeks to remove regulatory barriers and lower costs.
A Different Approach to Environmental Permitting
We have a tendency in our state to make improvements to clunky, outdated processes by adding more language, exceptions and clarifications rather than creating a better system.
Environmental permitting in Massachusetts seems ripe for an overhaul. But rather than the valiant efforts currently underway to fix the existing system with the regulatory equivalent of duct tape, we should consider how a better system might work.
The Devens enterprise zone offers a successful homegrown example. Site preparation and pre-permitting combine with MassDevelopment’s vigorous marketing to attract a growing cluster of advanced manufacturing companies.
The commonwealth could scale that same approach to its Gateway Cities and other impacted areas where redevelopment would lead to improved environmental outcomes. In a process similar to that undertaken during the Patrick administration with the South Coast Rail Corridor Plan, municipalities could collaborate with regional planning agencies and a state inter-agency working group to identify and designate these priority development areas.
With agreement on sensible locations, these areas should be given a pass to avoid drawn-out environmental review, something along the lines of a simple environmental notification form to satisfy the requirement.
Such designations could become even more robust by including additional incentives like expedited utility connections and streamlined local permitting.
Let’s reimagine our regulatory systems to focus on performance rather than process. Doing so will help level the playing field for places like Gateway Cities and enable them to compete and win.
André Leroux directs the Gateway Cities Innovation Institute at the MassINC Policy Center.
This article was originally published by Banker & Tradesman.