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For the moment, it is necessary only to highlight the parallel experience of communities that, again largely on their own, chose to focus more on managing the future geography rather than on managing the present demography of new residential and commercial growth. One such community was Fort Collins, Colorado. Like Petaluma, Fort Collins started off as an agriculture trading center, but its rapid growth was ultimately determined more by the presence of Colorado State University. With the widening of higher educational opportunities in the 1960s, Fort Collins experienced massive new development pressure, doubling its population every ten years.

More will be said of the Washington system in chapter 7. Maryland also developed a new growth management system in stages. After the state’s twenty-three counties vigorously rejected a set of radical reforms proposed by a gubernatorial commission in the early 1990s, including a British-like provision that the state be given final approval authority over local plans, the legislature adopted the Economic Growth, Resource Protection, and Planning Act in 1992. ” That legislation, passed in 1997 under the gubernatorial leadership of Paris Glendening, a former county official, has arguably done the most to institutionalize the conceptual paradigm and theoretical discourse of state-directed smart growth.

According to the Florida Department of Community Affairs, that is, local communities who had adequately demonstrated to state-level authorities a strong commitment and capacity to implement exemplary planning practices, including effective plan enforcement through technical planning expertise, would require less state and regional oversight of the comprehensive plan amendment process. However, this was not a wholesale retreat from the 1970s—and thus the state. Attesting to the full importance of smart growth ideals, “certification” was concomitantly dependent upon the local government’s efforts: (1) to manage transportation and land uses “that support public transit and promote opportunities for pedestrian and non-motorized transportation”; (2) to use design principles that “foster individual community identity, create a sense of place, and promote pedestrianoriented safe neighborhoods and town centers”; (3) to facilitate “clustered, mixed-use development that incorporates greenspace and residential development within walking distance of commercial development”; and (4) to encourage urban infill at “appropriate densities and intensities and separate urban and rural uses and discourage urban sprawl” (Florida Department of Community Affairs, 2006).