I'm not anticipating any real problems at this point. For years, efforts to find a legislative antidote to sprawl bogged down because of irreconcilable differences among the powerful interest groups involved - builders, conservationists, municipal officials and farmers. This time, after long and painstaking negotiations, legislators were able to get each group to sign off on an approach to the problem. Polls show that voters in fast-growing areas, in the Philadelphia region as well as around the nation, are fed up with traffic congestion and disappearing countryside. In many places, residents have even voted to raise their taxes to take open land off the market and preserve it.
More people are concerned about the impacts of growth.
And for the first time, we were able to bring the interest groups together to agree, and still do something effective. Getting consensus was not easy. Negotiators worked through the weekend to tamp down concerns about some provisions in the bills. One issue in the House bill was language that townships believed would have required municipalities that enact cooperative zoning to provide housing for all income levels in every municipality. That language would have exposed officials to more lawsuits from builders, the townships feared.