Figure from the 2003 Centre County Growth Forecasting Project

Regional governments, city planners and citizens hold differing opinions on how much Centre County will grow—and how much it matters.

by David Hutto

Local and regional governments spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on the salaries of professional planners while local residents have shown little interest in the process unless it appears within their sightline.

“0.08 percent of the population showed up to provide any kind of comment” on the region’s five-year comprehensive plan, said Trisha Lang, director of Planning and Zoning for Ferguson Township, who added that the prevailing attitude goes something like, “As long as it’s not next door to me, I just don’t care. People don’t care.”

At the end of February and through March, six public meetings were held to discuss potential changes in the plan. Total attendance for the six meetings was 76 people.

Professional planning staff at the municipal and regional level anticipate slight growth in the region, but some local residents say planning for more growth is not the solution.

The State College metropolitan area has a population of 86,000. Nevertheless, in the next 30 years, this region is expected to add an estimated 20,000 people, according to Jim May, director of Centre Regional Planning Association.

Regional planners assume growth, and based on this assumption, plan for more housing and greater demands on infrastructure.

May said people in the region want a “sustainable” growth model. The dominant local attitude, he said, is “We want to accommodate growth, but don’t ruin what we have now.” Examples of sustainable growth, according to May, would be recreation, tourism and health care.

Sustainability is popular now. If growth is inevitable, then sustainable growth is surely a better approach, according to many planners. But some residents say this issue is not as simple as that.

“The whole idea of sustainable growth we consider an oxymoron,” said Bill Sharp of Transition Town State College, who attended a planning session. In contrast to local planners, Sharp and his group work from an assumption that population growth is not inevitable, though it will happen if jobs draw people into the region. Sharp’s beliefs are based on one inescapable and profound idea—that the economy will change drastically because cheap oil is ending. The easy oil, as he points out, is gone, which is why companies are precariously drilling a mile below the surface of the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico.

Katherine Watt, also of Transition Town, wants to incorporate the concept of expensive oil into local planning.

“I'd like to see a chapter on peak oil and population stabilization or population decline put into the current update of the Centre County planning documents,” said Watt, who did not attend any of the comprehensive planning sessions.

Centre County is divided into seven planning areas, and State College Borough is located in the Centre Region with five other municipalities– College, Ferguson, Harris, Patton and Halfmoon Townships. Together these municipalities form the Council of Governments coordinate emergency services, transportation, parks and recreation, the library and sewer service.

Land-use planning with zoning rules is done more locally by individual municipalities. Although the townships and the borough coordinate in some ways, Lang said “the conversation really isn’t what it could be.”

The current system of planning is predicated on a model of growth and increase, working from past trends. Extrapolating from the past, planners project future growth.

“Historically we’ve had about one percent growth per year,” said Carl Hess, planning director of State College Borough.

Mark Holdren, the planner for College Township, said that in a town dominated by a large university, so that “you’re always going to have a need for new housing.”

But Sharp offers another approach.

“We have to come up with a non-growth model,” instead of the constant growth model used by the municipalities, he said. Sharp added that there needs to be a dramatic switch to relocalization, or focusing on use of local resources. One example of this is the growing number of people trying to eat more locally-grown food.

Watt also said that the assumption of growth in population is leading in the wrong direction.

“Planning for the last century or so has been based on the historic trends of population growth as a driver for economic growth. That formula can’t work forever. It hasn’t worked for a while, actually, because more population and housing puts greater strains on ecosystems, social systems and municipal budgets.”

Nevertheless, local planners walk a difficult technical tightrope between demands for housing, retail and other forms of growth, and equally prominent demands for preserving green space, maintaining historic regions and holding down sprawl. Knowing what people want is part of the process.

Would public interest be higher if people saw the issues in other terms? Watt thinks so.

“Designing this region around economic growth and population growth will no longer work because cheap oil is about to run out,” she said. “How are we all going to survive together without it?”

Sharp, for one, is pessimistic about the prospects of more interest in public planning.

“Unless there’s a real crisis there’s not going to be any change,” he said.