Striking the Balance Between Environment and Economy in Coastal North Carolina

Abstract

A fundamental purpose of intergovernmental growth management has been to infuse regional concerns—especially regional environmental and economic development concerns—into local land use planning. This paper presents results from a study of state-mandated local planning in coastal North Carolina during the mid-1990s, addressing in particular local efforts to ‘strike a balance’ between environment and economy as required by the state's planning mandate. While acknowledging the need for coastal resource protection, coastal localities were not striking a balance between environment and economy through their planning efforts beyond stating support for the State's minimum resource protection rules. Within this context, key factors yielding less environmentally focused local planning included both local elected officials' concerns about the need for economic development for jobs and their belief that environmental protection was not a local problem. Factors that tended to shift local planning back toward environmental protection included local officials' perception that the local economy was in good shape and heightened citizen engagement.

Acknowledgements

Funding for this research was provided in part by the US Environmental Protection Agency and by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Notes

I approached county and town administrators first expecting that they would provide the most disinterested assessment of their elected officials' commitment to and use of the local CAMA plan. I interviewed planning directors for eight localities either at the request of the administrator or because the administrator in office during the study period had since moved on and could not be located. I attempted to assess all 60 localities with populations greater than 2000 year-round or seasonal residents that participate in the CAMA planning program. I could not locate local officials in office during the study period for 13 localities, however, while five administrators either declined to be interviewed or terminated the interview early. Finally, of the 42 remaining localities, six were dropped because they had not used their CAMA plans at all during the study period for lack of development activity. Based on multiple comparisons across means for selected factors as between the 36 study localities and the 24 dropped localities, there appeared to be no systematic differences between the two groups. The telephone and mail survey instruments are available from the author upon request.

I evaluated plans for all 36 localities for which I was able to successfully complete a telephone survey, the three pre-test localities, and an additional locality for which I terminated the telephone survey early, yielding a sample size of 40 plans evaluated. The plan content evaluation instrument is available from the author upon request.

I used this operational construct for plan use emphasis to account for situations where local officials did not clearly focus on one type of policy over another through the use of their plans, but the plans themselves showed a clear policy emphasis on one policy over the other. Without this adjustment, local administrators' responses regarding policy emphasis in plan use were not significantly correlated to local attorneys' responses (correlation coefficient = 0.2190, p-value = 0.3676); with this adjustment, plan use emphasis was moderately correlated with local attorneys' responses at a significance threshold of 0.10 (correlation coefficient = 0.4204, p-value = 0.0731). While there is no perfect construct for the concept, I used the combined construct as a plausible and reasonable measure accordingly.

Several environmentalists voiced great frustration with local CAMA planning, essentially asserting that localities were not striking a balance between environment and economy at all but rather hiding behind rhetorical support for environmental protection without taking any meaningful action (see Norton, forthcoming).

See Briffault (1990) for a parallel analysis of pervasive ‘localism’ in a legal context through his analysis of judicial review of local land use regulations.