The following is based on a story published in the Earth Day Coaltion's 1998 Guide to the Green Scene and in the May-June 1998 Ohio Sierra Club News.
Your family’s future turns on public policy made by the State of Ohio. In some states, such as Maryland(1), Oregon(2) and Minnesota(3), conscious decisions have been made by legislators and governors to provide for a future that will not leave a huge tax burden for their children when they are grown up.
Ohio, unfortunately, has yet to adopt such policies. While a small segment of the population, land developers and land sellers, benefit financially, much of rural Ohio is slowly becoming suburbia. At the same time the city is being abandoned, and older suburbs are slowly following the city in decline(4).
As development on the suburban fringe continues, more publicly supported infrastructure is constructed, and must be maintained by taxpayers. As your children grow up, and you grow older, the needs of this increased infrastructure (roads, sewers and schools), will continue to enlarge demands on the taxes your family pays(5).
If you want a school, they’ll sell you one in Cleveland(6). In some growing communities on the edge of Ohio’s 16 metropolitan areas, there are many students and not enough tax dollars. So some students attend class in trailers(7).
With your gas tax dollars, freeways are widened, and interchanges are added by the Ohio Department of Transportation in new areas, all while ODOT helps less and less with maintaining state routes through older municipalities(8.1 - 8.8).
Northeast Ohio has seven percent less population than 25 years ago but we take up well over 30 percent more land(9). The new developments on the edge of the metropolitan areas attract people with high incomes. As they leave the older communities, the tax burden for the people who remain grows. The taxes also grow in the new communities to pay to convert rural areas into suburbia. The situation is a recipe for tax increases for everyone(10).
This need not continue. Given conscious changes in state transportation and land use policies, your tax dollars could be husbanded and our communities could be better planned to make best use of your money.
If long-term efficiency were the utmost goal in Ohio, our state would make it so developers would find it advantageous to work in the city and older suburbs. This would bolster what we already have, instead of expending our resources remaking the countryside into the city.
The solution is in financial responsibility maintained by your State government. The Governor of Maryland Parris Glendening calls this a Smart Growth/Neighborhood Conservation policy(11).
In Ohio, there are some in business that see the sense in such policies. These include Crain’s Cleveland Business(12) and Build Up Greater Cleveland(13), which is a division of the Greater Cleveland Growth Association. Even Sam Miller, co-chairman of Forest City Enterprises, a major land developer, said that the city is where the future of development is. Why? "Because it is affordable," said Mr. Miller(14).
In Ohio, the call is growing for a change to use our precious tax dollars to build only what we can sustain. And it is very easy for you to make this call too.
You need not know all about suburban sprawl to call your state legislator and senator and express concern by asking these questions: "What is your policy on suburban sprawl and highway spending? What do you think about farmland preservation and neighborhood conservation? What is your policy for the long term future for my family?(15)"