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A new report pointing out significant weaknesses in Maryland's Smart Growth policies illustrates the critical need for Montgomery's leaders to ensure the county's development guidelines will be effective and measured.

The lessons put forth in the report could be beneficial to Montgomery's elected officials as they continue to debate controversial long-term planning efforts, including those for Gaithersburg West, White Flint and Kensington, as well as the county's growth policy, which guides the Montgomery County Planning Board's decisions on development. All of these plans are scheduled for completion within the next year.

The report, published in the latest Journal of the American Planning Association, examines the effectiveness of Priority Funding Areas, established in the late 1990s as tools to encourage growth near existing infrastructure by directing money for roads and other improvements to densely-populated areas. By and large, the report states, PFAs don't work. Statewide, the percentage of single-family homes built within Priority Funding Areas actually went down after the establishment of Smart Growth legislation, from 76 percent to 71 percent. In Montgomery County, it decreased from 84 percent to 80 percent, though that's not entirely unexpected since Montgomery was already implementing many Smart Growth principles.

The report offers several explanations for this trend, including a lack of integration between state and local plans, not enough state spending within the areas to make a significant impact, and the use of existing data, rather than projected criteria, to develop the areas.

What the report doesn't mention, but surely contributed to Smart Growth's ineffectiveness, is that developers seeking approval for subdivisions in rural areas often provide funding to mitigate the impact of the new homes. Developers have effectively been able to supplant the state as a primary source of funding for infrastructure; in exchange, they have been granted development rights in rural areas, contributing to sprawl and all its not-so-pleasant attributes, like long commutes.

Now, county leaders are considering plans for Gaithersburg West, which could bring tens of thousands of jobs to Montgomery over several decades, as well as plans for Kensington and White Flint, which could bring nearly 20,000 new homes combined.

The largest growth is expected in Gaithersburg, where Johns Hopkins University is planning significant expansion as part of a larger plan to turn the area into a "Science City." Much of that development hinges on the construction of the Corridor Cities Transitway, a mass transit project linking the Clarksburg area to Gaithersburg. In situations like this, the county needs to take extra caution when negotiating with developers and other institutions, like the university.

Smarth Growth principles are generally sound, as developing infrastructure around populated areas should be more cost-effective, but with evident holes in the state policy's implementation, any county plans now under consideration deserve an extra level of attentiveness.