The Institute and its members are gaining traction with our call for transportation investments that curb sprawl, strengthen city centers, and provide cost-effective and convenient means for moving people and goods. The key has been to unite progressive-minded community groups and government bodies in the newly formed Michigan Transportation and Land Use Coalition. The Coalition has already established itself as a credible and respected voice that is attracting broad support and influencing policy. Its members hail from across Michigan.

Here is a brief look at our progress in 1999:

In Traverse City, we worked with the citizen-led Coalition for Sensible Growth to advance an alternative to a proposed $300 million bypass. The Smart Roads alternative redesigns current roads, improves public transit, and promotes compact development. Hundreds of local residents turned out to support Smart Roads and address the failings of the bypass plan. In the fall, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency formally objected to the Traverse City Bypass study and called the written comments of the Institute and the Coalition "credible and deserving of a response." The EPA said the Grand Traverse County Road Commission needs to do a much better job of developing and studying alternatives, including Smart Roads.

In Petoskey, the Institute opposes a bypass that would cut through two townships and some of the state's prime farmland, leaving sprawl in its wake. The Institute hired transportation planner Rick Kuner to develop a credible alternative. Mr. Kuner led meetings and workshops during which residents shared their knowledge and sketched out ideas. The result was a report that recommended improving existing U.S. 31, linking local roads to create a new Express Route, and developing a truck route that avoids the downtown. Leaders of the townships participated in developing the plan, which has gained the support of hundreds of Petoskey residents.

In Metropolitan Detroit, we formed a new partnership with the faith-based community group Metropolitan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength and the newly formed Transportation Riders United. With our assistance, MOSES in November held a transportation forum that attracted more than 1,000 residents, along with local, state, and federal officials. MOSES unveiled a plan to fund a system of buses and trains to connect residents to jobs and revitalize Michigan's most populated region.

In the Grand Haven-Holland area, we provided organizational know-how and technical support to a new coalition interested in promoting alternatives to a 27-mile-long bypass through rural Ottawa County. The coalition consists of township governments, the Michigan Farm Bureau, the West Michigan Environmental Action Council, and others opposed to the $315 million bypass. The state-proposed bypass would carve up some of the most productive farmland in the state. Moreover, it would fail to solve congestion, causing the state to consider $270 million in additional road-widening projects.

Driving Policy in Lansing
While the Institute's project managers worked with community groups throughout Michigan, Executive Director Keith Schneider worked with state representatives interested in Smart Growth initiatives to curb sprawl by using financial incentives and by eliminating wasteful subsidies.

Their efforts prompted a flurry of activity to draft new legislation to be introduced in 2000. Among the most promising is a proposal modeled on Maryland's Smart Growth law to guide state funding for roads and economic development programs to already developed areas.

Also in 1999, the Institute helped pass a new law to guide land purchases made by the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, the state's primary business development agency. The law the first to direct a state agency to reform its land use policy encourages MEDC to use its land purchases to improve economically distressed areas in urban centers.

THE PUBLIC TRUST ALLIANCE is the Institute's effort to put community values back into public policymaking. Debates over planning and zoning have been overrun in the 1990s by the extremist notion that the public's interest in clean air and water must stop at private property lines. The balance between private interests and the public good has tipped unconscionably toward exempting profit-making ventures from community concerns about how wetland destruction, massive hog factories, and haphazard housing development will affect the quality of other people's lives.

The Institute first tackled this issue in the mid-1990s by mounting citizen challenges to a rash of court cases in which developers claimed that local and state land use rules that limited their profit-making ability were unconstitutional "takings" of private property. Working through the courts, the Legislature, and the media, the Institute helped citizens expose the fact that the developers were actually taking public property.

In 1999, the Alliance worked to marshal more grassroots momentum for balanced public policy by:

• Organizing rural resistance to the state law that allows factory livestock operations to build massive manure cesspits next to rural neighbors and drinking water wells without safety or nuisance precautions. The Institute investigated and documented 16 cases of manure spills and chronic water contamination after the Department of Agriculture ignored obvious manure mismanagement. Our investigation galvanized an ongoing grassroots push for reform. State legislators, the Michigan Auditor General, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency responded with reviews of Michigan's agriculture oversight programs.
  
  
• Assisting in an effort to reform Michigan's antiquated Drain Code. The Institute published five case studies that told how communities are forced to subsidize sprawl because the Drain Code allows local officials to shift development's stormwater costs onto longtime residents.
  
  
• Publishing fact sheets on the state's Natural River Program, which local communities can use to establish zoning standards along rivers facing heavy development pressure. The Institute will use the fact sheets in 2000 to launch a campaign for designating more state Natural Rivers.

The GrassRoots Support Center gives community groups a fighting chance by providing expert assistance on how to raise money, communicate with media, build coalitions, and develop a clear message.

Since 1997, our Grassroots Support Center has played a role in assisting dozens of public interest organizations and launching others, including:

Benzie County Recyclers, a student project to earn money for youth programs through recycling.

Coalition for Sensible Growth, a 500-member organization devoted to finding less damaging and less expensive alternatives to a new bridge over the Boardman River and the proposed Traverse City Bypass.

Coalition for Sensible Transportation Solutions, a broad-based alliance that seeks an alternative to the proposed Grand Haven Bypass in order to preserve farmland in Ottawa County.

Friends of the Betsie Bay, a new citizen group whose goal is to ensure that economic development respects natural resources along the Frankfort and Elberta shorelines in Benzie County.

Friends of the Cedar River, a citizen organization in Antrim County that won a $135,000 court-sanctioned settlement from Shanty Creek Resort to restore one of Michigan's wildest trout streams.

H₂S Committee, a community organization that established a program in Manistee County to protect citizens from exposure to toxic hydrogen sulfide from oil and gas installations.

New Designs for Growth, an alliance of local governments, civic organizations, environmental groups, and businesses managed by the Traverse City Area Chamber of Commerce that seeks to tame sprawl in five Northwest Michigan counties.

Otsego County Advocates for Tomorrow's Environment, a community growth management advocacy organization in Gaylord.

Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear, an organization protecting century-old farmsteads in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

United Growth, a partnership of local governments, universities, environmental organizations, farm groups, and businesses managed by Michigan State University and charged with protecting farmland and reviving neighborhoods in the Grand Rapids region. n

The Oil and Gas Reform Project seeks to reduce environmental and community damage from oil and gas development. From 1987 to 1998, Michigan was the most intensively drilled state in the country for natural gas.

In 1999, the Institute led a coalition of local government officials, property owners, and environmental groups to protect Ludington State Park from oil and gas drilling. This effort utilizes a 1998 law the Institute helped to pass that restricts leasing state minerals in particularly beautiful areas.

The Institute also worked to ban directional drilling beneath the Great Lakes since we are not convinced the state will protect the shoreline and the lakes from spills and over-development.

In 2000, we expect a vote on the Ludington State Park proposal and increased attention in Lansing and Washington on the proposed ban of Great Lakes drilling.