Testimony on Montgomery County’s Annual Growth Policy

Given by Nancy Wallace to the County Council, October 2003

 

[Background: Montgomery County, MD population quintupled between 1950 and 2000.  The measure before the council would weaken the County’s already inadequate growth controls.]

 

I would like to recommend that first of all we rename this policy decision before us tonight.  I believe that this policy is in fact the single most important decision facing the Council each year, because it underlies all the other social and economic issues we face.  It’s the closest we come to discussing how many people will be dealt with in the education decisions, health funding decisions, traffic decisions, air quality decisions, land conservation decisions, library and fire and rescue and public security decisions. The list goes on, as long as the list of issues.  The most basic question is, how many people does the government need to service, care for, provide a decent quality of life for, provide jobs for.

 

And this is the issue that we need to talk about.  I believe we should talk about an Annual Sustainable Population Policy.  And I believe that number for this year should be a 2% reduction.

 

As Mark Twain said, when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you need to do is stop digging.

 

We are over our limits on the Beltway.  The engineering limit for safety was reached a long time ago.  We are over our limit on air quality.  We have federal code orange and red days every year.  We are over our limit on schools.  We are over our limit on fresh water supply, as our aquifers are generally going down.  We are over our limit on stormwater absorption, as we see by high volumes of runoff during storms and washing of pollutants into the Chesapeake Bay.  We are over our limit on chemical solutions to our lifestyle preferences, shown by the ozone hole – on track to be the largest ever this year – cancer, toxics in our groundwater, mercury poisoning in fish from all over the world - the list goes on almost endlessly.  We are over our limits.  We are harming ourselves and our future, right now.

 

When you reach your limits, you need to stop, look around, think, talk, and come up with a rational plan of action.  The official national Sierra Club position is a reduction in U.S. population.

 

At a minimum, we should stabilize until we take care of people and children and the precious environment we have today.  And we should transition to a sustainable society that does not poison its air and water and soil.  We have so much change to invest in before we are even capable of saying we are sustainable today.  The idea of adding more tens and hundreds of thousands of people when we’re doing a lousy job overall right now is against common sense and worsens all our problems.

 

Population stability doesn’t mean no economic growth.

It doesn’t mean no change in demographics.

It doesn’t mean no support for immigration.

 

I felt so sorry for the members of the 18-month transportation study, the TPR.  The fact is, many of your current policy challenges, particularly visible in the transportation issue, are unsolvable because you’re not talking about the problem.  There’s an elephant of an issue in the room, and it’s population growth.  And our public policy structure was not designed to deal with infinitely increasing population.

 

So I recommend that we implement a 2% reduction per year, until we are not harming ourselves or our descendants.  And I propose that we take half of all the capital construction we save and put it into our schools and air quality and cancer prevention – and we take the other half, and give it to a sister province somewhere in the developing world, as St. Paul, Minnesota has done.  We can save lives, both here and abroad – and put ourselves back on a road to real, lasting sustainable prosperity.  Let’s talk, and put ourselves on the path to where we really want to go.