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Implementing Growth Management

The Community Preservation Act

Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning Department at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst

Margaret Ounsworth Steere

Bonz and Company, Inc., a real estate advisory firm in Boston

Wendy Sweetser

Highland Communities Initiative, a program of the Trustees of Reservations

State-led growth management has been criticized as inflexible in addressing the range of situations that communities face. A second issue is that while many of the goals of smart growth can be achieved through regulation, others require funding for implementation. In 2000, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed legislation called the Community Preservation Act (CPA), an experiment in enabling communities to tax themselves to implement growth management/smart growth actions at the local level. This article examines that act as to whether it demonstrates flexibility in its application across communities in the state, analyzed according to sub/urban to rural character. The act is found to appeal to a wide range of communities for overlapping but also divergent reasons and provides a flexible method to aid communities in implementing a limited set of smart growth goals.

Key Words: smart growth • land use • policy evaluation

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