IT IS WIDELY acknowledged that Maryland entered a new political era last month with the election of the state's first Republican governor in more than 30 years.
Some also believe that the Baltimore region began a new era when the Maryland Court of Appeals unveiled a new political map last summer eliminating the city-county districts that had existed since 1994.
Since these moves would appear to politically isolate heavily Democratic Baltimore, one could easily conclude that they constitute a double blow to efforts to promote greater interjurisdictional cooperation in the area. Such a conclusion would be mistaken. In fact, these changes, momentous as they are, provide an opportunity for deepening ties among the city and surrounding jurisdictions.
Support for regional cooperation transcends partisan politics. Republicans are as interested in regional cooperation as Democrats - and in many cases more so. Examples are not hard to find.
Harford County Executive James M. Harkins, a Republican, has been a strong advocate for better regional transit, and he easily won re-election. The "Responsible Republicans for Carroll County" swept into control of the Carroll County Board of Commissioners promising change in that jurisdiction's isolationist policies. Republican county council members throughout the region have supported regional cooperation and more community-friendly growth policies.
Perhaps most important, Gov.-elect Robert H. Ehrlich Jr., responding to the Citizens Planning and Housing Association's candidate questionnaire, expressed unequivocal support for Rural Legacy and Community Legacy, programs that promote less consumption of rural land and more revitalization of existing communities - the heart of a better future for the Baltimore region.
There is no doubt that the city-county legislative districts drawn by Gov. William Donald Schaefer after the 1990 census helped promote greater consciousness among policy-makers about the regional nature of local issues.
However, city-suburban districts were not a prerequisite to regional cooperation. Howard and Harford counties shared no districts with Baltimore City over the past eight years, yet they have exhibited strong leadership in supporting regional initiatives regarding transportation and economic development.
Some districts still are shared between counties - four of 22 for the coming 12 years, down from seven out of 24 during the past eight years. The number of jurisdictions involved in the regional legislative districts remains steady at four, though Baltimore is not one of them.
Yet even if the Court of Appeals had eliminated every single one of the interjurisdictional districts, regional cooperation would continue its advance. This is because of an increasing convergence of interests among the five counties and the city in the metropolitan Baltimore, giving rise to an emerging consensus about the area's future.
The Baltimore Metropolitan Council, made up of representatives of all six of the jurisdictions, will soon release the final report of its Vision 2030.
Among the findings: a broad public understanding of the need to work together to find new solutions to transportation, housing, growth, and quality of life challenges. A 1,200-person public opinion survey confirmed what residents said at 17 public meetings - that people want to see a shift in regional priorities toward preserving rural lands and revitalizing declining communities in our cities, towns and older suburbs.
Merging needs
This emerging consensus about the region's future is not surprising because the needs of all six jurisdictions are beginning to merge, after decades in which the area has been stuck in a growth and development pattern characterized by some of the nation's worst outward migration and sprawl.
Baltimore in the 1990s was the fastest-shrinking major city in America, and its ills are well known. Less well known is that many of our older, established suburban communities have gotten caught in the same cycle of disinvestment, neglect and decline.
Leaders in many Beltway neighborhoods have been forced to confront vacancies - nearly 14,000 in Baltimore County, home to the majority of the area's older suburbs, with absentee landlords, stagnant property values and growing concentrations of poverty. A fourth of the county's elementary schools have a majority of students who are eligible for free and reduced-price meals vs. none 10 years ago. Older communities in Harford and Anne Arundel counties face similar challenges, and Howard and Carroll are not strangers to these trends.
The flip side of this regional coin is that outer suburban and rural areas have been flooded with growth at rates many times the regional average.
Developers outpaced regional population growth in the 1990s, building tens of thousands of excess homes in the four outer counties - Howard, Anne Arundel, Carroll, and Harford - over and above the regional population growth, leaving more than 70,000 vacancies in the older communities, both city and suburban. In the fast-growing areas, the symptoms that result from our unbalanced regional growth pattern include disappearing farms and forests, crowded roads and schools, overburdened services and infrastructure. The resulting air and water pollution are the greatest threats to the Chesapeake Bay.
The current regional growth pattern is working well for no one, putting us all in the same boat for the first time in many years. Addressing each jurisdiction's challenges requires confronting the larger trend, and that is something no community or jurisdiction can accomplish alone.
In the context of the emerging consensus about the need to shift regional priorities in a direction that works better for all, partisan affiliation and the shape of the legislative districts are almost irrelevant.
Widespread dissatisfaction with past trends and the emergence of a broadly supported vision for the future mean that the jurisdictions within the region are poised to work together far better than in the past. This new political reality has come into being gradually and with little fanfare, but as surely as the landmark election results last month.
Whether the region will be able to seize this moment of opportunity depends primarily on whether dissatisfaction with the status quo translates into support for the specific initiatives that will address the deep-rooted, long-term challenges that perpetuate it.
The Vision 2030 public opinion survey found overwhelming majorities supportive of including affordable housing in all new developments, improving the region's transit system and providing funding for substance abuse treatment on demand, among other policy changes.
Uniting in region
Regional leaders from community, civic, religious, business and environmental organizations are uniting around calls to build Phase I of the Maryland Transit Administration's Baltimore Region Rail System Plan, establish a regional funding mechanism for community revitalization, use zoning to maintain rural lands and apply here the principles of Montgomery County's long-established, highly successful Moderately Priced Dwelling Unit program that requires new developments of more than 50 units with a density of more than one unit per acre to have at least 15 percent of its units classified as affordable - 10 percent for moderate-income families and 5 percent for low-income families.
The region's elected leaders have an opportunity to embrace this growing public sentiment and play a leadership role in advancing required initiatives. If they do, this political era will be one remembered by future generations as a time of progress toward achieving the quality of life we all seek for ourselves, our families and our communities.
Lisa Akchin chairs the Committee on the Region of the Citizens Planning and Housing Association. Matthew Weinstein is the association's regional policy coordinator.