State News

Some Pickerington residents are quick to describe the growing pains in what was once a farming community.

They point to high taxes, an overcrowded school system, narrow roads that snarl traffic and the growing expense of the city's perks for landowners whose property is annexed into the city.

Fed up with the pace of housing growth in Pickerington, a group of residents is trying to slow it down.

The group is circulating three initiative petitions aimed at reining in the Pickerington City Council and the rate at which it annexes land.

"There's just too much, too quick,'' Mike Moeller said. "They're allowing hundreds and hundreds of new homes to come in.''

Moeller and others want to see more businesses, not houses, sprout up in Pickerington to help keep city taxes from rising.

City leaders say they're merely taking advantage of the growth that's inevitable in the area.

Better for new houses to be built in the city, where they'll provide additional tax revenue, than in the adjacent township, they say.

"Our position is it's going to be developed anyway,'' City Manager Joyce Bushman said.

Bushman is among the area leaders fighting a new state law giving counties and townships more say in annexation decisions.

The big push has been to annex enough land so Pickerington's border extends to Rt. 33, where an industrial park is planned.

Last year, 119 acres of Violet Township were annexed into Pickerington, which is about one-seventh the size of the township. This year, Pickerington gained 805 acres.

If enough valid signatures are obtained on the three Pickerington petitions, the issues can be put on the ballot for voters to decide next November.

One of the initiatives would make it more difficult for the City Council to pass emergency legislation, in which laws go into effect immediately, rather than in 30 days. Many annexations have been approved that way.

But more important, residents can't overturn emergency ordinances through referendums. When a referendum is filed, the disputed ordinance is suspended until voters decide the issue.

"It's for the developers,'' said Rex Myer, sponsor of the petition on emergency ordinances. "The developers are the only ones that gain anything from it.''

The change being proposed in the petition would allow the City Council to pass emergency ordinances only if there's a potential threat to the health and safety of residents. Passing emergency ordinances would require approval by six of seven council members, rather than the five now required.

In 1999 in Groveport, changes were made about how the Village Council can pass emergency ordinances.

The changes came as a result of a petition circulated by residents; when the issue went to the ballot, a majority of voters endorsed it.

Groveport attorney Kevin Shannon said he hasn't heard complaints that the council feels constrained by it.

"I think communities can tend to abuse the emergency ordinances, the 'we've-got- to-do-it-because-we're-running-out-of- time' kind of thing,'' he said.

Another Pickerington initiative would bar the City Council from offering the perk of cutting, delaying or eliminating water and sewer costs to property owners who agree for their land to be annexed into Pickerington.

Petition sponsor Rita Ricketts, a former Pickerington mayor, said she's worried that the cost of the perks eventually could be passed to users through higher sewer or water fees.

"I'm concerned the city is putting their constituents in a financial bind,'' she said.

Ricketts also is among the sponsors of an initiative to limit the density of housing developments to two units per acre. Dense housing units typically mean more schoolchildren funneling into an already overcrowded system, she said.

And if any new school buildings are constructed, Pickerington residents will have to foot the bill, she said.

Pickerington officials said housing developments, on average, are only slightly more dense than those in Violet Township. The average density of housing developments in the city is 2.8 units per acre; in Violet Township, it is 2.4 units per acre, city officials said.

And Pickerington Mayor Randall Hughes defended the ratio of housing to commercial development in Pickerington.

"We have the best balanced growth in the area,'' he said.

For every $3 of residential property, the city has $1 of business property; in Violet Township, there's $27 of residential property for every $1 of business property, Hughes said.

As for the perks the City Council has offered to property owners, Bushman said the additional revenue they'll bring the city outweighs the cost of those perks.

"It's a market where we have to negotiate,'' she said. "We do what we have to do.''

And approving annexations through emergency ordinances is a way to bring the land and additional real-estate taxes into the city as soon as possible, Bushman said. Passing legislation the standard way takes two to three months, she said.

© Copyright 2001 Columbus Dispatch

The flight to the suburbs is happening so fast in Greater Cincinnati that it is seriously damaging both the core city and the suburbs, says an expert on urban sprawl hired to study the region.

''I knew the central city had problems, but I was surprised by how much stress there is at the city's edge and suburbs,'' said Myron Orfield, director of the Minneapolis-based Metropolitan Area Research Corp.

Orfield said there's been ''very rapid social and economic decline'' in older suburban communities like Newport, Bellevue and Dayton in Northern Kentucky and in Mount Healthy, North College Hill and Lockland in Hamilton County. ''There are very few places in America where older, suburban communities are becoming poor so rapidly,'' he said.

Land development in the tri-state has outpaced population growth by a 5-to-1 ratio in recent years, he found.

''That's twice as bad as the na tional average, and the national average is bad,'' says Orfield, who will make a final report today to the Cincinnati organization Citizens for Civic Renewal, which hired him. Next, the local group will start putting together recommendations based on his findings.

The stress on the suburbs result ing from the rapid push to communities farther out shows up in mounting problems paying for schools, services and community revitalization. ''Greater Cincinnati has built an extra ring of suburbs with no growth, and now it has to pay for it,'' said Orfield.

''Developing suburbs, like Grant and Pendleton counties in Northern Kentucky and Butler and Warren counties in southwest Ohio, are very poor. They're growing with about half the tax base of the national average.''

Orfield traced Greater Cincinnati's sprawl problems to competition among communities to grow.

''Rather than cooperate, they spend time competing with each other,'' he said.

Orfield is a proponent of regional cooperation and says a good example of it is the Minneapolis area, where communities share 40 percent of their commercial and industrial tax revenue.

Earlier this year, in a draft report of his Greater Cincinnati study, Orfield recommended a tax sharing plan for this area.

However, Citizens for Civic Renewal and other local organizations told Orfield not to make recommendations in his final report and Orfield agreed.

''We want to figure out ourselves what will work here,'' said Greg Harris, executive director of Citizens for Civic Renewal.

''So, for the next year, we're going to do community outreach and find out what kind of reform is palatable to the region. We're going to get a feel about how serious people here are about reform.''

Harris said Orfield's study raises some serious concerns.

''We are a region continu ally separating ourselves from each other,'' said Harris. ''We've been fiscally reckless in our growth and development.

''Developing land five times faster than our population growth means taxpayers are absorbing heavy costs. They're paying for infrastructure and other things not warranted by our population.''

Harris says communities need to coordinate growth plans and develop financially sound policies for the entire region.

Despite the problems, Orfield and Harris remain optimistic.

''There are lots of good people who care about this community,'' said Orfield.

''I'm encouraged,'' said Harris. ''A lot of people around here have a fundamental sense that the way we are growing now is to our detriment.''

© Copyright 2001 Cincinnati Post

The satellite photo says it best.

Dayton and Cincinnati are rapidly growing together in a rush of housing, retail and commercial development across Warren and Butler counties. Anyone who's driven along Interstate 75 south from Dayton has caught glimpses of the shifting construction, jobs and people.

But from a satellite 515 miles above Earth, the view of the change occurring in southwest Ohio is more pronounced.

Dayton and Cincinnati are no longer separate cities. Neither is Hamilton or Middletown. The rush to the middle during the past decade linked them with subdivisions, industrial parks and shopping centers that have overrun municipal boundaries and the ways we've always defined our cities.

"I don't think the people in this area care whether it's Dayton or Cincinnati," said Joan Powell, president of the Lakota school board, which oversees a district with 15,700 children in booming West Chester and Liberty townships in Butler County.

From up in space, the lights of southwest Ohio look like one big necktie, with Dayton at one end and Cincinnati at the other.

On the ground, however, the view is not so clear in a four-county region where 139 local governments, about 47,000 businesses and nearly 2 million people grapple with implications of the shift to the middle.

Development in Warren and Butler counties during the past 10 years produced gleaming new homes in safe neighborhoods, new jobs and a wealth of stores, restaurants and entertainment venues. But it also wiped out farm fields and wooded land, overtaxed water and sewer systems,
increased traffic gridlock and overcrowded schools.

"The growth is happening and as a community we need to have a strategy on how best to deal with it and capitalize on it," said Maureen Pero, president of the Downtown Dayton Partnership.

WHAT OUR EXAMINATION FOUND

At stake is nothing less than southwest Ohio's economic health and its liveability.

In a yearlong examination, the Dayton Daily News found southwest Ohio struggling to grow in a global economy while maintaining the quality of life that the region's residents have come to expect.

Among our findings:

"It's time we swallow this self-important, ‘I'm the one’ approach," said Jim Mears, the former mayor of Franklin whose Warren County city aggressively outbid neighboring communities for new factories and jobs during the 1990s.

"We have to help each other survive."

POPULATION SHIFT RAISES COSTS, TENSIONS

Dayton and Cincinnati have grown together, but they took different routes before meeting in the middle.

The Dayton area is developing more slowly than the Cincinnati area.

A study released in July ranked the Dayton area as the 20th slowest urbanizing — or developing — metropolitan area in the country, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington D.C.-based think tank. The amount of developed land grew 18 percent between 1982 and 1997 in the Dayton-Springfield Metropolitan Statistical Area, a federal census designation that includes Montgomery, Greene, Miami and Clark counties, according to the study.

During that same period, the Dayton area's population density declined 13.6 percent to 3.64 people per urbanized acre in 1997.

To the south, however, the picture was far different.

The Cincinnati area is among the nation's 25 fastest-developing regions, according to the Brookings Institution. The amount of developed land increased by 40 percent between 1982 and 1997 in the Cincinnati-Hamilton Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes 13 counties in Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky and reaches as far north as Warren and Butler
counties.

But population density in the Cincinnati-Hamilton area declined 21.2 percent to 3.8 people per urbanized acre in 1997, fitting the Brookings Institution's definition of sprawl, where "land is consumed at a faster rate than population growth."

"It's getting less country all the time, honey," said Louise Buckley, 70, who's lived in the same house in Franklin in Warren County for 52 years. "It used to be farmland. Now it's all houses."

She said the big-chain stores and malls cropping up along I-75 have replaced hometown shops like Murphy's and Humphrey's. She doesn't like the changes.

"You have to go out of town to find a decent pair of shoes," Buckley said.

Although southwest Ohio's population has grown little during the past decade, you wouldn't know that in Warren County, which had the second highest rate of population growth in the state during the 1990s. Delaware County north of Columbus was No. 1.

Warren County's population increased by 39 percent to 158,383 since 1990.

During the same period Butler County's population increased by 14 percent to 332,807.

But population gains in those counties were offset by declines of 2.4 percent in Hamilton County and 2.6 percent Montgomery County — which together account for 1.4 million of the four-county region's 1.9 million people.

Greater availability of housing in Warren and Butler counties makes it easier for businesses to draw employees from across the region, but business and economic development officials say the slow overall growth in southwest Ohio's population makes it difficult to find adequately
trained workers.

The population shift to Warren and Butler counties also creates tension between newcomers and farmers or longtime residents, who may not want their communities to change and who object to paying higher taxes to cover the cost of growth.

Property owners in fast-growing communities West Chester and Liberty townships in Butler County and Mason and Springboro in Warren County have repeatedly been asked to approve more taxes for education. "I don't like it because there's too much traffic (and) schools have become crowded," said Warren County resident Glee Howard, 68, who has seen her annual property taxes increase to $1,300 from the $300 she paid in 1967 when she moved to Clearcreek Twp., part of the Springboro school district.

Springboro's struggle to accommodate growth demonstrates the conflict between new and old residents.

The school district adds 200 students a year and needed six temporary trailers to accommodate junior high school students this year, said Superintendent David Baker. Since 1990, voters considered 13 school tax issues and rejected seven. When the district added a third elementary school to relieve overcrowding in 1999, it stood empty for a year because voters would not approve more taxes to hire teachers and pay for equipment needed in the new school.

Although the new Springboro Elementary School eventually opened in September 2000, levy battles and school board strife polarized the community.

Resident Mike Hyzy, a parent active in Springboro school levy campaigns, said the election results showed weak support from Clearcreek Twp. neighborhoods, home to many longtime residents.

Hyzy, 35, moved in 1998 from Hamilton County to Sycamore Springs, one of Springboro's new subdivisions, to be closer to his job at NCR in Dayton while remaining within easy distance of friends near Cincinnati. He said the development occurring between Dayton and Cincinnati is a good thing, as long as government keeps pace by upgrading roads and improving the
water supply.

"That's progress, that's growth. It will help the local economy," Hyzy said.

Others disagree, warning that growth in Warren and Butler counties paves over valuable farmland, severs wildlife corridors, creates the need for additional infrastructure — roads, schools, public utilities — and hurts the urban core.

The Sierra Club argues that building more roads will only bring more traffic and, in a 2000 report, the environmentalist group put Mason and Deerfield Twp. in Warren County on a list of the nation's worst examples of uncontrolled commercial growth and sprawl.

Residents of those communities formed Balance, a grassroots group co-founder Helen Fox said has a core of about a dozen suburban moms who go to government meetings and advocate a more sensible approach to development in Warren County. Fox said the group is not opposed to development, but wants it balanced against the need to maintain greenspace and not overwhelm infrastructure and services.

There is value in retaining the rural character of southwest Ohio, said Larry Wood, interim director of the Middletown Economic Development Corp., a public-private partnership.

"I can drive 30 minutes and be in the country. That's one of the great assets we have here," Wood said. "I think we try to intensify growth around (I-75) and protect the areas away from the interstate."

Local governments struggle to cope with the environmental impact of southwest Ohio's sprawling middle.

When land is paved over, water runoff cannot drain into the soil, said Montgomery County Engineer Joseph Litvin. So millions of tax dollars must be spent to build storm sewers and improve culverts and to replace or widen bridges to handle the increased flow of water in creeks, rivers and ditches, he said.

Last year, Mason drew so much water from the aquifer serving southern Warren County that residential wells in Turtlecreek Twp. to the north went dry. Springboro's search for water prompted officials to buy land four miles from the city for a water well, prompting the neighboring city of Carlisle to pass a law restricting exploratory drilling.

Development also overwhelms roadways, forcing taxpayers to pick up the tab for road widening, realignment, traffic signal improvements and new roads.

For example, Warren County spent $12 million in the past two year improving just 17 of the most hazardous intersections. There isn't enough money to fix all the county's road problems, said Neil Tunison, the county engineer.

FIXING I-75 CRITICAL, COMMON GROUND

The cost of county road projects will seem small compared to the bills expected for what people across southwest Ohio agree is the region's most urgent transportation issue — repairing Interstate 75 from Dayton to Cincinnati.

Fixing bottlenecks and safety problems on the interstate through Dayton and at the Brent Spence Bridge linking Cincinnati to Kentucky will take years and hundreds of millions of dollars. Officials say gridlock threatens southwest Ohio's ability to remain a critical transportation corridor for business.

Daily traffic tops 120,000 vehicles through downtown Dayton and 146,000 at the Brent Spence Bridge.

Commercial truck traffic on I-75 in the Dayton area nearly doubled in a decade to 19,540 trucks a day in 2000, according to the Ohio Department of Transportation.

Southwest Ohio government officials have found common ground along the I-75 transportation corridor that fueled the region's sprawl and is increasingly inadequate in handling the results. They've joined in the North South Transportation Initiative, a major study of I-75 that focuses on improving the roadway between Dayton and Cincinnati and finding money to solve the problems.

Business leaders say repairs cannot come too soon. A 2001 survey of 40 chambers of commerce extending from the Ohio River north to Sidney found business leaders debating whether they should remain in southwest Ohio because traffic gridlock on I-75 makes it increasingly difficult to deliver goods and services on time, said Julia C. Maxton, president and executive director of the South Metro Regional Chamber of Commerce in Miami Twp.

MOVE TO MIDDLE WORSENS BIG-CITY PROBLEMS

Fixing Interstate 75 is just one of the daunting problems for Dayton and Cincinnati, and to a lesser extent, Middletown and Hamilton.

The loss of businesses and residents to the suburbs drains tax revenues and makes it more difficult for southwest Ohio's older cities to resolve chronic problems like concentrated poverty, crime, dilapidated or vacant housing, an eroding manufacturing base and low-achieving schools. Both Dayton and Cincinnati schools meet so few state performance standards
that they are rated in the lowest category of "academic emergency." Middletown and Hamilton schools are one step up with an "academic watch" rating.

All four cities have seen population declines and federal Internal Revenue Service statistics indicate that it is the wealthier residents who have left Montgomery and Hamilton counties.

Montgomery County residents moving to Warren County reported median incomes nearly $9,000 higher than the $28,253 median income of those who remained in Montgomery County, according to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service data from 1999, the most recent year available.

Among Hamilton County residents who moved to Warren County, the median income was $14,000 higher than the $27,228 annual median income reported by those staying in Hamilton County, according to the IRS.

Businesses have also left Montgomery and Hamilton counties.

Both lost just under 3 percent of their businesses between 1995 and 1999, according to statistics compiled by the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce. Some businesses shifted to developments in the middle. Warren County alone saw a 19.5 percent increase to 2,894 businesses between 1995 and 1999.

Companies moving to the middle in the past decade include retailers and manufacturers of all sizes.

Among the biggest employers that have relocated to or expanded in Warren and Butler counties along the I-75 corridor are Procter & Gamble, the household products manufacturer; Cintas, a worldwide uniform distributor; AM General, which makes diesel engines for military vehicles; Ohio-Kentucky Steel; and the Dayton Daily News' Print Technology Center.

The growth is "along an artery that clearly is a magnet for development," said Bill Schneider, senior partner and chief operating officer for Miller-Valentine Group, a Dayton-based developer.

DOWNTOWN EFFORTS HELP, MORE IS NEEDED

To find their new roles, Dayton and Cincinnati are focusing on downtown revitalization and having success at building entertainment venues, housing and businesses.

In Dayton, RiverScape and Fifth Third Field draw visitors who haven't visited downtown in years. In Cincinnati, a changed riverfront is anchored by a new stadium for the NFL Bengals and one that's under construction for Major League Baseball's Reds.

More is coming, including the Schuster Performing Arts Center and downtown lofts in Dayton and parks and shopping along the Ohio River in Cincinnati.

But experts said more is needed to restore the urban cities and keep them from dragging down the entire region.

"(People) should care because the problems of Dayton and Cincinnati move outward in a radial fashion," said Cincinnati City Manager John Shirey. "We're already seeing that some of the problems that plague the inner city have already plagued the first ring of suburban cities and those just keep moving out."

Jack Dustin, director of the center for urban and public affairs at Wright State University in Fairborn, said residents of the new suburbs in the middle are mistaken if they feel insulated from sprawl's negative impact on southwest Ohio's urban cities and their own communities.

"It comes down to higher taxes for (suburban residents). It comes down to less-efficient businesses that they work for. Their jobs could be at stake in the long term," Dustin said. "(You) have to care about other people that live here because if you have a group of people who are left out, who have lost hope, then your life becomes less secure, more threatened."

COMMUNITIES NEED WAYS, REASONS TO COOPERATE

Southwest Ohio's shift to the middle is fueling calls from business and government leaders for more cooperation, more "regionalism," which Dustin defines as "people sharing authority over managing issues, such as transportation, economic development, water, sewer, poverty (and) education."

However, there now are few reasons to work together and few ways to cooperate if communities wanted to do that, despite the fact that Dayton and Cincinnati and Warren and Butler counties in between have grown together into what David Daugherty, president of the Mid-Miami Valley Chamber of Commerce in Middletown, calls the "Dayton-Cincinnati metroplex."

"What we need to do is make that metroplex a selling point," Daugherty said. "That becomes a major competitive advantage in the Midwest and nationally."

The economic strength of a united Dayton and Cincinnati region was shown in a study released in July by the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

The study measured the value of goods and services produced in the nation's metropolitan areas and found that the 13-county Cincinnati-Hamilton area ranked 39th in the country with $59.4 billion in gross metropolitan product. The four-county Dayton-Springfield area ranked 68th, with a GMP of $31.2 billion. Put those two economies together and the GMP totals $90.6 billion and shoves the Cincinnati-Dayton region up to 22nd in the United States, just below Denver, Colo.

Experts say meeting growth's challenges and harnessing that economic vitality requires more cooperation between Dayton, Cincinnati and the new communities in the middle, along with an end to petty rivalries that hinder consensus.

"I certainly think regional cooperation can be improved," said Dayton Mayor Mike Turner. "I think people are seeing, for long-term growth and economic stability, it is important to act in concert."

Some argue that state tax law and nearly universal availability of property tax breaks used to attract companies set communities against each other in fierce competition for economic development. Many believe that unless communities share the property and income taxes that come with new development, true regionalism is doomed to failure.

Regional cooperation also is hindered by the state's strong home rule tradition, which gives each local government and its residents authority over most major decisions.

Planning consultant Michael Gallis, in a 1999 report on the region, called Dayton and Cincinnati the next Dallas-Ft. Worth because of the ways the cities are growing together. But he also warned that governmental fragmentation hampers the region's ability to compete against other U.S. metro areas or globally.

The Gallis report crystallized for the Queen City's leaders the need to join hands with people across southwest Ohio, northern Kentucky and as far away as Columbus and Indianapolis.

Gallis' argument was compelling — only together could the cities expect to compete on a global scale. But it met with resistance in Cincinnati, said William Burleigh, co-chairman of the Metropolitan Growth Alliance, the Cincinnati business coalition that paid Gallis.

"I recall several people saying, ‘Why doesn't Michael just be quiet? We have enough on our plates,’ " said Burleigh, retired chairman, president, and chief executive of The E.W. Scripps Co., a Cincinnati-based publishing and broadcasting company.

Dayton-area officials paid little attention to Gallis' report at the time, even though he was particularly critical of Miami Valley governments.

"Communities just do their own things," Gallis said.

Local officials argue that the situation is not that bleak and there is an increasing realization among government and business leaders that the Dayton area has much to gain from links with the Cincinnati area. The fear that businesses will find new homes somewhere outside of southwest Ohio intensifies the push for more regional cooperation.

"We have to try to be more aggressive, more forward-looking than the next guy," said Brad Tidwell, president of Bank One Dayton and a board member of the Miami Valley Economic Development Coalition.

Perhaps the best incentive to get past hurdles associated with regional approaches comes from the increased power Dayton, Cincinnati and the communities in the middle will gain if they are as united on the ground as they appear in the satellite image taken from more than 500 miles high.

"We have to find ways to work together so that our roads don't become parking lots, so that our two international airports provide the level of service that is required for an area of our size, (and) that we are competitive with any region when it comes to the technology highway," Daugherty said. "If we can achieve that, we can compete with anybody in the world."

© Copyright 2001 Dayton Daily News

HAMILTON — Commuters from Butler County spend more time in their cars going
to and from work over the course of a year than they do on vacation,
according to a report from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The report showed Butler residents spent an estimated 98 hours per year
commuting in 2003, up about eight hours compared to 1990 and the second-most
time in the state after commuters in Lorain County. It?s also 18 more hours
than a worker would spend over two weeks of vacation.

Peggy Taylor said she spends about 40 minutes each day between her home in
Liberty Township and her workplace in the city of Fairfield. She said she?s
seen her drive time go up because of road construction and the population
boom in the past 10 years.

?There are just so many people and they don?t stop building houses,? Taylor
said.

The average county resident has a 23-minute round-trip commute. According to
2000 Census data, those in Morgan Township have the longest average daily
commute at nearly 34 minutes. Oxford residents have the shortest average
commute at nearly 16 minutes.

Chris Petrocy, spokesman for the Butler County Engineer?s Office, said while
improvements like the construction of Ohio 129 and Union Centre Boulevard
have been made to add capacity, the population growth/road improvement cycle
is self-fueling.

?It?s one of those things where growth starts to happen, so we build more
roads, which leads to more growth,? Petrocy said. ?We certainly do
everything we can to make the roads safer and to add capacity. When you look
at growth in Butler County, people tend to find it a desirable place to
live. That?s the upside. But, it does stretch infrastructure.?

Allen Freeman of the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments
said one of the biggest problems contributing to longer commutes is
congestion on Interstate 75. With widening projects recently completed from
West Chester Township south and with another widening project under way from
the township to Middletown, residents should see some relief, Freeman said.
Within Butler County, he said, longer drive times are simply a function of
having more people on the roads.

For many of those people, though, having a job is more important than the
extra minutes to get there.

Brian Thomas said he spends about 12 minutes a day between home in Fairfield
Township and work in Monroe, but drove about 40 minutes before from the city
of Fairfield to the township.

?It pays the bills,? Thomas said. ?You?ve got to drive for it.?

Dave Gibbs, of Hunter, drives about 20 minutes round-trip between home and
work in Middletown. The idea of a person spending more time driving to work
than on vacation didn?t impress him much.

?People need to get a life,? Gibbs said.

Clinton McKnight of Carlisle spends about an hour every day on the road to
and from work in Sharonville. Although any more than an hour driving one way
to work would be too much for him, McKnight said he knows others have a
higher tolerance.

?There are guys at work that drive more than that — an hour and a half, an
hour and 45 minutes,? he said. ?You?ve got to do what it takes to support
your family.?

Freeman said the consequences of longer commutes are worth considering,
especially in light of ever-higher gasoline prices.

?Any time we have longer commute times because we?re just sitting on the
roadway, we?re doing two things,? he said. ?We?re consuming fuel and we?re
polluting air. We want to make sure traffic moves as smoothly as we can. It?
s a drag on efficiency, too. We?re losing time we could be spending with our
families or at work.?

The AAA Auto Club lists several options for fighting the commute, including
telecommuting or traveling during off-peak times, using public transit or
carpooling and leaving early to avoid feeling rushed.

Liz Brown, director of the Smart Growth Coalition for Greater Cincinnati and
Northern Kentucky, said commute times are likely to continue to increase
unless development patterns change. Brown said the trend in the region is
for people and workplaces to growth farther apart with limited options in
the means of getting around or the routes for doing so.

?It?s the placement of homes and the workplace,? Brown said. ?Everyone is
forced to get on the same feeder road. There?s only one route to work.
Everyone?s on that road and everyone?s stuck in traffic.

?At this point, it is somewhat irreversible until we start noticing things
like that and officials look at it differently and start making some
changes.?

Despite being ranked second in Ohio, Butler daily commute times are lower
than the national average of 24 minutes and lower than drive times on the
east coast, which posted some of the highest. New York state had the longest
average daily drive time at 30 minutes. New York City bested the nation with
an average daily commute time of 38 minutes.

Copyright 2005 - JournalNews

It's a sweltering summer evening in 2011, and 20,000 soccer fanatics stream
into Wolstein Stadium, home of Major League Soccer's newest franchise, the
Cleveland Comeback.

After a last-second victory, jazzed fans scurry through the sprinkle of a
gathering storm to nearby pubs and eateries among the new clusters of
commerce that dot a new Ohio 8 between Cleveland and Akron.

The swelter breaks with a near-Biblical torrent of rain.

Runoff accelerated by new roads and rooftops drains into the Cuyahoga River
valley.

Near dawn, an overflowing river delivers a multimillion-dollar punch to the
valley, ripping out popular trails, swamping low-lying businesses and
injecting the valley ecology with the dregs of suburban runoff.

Cuyahoga Valley National Park planners find no solace in saying, "I told you
so."

This version of the future is built on a developing present. Cleveland and
Akron grow closer as outlying suburbs along Interstate 77 and Ohio 8 host an
emerging belt of subdivisions, shopping plazas and office parks.

Multimillion-dollar road projects foster growth that brings wealth and
vitality to the hinterlands. But it's also applying pressure to the great,
green asset that's the spine of the I-77/Ohio 8 corridor, the Cuyahoga
Valley National Park.

"We see development just closing in on all points of the compass around the
park," says park Superintendent John Debo. "Home development is marching
right up to the park border."

Mushrooming growth builds a megalopolis

In a conference room at Brecksville City Hall, Mayor Jerry Hruby holds his
hands over his head and slowly brings them together.

Cleveland and Akron, he says, are "creeping toward each other. Eventually,
it will be one solid corridor of business and people."

An inexorable tide of development rolls south on I-77 into southern Cuyahoga
County, to some degree spilling from overheated office growth at I-77 and
Rockside Road in Independence.

The growth enriches outer suburbs like Brecksville, which sits just north of
the Summit County border.

Hruby says business growth has bumped income tax revenue 17 percent this
year, a figure any mayor would covet.

While Brecksville's population grows modestly, numbers for its outer-ring
neighbors are startling.

Summit County's population grew 5.4 percent from 1990 to 2000. But the 13
communities in the county's northern sector - from Richfield to Twinsburg -
grew 30 percent, Summit County planners report. They forecast an additional
19 percent jump by 2030.

"I don't know where all the people are coming from," marvels Sagamore Hills
Township Trustee Rose Mary Snell. "Really, it's amazing."

With growth comes traffic congestion, and the taxpayers' burden of fixing
it.

Snell supports the widening of Ohio 82 in her township, for several miles
east to Ohio 8. The $11 million proposal would pave the way for even more
growth in the Ohio 8/I-77 corridor.

Principal among the projects is the $165 million makeover of Ohio 8 from
Ohio 303 in Boston Heights north to Interstate 271 in Macedonia. Four
stoplights along the five-mile route will disappear by 2011, when Ohio 8 is
to become a high-speed freeway.

Ohio 8's exits already are home to a number of light-industry and office
parks, particularly in Stow and Hudson. That kind of development "will
explode and grow exponentially" when the Ohio 8 upgrade is done, says Scott
Wagner, deputy director of Summit County's Department of Community and
Economic Development.

The mix of undeveloped land and robust, "soccer mom" demographics that flank
the Cuyahoga River valley has developers pitching mega-projects.

Scott Wolstein continues to pursue the $120 million development of a Major
League Soccer stadium in northern Summit County.

The location is ideal, says sports marketer Paul Garofolo, who's working
with Wolstein.

"Soccer is played in the suburbs, and that's where our audience is,"
Garofolo says.

At Ohio 8 and the Ohio Turnpike in Boston Heights, Omni Realty Cos. of
Pepper Pike wants to build retail, restaurants and offices on 77 acres. A
group including Westlake developer Dick Jacobs proposes a Crocker Park-style
development at I-77 and Ohio 82, in Brecksville and Broadview Heights.

New growth, old problems

Clearly, developers covet areas where population and wealth are on the rise.
But growth in Summit County communities like Sagamore Hills, Macedonia and
Northfield Center is fueled by arrivals from Maple Heights, Garfield Heights
and Bedford, officials say.

Those struggling suburbs can ill afford the loss of residents. Some of the
exodus is "white flight," but most of the new arrivals from aging Cuyahoga
County suburbs want bigger yards and better schools, says Bedford Councilman
Don Saunders.

Saunders' perspective is unusual. He's also the zoning inspector in
Northfield Center.

A big shopping center sits half-vacant in Bedford because stores moved to
Macedonia, Saunders says.

"Keeping retail is tough and getting any sort of a restaurant, especially a
chain, is virtually impossible," he says of aging suburbs like Bedford.

Greg Griner, 47, moved from Garfield Heights to Sagamore Hills in 1993. His
landscaping business thrives in the growing neighborhoods, he says.

"A lot of our classmates have moved to the Nordonia area," Griner says. "It
seemed like those [Cuyahoga] communities were stepping a little bit
backwards."

Meanwhile, the hardy growth in northern Summit County is pushing into
low-lying, wetter areas along Ohio 8 that developers once ignored.

"Kaboom! Areas you would have said, 'No way!' have homes on them," Saunders
says.

The loss of low-lying lands that capture and drain runoff raises anxiety
among Cuyahoga Valley National Park officials. The park and its 22 miles of
river lowlands are "serving as the de facto storm-water drainage for a
substantial portion of developed and developing Northeast Ohio," according
to a draft report on the impact of growth on park watersheds.

Fifteen communities that touch the park, including parts of Akron, have seen
10,000 people arrive since 1990, the report says. Each community has seen an
average of 41 new homes each year since 2000.

More development means more impervious surfaces and "ever-increasing levels
of storm-water runoff," the report says.

The national park's Debo points to the July 2003 flash food that did
multimillion-dollar damage to the park and the village of Peninsula.

"Flooding episodes are becoming more damaging and more frequent," he says.

Taxpayers bear the cost of damage repair, and also dredging downriver, as
the silt of runoff settles in the river's industrial channel in Cleveland.
Ultimately, polluted runoff flows into Lake Erie, which supplies our
drinking water.

As a result, park staffers like planner Jeff Winstel pitch zoning and
land-use policies that conserve open space and protect wetlands and stream
banks to national park neighbors.

"This is one of the region's greatest assets," Winstel says. "Should we be
trashing it? There's a certain lack of logic there."

Communities move to keep a grip on growth

That's not to say the outer-ring communities between Cleveland and Akron
promote willy-nilly growth. Communities spend big bucks to save green space
and battle developers over unwanted density.

Brecksville is closing on a deal to buy 102 acres from Cleveland for $4
million. The land will be used for recreation and green space. Sagamore
Hills residents approved a new tax to generate $660,000 to buy nearly 200
acres of green space . Richfield battled McDonald's in the mid-1990s,
granting one driveway instead of two at a Wheatley Road restaurant. The
suburb has since bought about 20 acres across the street for $2 million.

"Gaining control of that indiscriminate development was worth it," Richfield
Mayor Michael Lyons says. "We are the central point in the [Cleveland-Akron]
megalopolis, but that doesn't change the fact that we're a small community
far away from two urban centers."

Officials in those two urban centers, meanwhile, fret over the continued
drift of wealth, business and population down I-77 and Ohio 8. Job
opportunities in those areas are far removed from the inner-city unemployed.

"A lot of this doesn't help Cleveland or Akron at all," says Jason Segedy,
transportation planning administrator for the agency that authorizes federal
money for road projects in Summit County.

Office parks in Stow and Richfield enable people to live farther out in the
exurbs or farm country, creating a sprawl that chews up more land, energy
resources and tax dollars in a region that has little population growth.

So planners talk more about "smart growth" - directing development to older,
underused sites and preserving green space and watersheds.

By the end of the year, Summit County planners will have a land-use plan
that encourages smart growth. The plan's impact is iffy, however, because
communities decide their own growth, not the county.

That's why national park staffers are taking the message of habitat-friendly
development directly to community leaders.

They are more receptive now than when park Superintendent Debo arrived in
1988. Communities were hostile toward a park that had taken land and
property-tax base in the valley. Most leaders now see the park as an asset,
Debo says.

Still, Debo is certain that development near the park and increasing traffic
within bodes a destructive future.

"The prognosis," he says, "is not all that good."

© 2005 The Plain Dealer

Subject	Article Headline	Date
Population	Ohio Group Aims to Lower Growth	11/18/01
Sprawl	Cincinnatti Sprawl is Severe	10/30/01
Population	Dayton and Cincinnati Becoming Single City	10/28/01
Traffic	Report: Drivers spending more time in cars	4/8/05
Sprawl	Green space losing ground	11/02/05