Grow Smart Rhode Island Executive Director Scott Wolf is finally getting a chance to breathe after a whirlwind end to the General Assembly session. The organization that advocates for sustainable development pushed lawmakers on a number of issues and came out with a mixed bag.
Wolf recently took some time to discuss the major issues and Grow Smart’s plans for the future.
PBN: Grow Smart Rhode Island had set out an ambitious agenda for the General Assembly session that wrapped up in June. Overall, what are your thoughts on the outcome?
WOLF: While the assembly did a commendable job of achieving greater fiscal austerity in this session, we at Grow Smart RI don’t believe that austerity alone is enough to turn our state around. A creative long-range prosperity agenda is also needed for Rhode Island to overcome its economic sluggishness and come closer to reaching its full potential.
That’s why we pursued initiatives in this assembly session to restore a more targeted State Historic Tax Credit, to begin increasing comprehensive transportation investments through modest increases in user fees and to provide new incentives for municipal officials to encourage economic development in our urban, town and village centers.
The assembly demonstrated a lot of interest in each of these proposals as well as other aspects of our 2011 legislative and policy agenda, but deferred action on any of our priorities that called for targeted state investment in Rhode Island’s competitive advantages. We believe that these advantages include:
Our compact, energy efficient, user-friendly development patterns.
Our tremendous concentration of historic buildings and dynamic historic neighborhoods.
Our underutilized ports and marine expertise.
Our strategic location within a day’s drive of more than 35 million people.
We also believe that if Rhode Island doesn’t capitalize more fully on these competitive advantages, the most fiscally disciplined budgets in the world will not get our state where it needs to be or deserves to be.
Beyond Cash Donations: How New Forms of Giving Are Transforming Not-for-Profit Accounting
Evolving Funding Landscape for Not-for-Profits Not-for-profit organizations are being asked to do more with less,…
Learn More
PBN: Grow Smart was a big proponent of restoring the state historic preservation tax credits. That didn’t happen, so what’s the next step? Will you lobby for them again next year? The same way? Differently?
WOLF: We will definitely be working hard to get a targeted version of the state historic tax credit program restored either later this year or next year. We continue to believe that the state historic tax credit program is an outstanding economic development and neighborhood revitalization tool, and a significant way for Rhode Island to capitalize on one of its prime competitive economic advantages — our tremendous concentration of historic buildings and dynamic historic neighborhoods.
Knowledge economy companies such as United Natural Foods, Atrion Networking, Moran Shipping Agencies, Dassault Systemes and Inquest Technologies have been showing a preference for such sites both locally and nationally, and we arguably have more of these sites per square mile than any other state in the country.
To increase the chances of getting a robust form of the tax credit program restored in the near future we will seek to maintain and expand the alliance with key elements of the building trades that we developed late in the 2011 General Assembly session. We will also redouble our efforts to highlight potential redevelopment projects with a strong economic development payoff that need the economic incentive of a state historic tax credit to be viable and move forward
PBN: Switching gears, can you talk about the importance of lawmakers tweaking how municipalities may define overlay districts?
WOLF: The overlay district reform bill that we strongly supported and that has now become law gives municipalities more flexibility to encourage creative mixed-use development and redevelopment in our urban, town and village centers. Examples of how this new flexibility could be used by municipalities include the following:
Regulations for a Village Center Overlay District might provide the flexibility to reduce or eliminate required on-site parking spaces.
Regulations for an Overlay District that serves as a Receiving Area for a Transfer of Development Rights program might allow higher density development than underlying zoning would allow.
In an Agricultural Overlay District, an agricultural operation might be authorized to have “service and retail” accessory uses, with permits based on preexisting standards for hours of operation, buffer design, frequency of activities, etc.
PBN: Lawmakers also passed the Comprehensive Planning and Land Use Act that, among other things, requires communities to update their comprehensive plans every 10 years instead of every five years. What are your thoughts on the longer timeframe and act in general?
WOLF: We think that passage of this act will help local communities develop more understandable and practical comprehensive community plans that are less likely to sit on a shelf and more likely to be translated into local zoning reforms that encourage sustainable economic development and quality of place. The longer timeframe for full updating of local plans makes sense because trends that warrant significant changes in planning priorities are more likely to manifest themselves over a 10 year than five-year period.
Furthermore, a full update of a comprehensive community plan is a major undertaking for most communities , and is therefore likely to be approached more enthusiastically and with less fiscal impact if it is only required once every 10 years.
PBN: Other than the historic tax credits, what else does Grow Smart plan to pursue later this year when the assembly reconvenes or next year?
WOLF: Certainly we plan to revisit the entire sustainable economic development package that we pursued earlier this year, including transportation funding reform, plus mount efforts with our coalition partners to get bond issues on the 2012 ballot for affordable housing and agricultural preservation. We also hope to have the resources available to review state laws that might inadvertently and unnecessarily burden agricultural activity, and recommend reforms in such statutes.
