boonecountygirl
Wiley Coyote
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Herman Cain
Mark Pellin
Seed Money For Big Government Utopia
The Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners last month threw its support behind an effort to win a $3.5-million federal grant that would be used to help craft a regional plan to create sustainable and livable communities.
The initiative centers on the principles of so-called smart growth, ripe with an emphasis on social equity for housing and education opportunities and collaborative planning for economic development and shared transportation options. The sustainable communities grants program, however, is drawing sharp criticism for being an overreach of the federal government, designed to muscle localities into restricting where people can live, work and recreate by corralling them into dense areas connected by taxpayer-subsidized public transit.
The first wave of grants, totaling about $75 million nationwide, is being administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) through its Sustainability Partnership with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation (DOT).
The grants are seed money of sorts for the Livable Communities Act, which is currently weaving its way through Congress and is on track to become law later this year. The act would authorize a whopping $4 billion to be administered by a newly created branch within HUD, called the Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, charged with imposing what critics label “a Washington-based, central planning model on localities across the country.”
The Democrat majority of the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners voted along party lines to pursue the sustainable communities regional planning grant. The Charlotte City Council in July gave unanimous, bi-partisan support to the same.
The Centralina Council of Governments (COG) is overseeing the grant application. If it’s successful, the funding will be used to enact the sustainable-growth policies and livability principles of the CONNECT Regional Vision Plan, which was adopted last year by all 73 member jurisdictions of the COG, including Charlotte and Mecklenburg County.
“This is the time to try to put legs under the CONNECT vision and to move forward,” COG Executive Director Al Sharp told commissioners in pitching for the sustainable communities grant. “It’s to effectively provide the basis for better planning data and basis of cooperation, so that our own resources and future federal resources can be brought to solve the problems of our community.”
Critics of the sustainable communities grants as precursor to the Livable Communities Act, however, contend that tying local planning decisions to federal resources can prove a slippery and dangerous slope.
“Local land use and zoning has always been the responsibility of local and State governments – to coordinate transportation and zoning projects, maximizing economic growth and serving community needs,” wrote Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). “But the administration’s ‘livable communities’ initiative ignores this jurisdictional boundary by leveraging grant money to gain heavy influence over local planning decisions.
“The ‘Office of Livable Communities’ reflects Washington’s lack of trust in localities’ ability to solve their own problems,” Ryan continued, “and instead it imposes an urban-utopian fantasy through an unprecedented intrusion of the Federal Government into the shaping of local communities.”
Ronald Utt, a senior research fellow for economic policy studies at The Heritage Foundation, expressed similar misgivings in a report released when the Obama Administration unveiled its livable communities initiative.
“Rich in the sort of progressive euphemisms used to mask real intentions, (it) heralds a process that could likely lead to an unprecedented federal effort to force Americans into an antiquated lifestyle that was common to the early years of the previous century,” Utt wrote. “More specifically, these initiatives reflect an escalation in what is shaping up as President Obama’s apparent intent to re-energize and lead the Left’s longstanding war against America’s suburbs.”
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Mark, heard you discussing this last night on Pete’s show. The origination for the Sustainability projects and regionalism comes from Agenda 21, a United Nations treaty that Bush #1 and Clinton both signed onto. It completely undermines sovereignty, national and local. Why are localities signing onto this? Grant money?? This is insidious. And the biggest question, how do we stop it?
I found this quote today: “Communitarian Plans exist in every corner of the world, and nobody at the local level will explain why there’s no national legal avenue to withdraw from the U.N.’s “community” development plans.”
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[...] Mark Pellin reports here, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), in concert with the Environmental [...]
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