A little over a year ago, Wisconsin started to fight back against sprawling development patterns that eat up open space, drain our cities, increase air and water pollution and drive up our taxes. It has only been twelve months, but already there are encouraging signs that Smart Growth For Wisconsin is going to be a success.

National surveys indicate that sprawl has taken its place among the problems Americans are most concerned about and with good reason. In southeast Wisconsin, sprawl accounts for the destruction of ten square miles of some of the most productive farmland in America each year.

It is not that growth in itself is necessarily bad or that we can grow without developing some land, but we are using far more land and other resources than simple population growth would predict. In southeast Wisconsin, the area’s population increased by 3% between 1970 and 1990, but the amount of developed land went up 38%.

Those sprawling development patterns create places that are more expensive to reach with public services. One University of Wisconsin study found that large lot developments were 172% more expensive to provide transportation and utilities to then more compact urban or truly rural places.

To address these problems, 1000 Friends and a coalition of municipal, environmental, planning and development groups, including the Wisconsin Realtors Association, worked to write and pass Wisconsin’s new Smart Growth law. It was the first time that environmentalists and developers came together to support land use legislation. The new law was also supported by a bipartisan group of legislators led by Sen. Brian Burke (D-Milwaukee) and Rep. Mike Powers (R-Albany).

The law requires every community that makes land use decisions to develop a local comprehensive plan and to use it to guide those decisions. It provides state money to pay half the cost of those plans and it gives communities until 2010 to get the work done. However, financial incentives in the new law encourage communities to get their plans done sooner.

The law also provides minimum standards for plan development, including a requirement for extensive public participation and a set of goals for the results of those plans.

Two parts of the new law are Wisconsin innovations, not present in any other state comprehensive planning law. Our law calls for a model traditional neighborhoods ordinance, which is designed to provide a guide for the development of new, close knit neighborhoods with corner stores, schools that kids can walk to, porches and other amenities that are often lacking in new subdivisions. The other innovation is the "Smart Growth Dividend", which is designed to offer financial incentives to communities to build these new traditional neighborhoods through a new state aid program.

Forty communities have already started working on their smart growth plans with help from the state’s planning aids program. In southeast Wisconsin, the cities of New Berlin, South Milwaukee and St. Francis and the towns of Oconomowoc and Summit have received grants. Another 103 communities throughout the state have applied for the second round of grants due out early next year, including the city of Kenosha.

Smart Growth creates an unprecedented opportunity for us to decide as communities how we want to grow, but the law will succeed in reining in sprawl only if citizens take advantage of this chance. 1000 Friends urges citizens in southeast Wisconsin to get involved. You can get more information about Smart Growth by visiting our website at www.1kfriends.org or you can write us at 16 N. Carroll St., Suite 810, Madison, 53705.

Dave Cieslewicz is the director of 1000 Friends of Wisconsin, a citizens land use policy group with almost 2000 members in over 250 communities around the state. Their offices are in Madison.