In Downers Grove, looking northeast on I-88 at I-355 exchange

In Woodridge on I-355 at 75th Street

Photos by Richard Foertsch/Photoprose In Hoffman Estates on Higgins Road looking west at new Sears Building

On June 18 the governing body of the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission (NIPC) is expected to approve a plan that exposes the folly of equating "progress" with the continual spread of Chicagoland suburbia over miles and miles of some of the world's richest farmground. Banking on the support of the scores of people who helped draft the plan, NIPC will call on the state, county and myriad local governments to endorse policies that make the rebuilding of cities more attractive than paving over more farmland.

The "Northeastern Illinois Metropolitan Region Strategic Plan for Land Resource Management" makes 68 recommendations, most of which call for the intergovernmental coordination needed to deal with the adverse cumulative effects of locally driven development policies. The recommendations point to the need for Illinois' political leadership to realize that wasteful land development policies are a major contributor to government's current fiscal crisis.

NIPC will recommend, but will anyone listen? Although regarded as the best source for population and employment trends in the six-county metropolitan Chicago area, NIPC's interpretations are only advisory. Its new plan, the first since 1984, reflects the agency's emerging role as a regional forum. Government representatives go to NIPC headquarters — located at 400 West Madison in downtown Chicago near the commuter train stations — because it is the one place they can discuss increasingly complex land related issues.

NIPC concludes that "higher taxes, continuing pollution, rapid loss of farmlands and declining urban communities" are the results of the region's most significant trend: decentralization of population and employment away from Chicago and adjacent suburbs to more distant suburbs. Between 1970 and 1990 the region's population increased by only 4.1 percent while residential land consumption increased by nearly 46 percent. NIPC asks: " ... how can costs not rise if public services and infrastructures must be stretched over 45% more territory to serve virtually the same sized population?"

The new NIPC plan "is a rare attempt to talk about fundamental changes" on our most far-reaching of all public issues, said NIPC executive director Larry Christmas. "Everything has a land dimension to it. Land use is one way in which all things come together. Yet nobody in the state of Illinois takes responsibility for thinking in such broad terms about how all the policies are shaped in a region where two-thirds of the

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state's people and activity is located. The fact is that we're paying an exorbitant amount of money for the way we consume land."

The plan calls for reform of a state "tax structure which encourages inter-municipal competitiveness for new tax base." In Illinois, local governments generate most of their revenue through property taxes, sales taxes and impact fees. As a result, Christmas said that "the tax situation so distorts the planning process that we can't get the attention needed to discuss" how to do things in a way that benefits the region as a whole.

The plan recommends that the Regional Partnership — a consortium of civic and governmental organizations that includes NIPC — examine revenue measures that could reduce the need for "tax base planning." The municipal pursuit of added tax revenues works against regional concerns, such as the siting of permanent open space, affordable housing and the protection of prime farmland. As a consequence, Christmas said, nobody tries to gauge "the true cost of development. You rarely see a study that looks at the impact of development on all units of government in the region. We don't even have a mechanism to raise the question."

NIPC is asking Gov. Jim Edgar to direct state agencies to recognize and support the land management plan. State agencies endorse regionally prepared plans on an array of issues including transportation, open space, solid waste management, water supply and water quality, but they lack what the plan calls "an explicit, comprehensive and coordinated set of land resource management policies."

The plan "makes many good points" that will stimulate debate in Springfield, said Alan Grosboll, executive assistant to Gov. Edgar. "I'd like to sit down with NIPC and find out what are the realistic kind of things that we can do," he said.

During its 35-year history, NIPC has created several plans in accordance with its mandate from the General Assembly to promote "sound and orderly development" of the six-county area. Yet, as Illinois Secy. of Transportation Kirk Brown said, the new plan's statistical findings "indicate that most people don't follow NIPC's ideas." He added that "planning is most effective when done with the authority to make decisions," implying that the NIPC plan will become a blueprint for change only if local governments agree that the plan is in their best interests. "The nature of the way we've done business in this state is that the people charged with making decisions are county boards and municipalities, not advisory planning boards," Brown said.

Ann Hughes is one of 190 people who volunteered for the five task forces that hammered out portions of the NIPC plan through an elaborate two-year public hearing process. Hughes ran for the McHenry County board in 1980 after learning that her family couldn't stop the municipal zoning of a subdivision next to their farm. Now board chairperson, Hughes, a Republican from Woodstock, is running for state representative in the new 63rd District partly because she believes counties have little effect on land use. "Local governments fall back on the argument of having been elected, which is a cop out," said Hughes. "The reality is that we have to start downscaling expectations" of further expansion into farmland.

Robert Coffin, an architect who served as Long Grove Village president for 22 years, said municipal boards tend to be pro-development because those involved have monetary interests. "NIPC tries to take a stand, but the pressures of people who own land and have a lot of money override it."

John Matijevich, a Democrat from North Chicago, is assistant majority leader in the Illinois House, running for his 14th term from the new 59th District. He said that the General Assembly will consider NIPC's proposals only if a broad base of grass-roots support demands action. Matijevich said that a coalition of entrenched interests, starting with the realtors, Farm Bureau and homebuilders, keeps local land development issues out of General Assembly debates. NIPC's report could "provide the fodder" for the general public to realize the price we pay for an increasingly vast metropolitan landscape, he said. "We've doubled our land area without doubling our pleasure."

NIPC's plan is the most ambitious effort to affect the direction of growth in the region since the Chicago Plan of 1909. Better known as the Burnham Plan, it won worldwide acclaim for saving the Lake Michigan shoreline. Architect Daniel Burnham had the advantage of working with only one municipality of consequence and of wholehearted backing from Chicago's industrial giants. Back then, the Commercial Club feared that other cities would build improvements that would give their big business competitors an advantage over Chicago's. The 1909 strategy to resolve that day's urban traffic congestion included recommending a quadrangle of wide streets around Chicago's central business district. Any strategy today faces a magnitude of complexity in the six-county landscape that includes 1,247 governmental units providing services to 7.26 million people in a 3,660 square mile area.

NIPC itself was dreamt up in the 1950s by a Metropolitan Planning Council blue-ribbon committee consisting of bankers, developers, realtors and large retailing concerns. Their chief interest was the federal spigot that had begun to flood the region with capital development monies for new sewer lines, water pipes and roadways. First called the Northeastern Illinois Metropolitan Area Planning Commission, it was only one of many regional planning agencies popping up nationwide.

Ironically, NIPC was created to facilitate the very process of decentralization that has since become the cause of so many problems. Equally ironic is that suburbia, a national symbol for freedom from government intrusion, was spawned by federal dollars. Before World War II, the six-county area included 175 municipalities. Fifty new suburban municipalities sprouted between 1940 and 1960. In the last 32 years, 40 more have been created. Besides the municipalities and the county governments of Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry and Will, local government units include at least 18 other types with property tax authority: school districts and townships as well as special districts for parks, forest preserves, airports, libraries, cemeteries, sewerage, water supply, river conservancy, streetlighting, roads, transit, irrigation and water conservation, soil conservation, fire protection, health, hospitals and mosquito abatement.

In 1956 a state panel chaired by Rep. Paul J. Randolph, a Chicago Republican, learned during a series of public hearings that the new "fringe areas" weren't planning for public services such as water supply, sewage disposal, surface drainage or garbage disposal. The Randolph Commission noted that the desire of people "to control the character of their own community

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government has resulted in the creation of a large number of municipalities and in turn shredded responsibility for some services that can only be effectively administered on a broad geographical basis." The commission report recommended the creation of NIPC to "deal with those problems which can be solved only within a metropolitan framework."

By 1959 NIPC was promoting passage of nine state laws that created subdivision and zoning standards as well as specific powers for municipal and county authority on water, sewer and drainage issues. "The first NIPC Suburban Factbook was an instant bestseller," the agency's 1981 annual report noted because "public officials and private developers were clamoring for information pertaining to suburban growth."

There was no clamor, however, for a regionwide plan until the federal government threatened to turn off its highway funds. With development patterns making suburbanites more dependent on cars, NIPC's Comprehensive Plan of 1968 proposed that future growth be clustered near commuter rail service. Called "the finger plan" by then NIPC executive director Matthew Rockwell, the plan was largely ignored by municipalities as they vied for new development.

To study, plan and recommend is the role relegated to NIPC. "NIPC doesn't have the legal authority to impose its will because that would have been regional government," said Sen. Howard Carroll, Chicago Democrat running for reelection in the new 8th District. Carroll chaired a legislative oversight committee that monitored NIPC in the 1960s when many feared that the regional agency was acting on federal behalf to take control of local land issues. "NIPC takes the soft sell approach. It can't dictate; it cajoles. I'm sure NIPC would prefer to be the last word. Its function is to be the best word."

The reality is we have to start downscaling expectations' of further expansion into farmland

NIPC's critique of urban sprawl echoes recent Maryland and California studies that did little more than name the problems. Deborah Bowers, editor of the national newsletter Farmland Preservation Report observed, "The wisdom and courage it takes to correct wasteful land use is painfully rare." Local interests are much more interested in federal subsidies to pay for big-ticket infrastructure items than in the corresponding federal effort to define parameters for sound development, said Charles Hock, urban planning professor at the University of Illinois. "NIPC's problem is that it represents a function of government that lost out after the New Deal."

Urban planning consultant Robert Teska called the NIPC plan its most pragmatic undertaking, largely because the local governmental planning network "is better coordinated than ever before."

Although the dialogue with the private sector is lacking, he sees progress on transportation issues because the need for better coordination is so overwhelming "that the public is willing to grant authority to address them."

A new impetus for regional planning may come from the U.S. Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. As one of the country's eight worst offenders for ozone emissions, metropolitan Chicago must begin a gradual reduction in ozone output by 1996 with measures that could affect companies that employ two-thirds of the region's workforce.

The region's striking dispersal of population in the last 20 years coincided with a nearly identical 46 percent increase in auto registration. "This is partly causal," Christmas said, noting that an astounding increase in the number of cars "is the root cause of traffic congestion problems" and a big reason why this region's ozone emissions are so great. "But the state hasn't faced up to the fact that you can't put a lid on car travel while at the same time encouraging sprawling patterns of development." The region's 2010 transportation plan calls for $5 billion alone in new and expanded highway facilities, which NIPC's Christmas said will only serve "to catch up with sprawl." The new federal transportation bill recognizes regional planning. Congressional sponsors of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) want to tap metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) for planning the dispersal of federal funds for regional transportation that includes more than the building of new roads.

NIPC is the arm of no one government. Its governing body consists of 32 commissioners. Seven are appointed by the Suburban Assembly of Mayors, five by the governor and five by the mayor of Chicago. Three are appointed by the Cook County Board president and one each by the heads of the five other county boards. One member each is appointed by the Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, the Regional Transportation Authority, the Chicago Transit Authority, Metra, Pace, the Chicago Park District and the Illinois Association of Park Districts. NIPC has a staff of 36 and a current budget of $3.1 million, which is funded largely via local government contributions, followed by federal monies passed through state agencies.

NIPC's strategy for reaching both citizens and public officials with its new plan for land use policies includes an implementation task force, demonstration projects, workshops and manuals as well as hopes for introducing some legislation in the 1993 session. Suburban homebuilder James Hemphill volunteered to join the implementation task force before he finished reading a draft copy of the plan. Past president of the Homebuilders Association of Greater Chicago, Hemphill said, "We have regional problems that need fixing at the regional level."

"The problem will be to get people to rise above their particular interests in order to deal better with the growth in the future," said Christmas, who is resigning from NIPC this year after 12 years as executive director. "We're trying to make an inherently inefficient government work better. This plan is really a rather modest attempt to bring Illinois' land use policies into the 20th century."

Robert Heuer is a Chicago journalist, who grew up in Elmhurst in DuPage County.

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