Should the Census count inmates as residents of the prisons where they’re held — often hundreds of miles from home? Or should they be tallied as citizens of the cities or counties they came from?

An agreement just reached between the U.S. Census Bureau and Rep. William Clay Jr. (Mo.), the chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees census issues, may signal an historic shift in how the bureau reports prisoners to state and local governments. The accord creates at least a chance for prisoners’ overwhelmingly urban home areas to get a better break on legislative representation.

Counting prisoners where they’re incarcerated didn’t matter a lot when America had modest numbers of inmates, usually held in institutions near their homes.

But all that’s changed in the last three decades as America’s prisoner counts have soared from about 500,000 in 1980 to 2.3 million today. The combination of tough “law-and-order” politics and development of a vast “prison industrial complex” has led to confinement of predominantly city-based convicts in hundreds of new prisons in small town areas.

Since the 1970s, with their economies and populations declining, rural areas have campaigned hard for prisons as a source of jobs for local residents. State legislators representing those areas back up the towns’ efforts and are likely to support indiscriminate “lock-em-up” strategies. Increasingly powerful prison guard unions take the same side and back pro-incarceration legislators in campaigns.

But far-from-home incarceration is bad penology. Inmates who are held at outstate (sometimes even out-of-state) locations receive far fewer family visits. More isolated, they’re destined to have a harder time readjusting on release. The practice feeds a negative spiral leading to more recidivism and demands for still more prisons.

But there’s another impact: because the Census historically counts inmates where they’re imprisoned, their numbers actually swell population counts — and legislative representation — for rural areas. The losers in political clout are then the very urban areas most of the prisoners come from.

The Prison Policy Initiative, an advocacy group that documents the impacts of mass incarceration, found 21 counties across the nation where at least 20 percent of the population were prisoners from another county. The reformers’ “case celebre” is Jones County in eastern Iowa, where a backhoe operator was elected to the Anamosa City Council with just two write-in votes, one his wife’s. Why? Because 95 percent of his ward’s population consists of 1,300 inmates in Iowa’s largest penitentiary– and none of them can vote.

Seven state senate districts in upstate New York, the Policy Initiative has calculated, would not have met minimum population requirements in the last decade if they’d not had significant prison populations. California, Texas, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin and Maryland are among other states in which the census count of inmates held in lightly populated small town areas can impact the political balance.

The distortion makes it less likely that a whole range of smart penal reform measures — electronic monitoring in place of imprisonment, community-based reentry programs and halfway houses, basic education and post-release employment programs — will receive adequate state support and funding.

The agreement Rep. Clay has negotiated with the Census Bureau doesn’t reach the full solution reformers would like — to count all inmates as residents of their home cities and counties, not their prison addresses.

But the bureau has agreed to make an early release, in 2011, of its counts of “group quarters” such as prisons. States will then have time to decide how, for purposes of the legislative reapportionment they’ll be starting next year, their prisoners should be counted: where the prisons or where the prisoners last resided before incarceration. Or they can choose not to count them for reapportionment purposes at all.

How the issue plays out over the long run won’t just influence state politics but big decisions in federal grants policies too. The Census Bureau itself last year identified some $436 billion worth of federal grant and direct assistance money that’s “allocated based on Census Bureau data,” with the largest items being Medicaid ($203 billion), unemployment insurance ($36 billion), highway funding ($34 billion). Nutrition, school and college aid, school lunches and Head Start are also impacted.

The reality is that prisons aren’t the only issue shortchanging urban areas. As the National Research Council confirmed in a 2009 study, there’s a long history of “differential net undercount” of blacks and Hispanics that “has led to their receiving less than their share of federal funds and political representation.”

Correcting the imbalance, compounded by many low-income residents’ fears of government and/or immigration laws, is no easy task for Census takers. But there should be no easier place to start than counting prisoners at their home addresses, not their prison cells.

Cities in the modern world are beginning to share some features with the city-states of millennia past – communicating, trading, competing. But they’re two differences: Today it’s nation states, not city-states, that occasionally go to war. And unlike the walled cities that harbored flourishing trade in Medieval Europe, today there are literally thousands of cities on the rise, and looking outward in search not of silk and spices, but rather sources of finance, global talent, and most of all, good ideas.

But the search for knowledge isn’t always easy. And there can be resistance. My colleague Neal Peirce recently chided the short-sightededness of journalistic watchdogs who see in mayoral travel only junkets, not fruit-bearing study of better and smarter practices elsewhere.

But here’s the big news that really counts. It’s that the 500 largest cities on the planet are sending delegations to visit each other, repeatedly and consistently every year, on the order of thousands of study trips annually. The cities are selected carefully, so that visitors may acquire valuable knowledge to speed improvements back home.

The pattern became crystal clear to me conducting research, including detailed responses from 45 world cities, for my forthcoming book, Beyond Smart Cities. The cities indicated they visit often and continuously every year, often more than 10 times per year. They tend to choose their visit partners that are their like themselves. The rich tend to visit the rich – for example, Stockholm visits London, London visits New York. But the “poor”—cities like Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Dakar, Senegal; and Tabriz, Iran—visit rich and poor in equal shares. And though visitors often select similar sized hosts, even the mega cities more frequently visit their cousins in the one to five million range than their sister mega-cities. Perhaps something about that moderate city size enables newcomers to get their arms around the whole thing in a short time.

So why do the cities go to all this effort, and what do they learn? They go because in a globalized economy, cities need to work harder to make a living. They no longer have the protections of trade regimes and the comforts of regional isolation. In today’s world, money moves fast, even faster than trade deals. And cities have learned that they must keep up with their principal competitors — other cities. If they want those incoming investments, they must strive to be on top of their game. They have to make themselves an attractive place for global talent, with well-connected and efficiently functioning infrastructure.

But also, city leaders spread out around the world because they have short terms of office and know that learning from others is cheaper and less risky than pursing untested ideas and ending up in false starts. Good practices in successful cities offer short-cuts. The experience of the Olympics games in Salt Lake and Barcelona in the 1990s were of enormous assistance to Turin and Vancouver this decade. In turn, Barcelona and Turin have both studied venture capital practices in Silicon Valley. And Charlotte and Denver have both studied Portland’s transit system. City-to-city exchange was ranked by survey takers by far as the most effective way to learn. Visitors see things work.

Half of the cities taking part in the survey were “reformers” (by their own reckoning, they have made “many significant reforms”). And they exhibit interest in distinct areas, such as transportation and the keys to increased local economic development. The search for transport solutions reflects the well-known spread of Curitiba’s bus rapid transit (BRT) system to other cities in Brazil, then to Bogota, Colombia; and on to Mexico City. Currently BRT is reaching East Asia. It is also why dozens of other cities (Portland is a good example) visit Amsterdam and Copenhagen: visitors see demonstrated in those Northern European cities the power of integrating all forms of movement—walking, bicycles, automobiles, busses, and trams—into a single transit system.

The “non-reformers” in the survey – those with a history of fewer major policy or practice shifts – have a broad spectrum of topics for which they travel, including finance, urban planning, urban renewal, and basic utilities. Perhaps the reformers feel they had this ground already covered. Both reformers and non-reformers are concerned with the big and growing question for all major central cities on the planet: how to govern sprawling metropolitan areas? It’s a tough challenge: cities on the prowl for answers to the metro puzzle may learn some ways to work around municipal lines, but they are unlikely to return home fully satisfied.

But acquiring new knowledge is only half the battle. How the knowledge is validated and applied to problems back home is a whole other drama. My research has also discovered individual styles in the way cities handle new knowledge.

Trust and a learning environment seem to be the main ingredients in the alchemy of internal processing needed in a city to adapt knowledge successfully to local circumstances. Seattle’s Trade Development Alliance has internalized this notion in its study tours. A range of business, government, and independent leaders is involved in each and every mission. Over more than 20 years of missions, with many repeat participants, the process has produced significant bonding among its top civic leaders.

And it’s that type of trust and bonding that helps set the stage for adapting “imported” knowledge to solve problems. Even though they may not know it, smart cities create comfort zones of informal, internal networks of trust. One management guru calls this zone the “ba,” a climate conducive to exchange of shared values. With the right climate, civic leaders are able to reach consensus, and their reactions and policy initiatives have greater coherence and are achieved more speedily.

The research I’ve worked on shows the prowling of cities is not just continuous. It’s growing. The arrangements for visits are becoming more sophisticated. Intermediary organizations are popping up to help match cities, much like a dating service matches couples.

The bottom line: a wise policy environment and enlightened public support could help cities create the conditions, cultivate the soil, for innovation, even while they are on the prowl.

Tim Campbell is a seasoned international observer and board chair of the Urban Age Institute. His e-mail is TimCampbellPhD@verizon.net

Do you know the best survival strategies when an earthquake hits? Would you know how to prepare for a tornado, lean into hurricane-force winds, escape from a smoke-filled room? If fire hit your home, would you know how to use that fire extinguisher you bought years ago?

The earthquake in Haiti, followed in close order by major seismic eruptions in Chile, Okinawa and Taiwan, should be a wake up call for a re-examination of readiness across the globe. We Americans should learn to be a little less obsessed with terrorism, much more about preparedness. The reality is that an earthquake or monster storm or wildfire epidemic could spell disaster for many more of us.

There’s a lot cities can do about this. And I got my first clue sitting on a plane to Fukuoka, Japan, as part of my work organizing the annual international city study missions of the Trade Alliance and Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce. The city, I discovered in my reading
materials, listed a disaster training center as a tourist attraction.

What could that be about? So on arrival in Fukuoka, I made a Sunday afternoon stroll to see what the center was all about. To my amazement, there was a line of families in the parking lot waiting to enter. I toured the facility and complimented one of the workers on parents bringing their children for training. She said, “That is not correct, sir. The children are bringing their parents. All school children must annually visit the center. They like it so much, that they bring their parents on the weekend.” The facility is run by the Fukuoka fire department.

Every major city in Japan, I learned, has an experienced-based disaster training center run by the city government. There is nothing like this in the United States. My discussions with local Red Cross and other officials suggest the American system is simply not effective. But the professionals I talked with were genuinely excited by the Japanese approach.

We brought our Seattle delegation to the Fukuoka center as part of the study mission. A sample of what they saw:

In one room there’s an interactive screen the size of a wall in one’s home. In the corner of the screen is a waste paper basket. Against the wall are four red fire extinguishers. Paper in the waste basket catches fire. The fire begins to spread. Four children run to get the extinguishers and spray them on the fire. If done properly, the fire goes out. If not, the room burns up!

It turned out that none of the over 74 Seattle delegates had ever used a fire extinguisher before, although all of them had one in their home.

Another room is set up as a kitchen, with a table, four chairs and a gas stove. Four of our delegates sat at the table. The room began to rock and shake to simulate either a 5.0 or a 7.0 earthquake. One turned off the stove while the others dove under the table and held onto the table legs. Afterwards, one of our business delegates said he would bolt his home to the foundation on his return to Seattle.

The center allows one to escape a smoke-filled room, learn about floods, experience typhoon-level winds, examine a medivac helicopter, and practice CPR. We discussed home safety precautions, smoke detectors use, and other day-to-day safety tips.

A U.S. Navy base in Japan uses a center near Fukuoka for the certification of baby sitters. Training for care givers from retirement homes and hospitals, school teachers and day care provider staff is possible. Every new Toyota employee in Fukuoka must go through the center.

Back home, prompted by what we’d seen and experienced in Fukuoka, the Seattle City Council appropriated $75,000 to hire a firm to do a feasibility study, visiting other Japan centers to flesh out its possible recommendations. We concluded the best metro site for the center would be at Seattle Center, which receives 12 million visitors annually. The facility could also be connected to the Pacific Science Center to add the science of fire, earthquakes or floods. We received contributions from insurance companies, hospitals and others to complete a phase two study. We also concluded that the Japanese approach was a perfect national demonstration for Homeland Security.

We asked Fukuoka to invite the Secretary of Homeland Security to visit its facility. It’s said in the Orient that a picture is worth a thousand words.

Perhaps President Obama, on his next trip to the Far East, should take along his Homeland Security advisers — and just as important, a delegation of mayors from across America — to visit the Fukuoka facility. The next step could be a series of demonstration projects in interested cities nationwide. The cost would likely be a fraction of what we spend checking bags and padding down passengers in airports every day — and in the long run, infinitely more important.

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WASHINGTON — Why in the world should Congress be considering a “Green Taxis Act”?

It’s because New York — plus Seattle, Boston, San Francisco and several other cities — want to switch their taxi fleets over to all-hybrid vehicles. But they’ve run into a big legal snag, and Congress may have to come to their rescue.

Switching cabs to hybrids promises some potentially stunning gains.

Take carbon emissions. In New York City, taxis alone account for 1 percent of total carbon emissions; switching them to hybrids would be the equivalent of taking 35,000 cars off the road.

Second, there’s gas consumption. A standard taxicab such as V-8 powered Ford Crown Victoria gets about 14 miles to a gallon of gas. But some hybrids, running on a combination of gasoline and electricity, get as much as 36. The hybrid advantage is especially high among taxis because they so often find themselves idling or creeping along in traffic, generating pollutants all the time. Hybrids just don’t need internal combustion energy in that situation.

In New York City, where the typical cab is driven 80,000 miles a year, the Crown Victoria consumes 5,700 gallons a year, the leading hybrids 2,200 gallons. If we want to curb American oil consumption, what better starting point?

Finally — and arguably most significantly — there is the health issue. Most vehicles are worrisome smog generators. Their tailpipes emit not just carbon dioxide but also nitrogen oxides, benzene and particulates. The public pays the price in heightened levels of asthma, other respiratory diseases, and increased susceptibility to cardiac incidents — triggering sometimes deep personal tragedies and drains on public health budgets.

So what’s the hang-up slowing down hybrid conversions across the country?

Taxi fleet owners, who lease out their cabs to individual drivers, flinch at the original hybrid purchase price (often several thousands dollars higher). The hybrids’ big savings end up not in the pockets of the fleet owners but the drivers, who buy their own fuel.

So in 2008, when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg set fuel standards designed to convert all of the city’s 13,237 taxis (its legendary “yellow cabs”) to hybrids by 2012, he was immediately challenged.

The city’s Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, which represents the fleet owners, went to court arguing that only the federal government has the power to regulate emissions and fuel efficiency. The Federal Clean Air Act and a companion environmental law of the 1970s, they argued, preempted states or local governments from regulating in the field.

A federal judge in New York ruled in favor of the fleet owners. Bloomberg was not pleased, declaring:
“The decision is not a ruling against hybrid cars, rather a ruling that archaic Washington regulations are applicable and therefore New York City and other cities are prevented from choosing to create cleaner air or a healthier place to live.”

Then the city passed an incentive program to encourage yellow taxi owners to convert to hybrids, and was again slapped down by the court.

Now the case is before the U.S. Court of Appeals and there’s a new player — the Obama administration. It’s entered the fray with a “friend of the court” brief vigorously defending the right of New York — and Boston in a parallel case — to set rules for its own taxicab fleets. The move is significant because it’s rare that the federal Justice Department would make a major point of defending states’ and localities’ rights.
And there’s another new player: Congress. The Green Taxis Act, permitting cities to move forward without preemption roadblocks, has been introduced by two New Yorkers — Sen. Kirstin Gillibrand and Rep. Jerrold Nadler.

The legislation, Nadler argues, would “finally empower New York City and other cities to make their fleets greener and more accessible.”

Gillibrand adds: “As a mother of an asthmatic child, I believe this bill is a win-win for our children and our efforts to combat climate change.”

There’s even a “Buy in USA” angle — the still-dominant Crown Victory is manufactured in Canada, but the leading hybrid alternative — the Ford Escape — is produced in the Kansas City area.

The big question, of course, is whether the Green Taxis Act will attract enough attention to achieve passage in a busy and distracted Congress.

Narrow parochialism might stymie it. Rohit Aggarwala, Bloomberg’s Director of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, says word has filtered back from some Capitol Hill circles that “it’s a joke because no one outside of New York thinks taxis are important.”

That would be sad: Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C. all have all expressed definite interest in the clean taxi program. Big fleets await clean-up in Houston, Miami, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Denver, Phoenix and St. Louis as well. Cumulatively, smaller cities’ fleets add up to big numbers.

If we Americans can’t give our cities a green light on this straightforward reform, then our health and climate futures are indeed dim.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

WASHINGTON — Nicknaming a federal grant-in-aid program TIGER may seem an anomaly: federal disbursements, normally loaded with rules, regulations and complexity, rarely get called bold or ferocious.

But the government’s historic knee-jerk preference for roads gets a nip–maybe a deep bite–in the Transportation Department’s just-announced $1.5 billion in grants to states and cities under the “Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery” program–or TIGER.

As Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood explained to me last week: “TIGER is our opportunity to say to folks that we know you’re trying to do innovative and creative transportation things that never really fit our official formulas or program silos. This program is your opportunity to show you’re the innovators around the country.”

Each state and local government applicant, in short, had to show how many of the program’s goals it could reach– “shovel-ready” job production that fights recession and rebuilds the economy, safer streets and communities, environmental sustainability (such as reduced carbon emissions), and greater community livability.

There also seems to have been an unwritten factor: to be catalytic, providing the gap financing to move commendable but stalled local projects forward.

The contrast to money channeled routinely to roads justified if at all on reducing congestion–couldn’t have been more dramatic.

A TIGER-supported replacement for a deteriorated interstate bridge over the Arkansas River in Tulsa, for example, won’t just carry cars and trucks but include lanes for bikes and pedestrians, long-distance freight and passenger rail service, and also space for a commuter rail system that might otherwise have to wait a generation to be completed.

Beleaguered Detroit receives $25 million to help the city assemble funds for its first significant transit line in decades –a 3.4-mile light rail line up the central Woodward Avenue spine, seen as a major downtown economic stimulant and way for low-income Detroiters to access the center city.

Whitefish, Mont., is awarded $3.5 million to return its main street, now a high-speed truck route, to walkability and a retail-friendly small town character with curb-to-curb reconstruction, modern traffic controls and angled parking.

Then there’s New York City, where Transportation Department officials allocated $83 million in TIGER funds to improvements for Penn Station, now congested with more millions of passengers than it can reasonably handle. They hope the money will be a magic key to break the local political stalemate that has delayed developing a world-class station in the historic Farley Office Building across Eighth Avenue.

Where TIGER funds highways, it’s generally for missing links and interchanges. The bigger news is freight. A 2,500-mile “Crescent Corridor Freight Rail” network from the Gulf Coast to the Mid-Atlantic and involving eight states, receives funding. Plus, TIGER invests $100 million in the long-congested Chicago rail hub, a key to efficient delivery of goods nationwide.

It’s true TIGER is covering only 51 projects out of the 1,400 applications (total value $57 billion) it received. But if its “modal split” is a harbinger, future government transportation outlays may differ radically from the past. Just 23 percent of the TIGER projects are roads, compared to 26 percent for transit projects, 19 percent for rail, 7 percent for ports and 25 percent for multimodal facilities.

The tightly competitive TIGER grants process “is a smartly conservative, competitive, outcome-oriented way” to assure federal transportation dollars actually serve regions’ own planning goals, and support communities’ livability as well as mobility. That’s the judgment of Scott Polikov, a Texas town planner and transportation expert and board member of the Congress for the New Urbanism.

Polikov worked with a successful Dallas-area TIGER application to fund a new streetcar line that connects major employment centers, workforce housing, parks and walkable mixed-use neighborhoods as well as existing light and commuter rail lines. Regional cohesion helped win the day, he says, with the North Texas Council of Governments–which serves as the designated Metropolitan Planning Council (MPO) for its area–using the TIGER grant lure to pull together local jurisdictions that rarely work well together.

With Congress hard-pressed to find sufficient money for traditional large-scale highway projects, Polikov says the country’s leading MPOs would do well to coalesce for a competitive, less costly federal transportation program modeled on TIGER.

Potentially, state transportation departments, which have “ruled the roost” on dispensing both their own and federal formula-based transportation dollars, might resist that idea. But TIGER lets the cat out of the bag: Why shouldn’t state departments compete, too–especially in big projects with neighboring states, and not just roads but waterways and rail, with goals mixed from mobility to livability to carbon reduction?

The time’s clearly at hand to spend our transportation dollars a lot more smartly. TIGER’s roar: let competition come first.

Note to readers: Research by Rob Puente of Brookings’ Metropolitan Program also indicates the TIGER grants give metro areas a much bigger break than normal transportation allocations. Check this Brookings link for details.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

A little more than a dozen years ago, a collection of three adjacent suburban towns in the sprawling Sun Belt region of Charlotte did something extraordinary. After months of public workshops, lectures and community discussions, months of looking at slide shows to choose what kinds of streets, stores, houses and apartments they wanted for their towns, they revamped their town codes. They aimed to discourage conventional suburbia and encourage traditional neighborhood development, transit-oriented projects and farmland preservation.

It warmed the hearts of planners. It drew national attention and awards and, after a couple of New Urbanist neighborhoods were built, busloads of visiting Smart Growth disciples. Writers, including yours truly, ladled on praise. In 1996 I wrote an editorial calling the new ordinances in Huntersville, Cornelius and Davidson, N.C., “a remarkable exercise in local and regional planning” and “a remarkable vision.”

But as Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys sang decades before, “Time changes everything.”

“It faded away in Cornelius first,” says David Walters, an urban design professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who has worked as a consultant for all three towns starting in the mid-1990s.

“The torch didn’t get well passed,” says Bill Coxe, transportation planner in Huntersville, a one-time mill-town and railroad hamlet that has grown from less than 3,000 people in 1988 to an estimated 39,000 in 2006. In both Huntersville and the next-door town of Cornelius, early enthusiasm for concentrating development into higher density nodes and for pushing more growth into the towns’ tiny, historic downtowns has faltered, victim of elections and the departures of some key planners, mayors and town managers. It hasn’t helped that a long-wished-for commuter rail line remains in funding limbo.

Today, Huntersville town commissioners are thinking of using a city-owned former cotton mill site–purchased years ago with an eye to a mixed-use development clustered at a planned commuter rail stop–to build a new police station. After all, the reasoning goes, it would save money to use land the town already owns. And anyway, conservatives on the town board had successfully scuttled a deal with a willing local developer. That happened back in the pre-recession days when developers could still get financing.

By 2010, only Davidson–an affluent college town of about 9,000, home to Davidson College–was hewing religiously to its strategy: channel most growth into already developed areas, protect the village feel of its historic downtown by requiring new development to fit in with the old and try to protect open land in its fast-disappearing rural surroundings.

In Huntersville, by contrast, “The cadre who believed in it moved on,” Coxe says. “Now you just have a bunch of suburbanites. And they just don’t get it.”

How, he wonders, do you embed into a town’s culture the precepts of smart planning, of building walkable town centers and channeling the growth into the areas where it makes sense to grow? After so much work by so many townspeople and elected leaders, how do you maintain that level of interest, engagement and understanding of the underlying principles? After all, most Americans still equate “density” with poverty.

With so many newcomers, and the generally transient nature of much of America, how many Huntersville and Cornelius residents were even aware of all those hours townspeople devoted 15 years ago? Walters worked with Cornelius, population about 13,000, on an area plan in 2003 and with Huntersville on a 2005 downtown plan. Public participation, he says, was “pretty disappointing.” And, he says, “More worryingly, there was not a whole lot of interest from public officials.”

In addition to the turnover and the influx of newcomers unaware of the past work, I suspect a piece of what has happened relates to starker political partisanship and more liberal-versus-conservative tensions in the past decade. Much about traditional neighborhood design might be considered conservative–such as its aim to hold down municipal services costs and its association with small-town values. But once “smart growth” came to be associated with environmentalism, it became a target for many conservatives suspicious of anything favored by liberals.

Yet the northernmost town of the three, Davidson, has held to its course. Walters credits many things, including its long-time mayor, Randy Kincaid, who only left office two years ago. “He got it,” Walters says. “He really didn’t need any convincing.” The town board, also, has seen little turnover and is generally well-educated about the complexities of growth and planning. And while the town’s top planners have changed, they’ve all been, in Walters’ words, “activist planners.”

And, as if happens, Davidson is a place enamored of itself. “Davidson’s own dynamics, its sense of specialness,” has, over the years, helped it work through difficulties and keep its eye on its goals, Walters says.

Coxe, the Huntersville planner, told me recently that he considers it a personal failure that Huntersville hasn’t held to its much-praised vision of a decade ago. I think he’s too hard on himself. Like a large number of Americans, many of Huntersville’s new townspeople have never lived anywhere but suburbia. That’s the way of life they know and love.

Walters, who has worked as a consultant on planning projects around the country, thinks the inability to stick to community plans is likely a continual problem, especially rapidly growing suburban areas such as Huntersville. He’s right. People move away. They forget. They elect new politicians. Time changes everything.

Even if 15 years ago hundreds of people devoted hundreds of hours to learn a better way to grow, Walters reminds us, you need “constant vigilance, constant education, constant programming of public events to keep the issues alive.”

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WASHINGTON — The tea party crowd has it dead wrong. We don’t need smaller government, we need smarter government that can look ahead, saving us crises and billions of dollars in the process.

A prime example: this winter’s record-breaking snow storms that left the Nation’s Capital region, due to insufficient snow-clearing equipment, immobilized days on end, at humongous cost to citizens, governments and private businesses.

Appalled at the inefficiency, Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein came up with an intriguing idea: Why not require everyone in the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia metro region to sign up for “snow insurance”?

Sure, it would cost something. Homeowners might have to pay $25 a year, businesses an average of $2,500. With the cash, local governments would guarantee no disruption of work or school after snowfall up to one foot, perhaps 36 hours maximum for a bigger storm.

Even if monster storms hit just every few years, the math works. The recent storm surge cost the federal government at least $400 million–$100 million a day–in lost productivity. Private businesses and jobs were hit hard–the overall loss to the region was likely close to $5 billion.

Yet with a “snow insurance”-funded extra $75 million a year, deployed to finance added manpower and technologically advanced snow removal equipment, the blow would have been dramatically less. Businesses would have stayed running, schools open. Government would have saved dramatically. Hourly workers would have been spared the bitter reversal of losing pay when they couldn’t reach work.

But just push snow insurance seriously, Pearlstein noted, and Republicans would castigate it as “the biggest tax increase in history.”

Yet the fact is–snow removal’s just one of thousands of potential smart, money-saving government moves. Environmental markets specialist Albert Appleton produced a slew of think-smartly-ahead ideas for thinking ahead at a recent New York conference on sustainable city finance, cosponsored by the Urban Age Institute and New York Academy of Sciences.

As New York’s environmental protection commissioner in the early ’90s, Appleton recalled, there was real danger that agricultural runoff in the Catskill Mountains would imperil the city’s legendarily clear waters, supplied from Catskill reservoirs.

There was an obvious “high tech” solution: build enormous water filtration plants. But they would have cost about $6 billion, triggering rocketing water and sewage rates for New York taxpayers. So Appleton chose another strategy–to make the Catskill farmers stewards of the watershed. Predictably, the upstate farmers bristled at the big city’s suggestions to limit pathogen and nutrient runoff from their operations. City demands would destroy their way of life, they claimed. So the solution: the city agreed to address the farmers’ concerns and paid for cleanup and safeguarding measures also designed to economically strengthen Catskill farming.

Not only has the Catskill environment improved, says Appleton, but “we have protected the champagne of drinking water for the future.”

And after that incident, he adds, whenever he saw audiences’ “eyes glaze over” when he made a pitch for environmental protections, “all I had to say (was) it’s like the watershed program–it’s cost-saving pollution prevention.”

Now, he insists, it’s time to scratch the 20th century one-issue-at-a-time, regulatory approach to environmental concerns. And to fix perverse incentives. A utility’s emissions, for example, easily cause asthma and other illnesses. But what’s the benefit to the company’s bottom line if it installs superior scrubbers or substitutes cleaner fuels?

Alternatively, Appleton proposes government should design market rewards for pollution-reducing measures–switching increasingly to “green” power and energy conservation. The goal should be an overall cleaner environment, through multiple steps, by diverse players, across entire watersheds.

Government spending choices need careful scrutiny, too he suggests: “Green energy is supported today mostly by subsidies. But that’s economically inefficient when we also continue to subsidize coal, oil and natural gas.” Costs for wind, solar and the like are now “within striking range” of fossil-based fuels, he adds. He sees fair economics as the route to greener power.

Plus, Appleton stresses, taxes should reflect true costs. To replace property taxes now facing widespread public revolt, he’d institute a “land services use tax” –the actual proportionate costs the public has to pay to support a piece of property, from roads to water lines to sewers to lighting to police protection. Compact, in-town and physically closeby developments would be the economic winners–not scattered home and office sites which actually cost far more to reach and service.

(A parallel innovation–the Henry George-era idea of putting local property taxes on the value of land, not buildings–has been tried sporadically over the years, with positive results in such cities as Pittsburgh. Proponents say its an incentive to clean up abandoned, vacant or rundown properties, benefiting cities, stimulating economic development in the process. The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy recently published a report detailing experiences of nations and cities that have tried the land value tax.)

So what does a “snow tax” have to do with funding for water supplies, pollution prevention, green energy and a fairer way to impose land-based taxes? Each of the steps could lead to higher productivity, a better environment, smarter and more nimble cities and regions, and ultimately more, not less, disposable cash for citizens.

Of course some experiments might founder. The political hurdles are huge. But aren’t we smart enough to at least try?

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