close, Congress passed the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA). Although ISTEA continued the long-standing tradition of prioritizing highways over transit, it had several features that were helpful for developing highways that were sensitive to the environmental and social context of their surroundings. These included mandating public participation in assessing regional projects, shifting more authority in the decision-making process to states and localities, and requiring regional planning organizations to approve major projects.75 While environmentalists used ISTEA and related policies to curb regional growth, many citizens and public officials continued to see highways as the only way to enhance mobility, even though these roads would likely perpetuate the congestion that was a by-product of sprawl.
Rampant development between 1980 and 2000 made farming on the urban edge more challenging in Greater Washington. Suburban encroachment, for example, raised land values and therefore property taxes for rural property owners. The agriculture industry also changed as high land costs, nuisance complaints from suburbanites, and low prices reduced the number of animal-based and commodity farming (e.g., wheat) operations. Federal price supports under the Farm Bill as well as the Conservation Reserve Program, created in 1985 to encourage farmers to take environmentally sensitive land out of production, were insufficient to sustain highly capitalized farms on the urban edge. The results of this were not favorable to the region’s farmers. The percentage of land in farms in Prince William County dropped from 27 percent in 1978 to 15 percent by 1992, and in Prince George’s from 25 percent to 17 percent.76 As farming costs continued to rise, a growing number of part-time and hobby farmers found success in operating small, specialized farms for produce and boutique items that allowed them to clear higher profit margins and depend on other work for their primary income.77
For most of the late twentieth century, public officials and environmentalists on the urban edge had been more concerned with losing the natural amenities of rural land than with farming operations per se.78 This fostered support for policies that restricted the development potential of land and offered incentives to discourage farmers from selling their land because it was too expensive to work. The tendency to see farms as land to preserve rather than businesses to support frustrated farmers because it was often associated with limiting the infrastructure they needed to support their operations and reducing the developable potential—and thereby the value—of their land as collateral to borrow funds to reinvest in their highly capitalized businesses.79
Gradually, environmentalists realized it took more than land preservation to protect farms from suburban encroachment; it also required support for farms as businesses. Montgomery established an Agricultural Services Division in 1996 (renamed the Office of Agriculture in 2016) to help them navigate local planning issues, manage local preservation programs, and provide technical assistance, Loudoun took similar measures.80 Getting the public to visit farms and buy locally also became more popular. By 2000, there were thirty farmers markets in the Washington area and several farm tours. Some localities, especially in Virginia, had success with marketing local farms as part of a rural tourism strategy including historic sites and outdoor scenic and recreational opportunities.81
The feverish growth of Greater Washington during the 1990s sowed seeds of discord for slowing it down. As metropolitan development became more diffuse, sprawl consumed rural land, degraded resources such as water and open space, drove up taxes to pay for public services further out, and failed to resolve mounting traffic congestion. These consequences forged a broad but loose coalition of civic, environmental, antitax, and broader-based groups committed to compact, transit-oriented development—the basis for the smart growth movement.82
CHAPTER 1
A River Revived
In a 2012 story for the Washington Post, Ed Merrifield reflected on his work over the previous decade as president of the Potomac Riverkeeper Network. The group was one of several civic organizations in Greater Washington devoted to curbing water pollution, enhancing recreational opportunities, and protecting river habitats. In discussing their approach to environmental stewardship, Merrifield avowed, “If it’s illegal pollution, we go after it as fast as we can to tell them you have to stop. We use all legal means necessary. We won’t back down.”1 Potomac Riverkeeper engaged in political lobbying, like many environmental groups, but was better known for providing environmental education and hands-on activities to cultivate public stewardship of the Potomac. This kind of work proved ever more valuable during the late twentieth century as sprawling development expanded the sources of pollution and encouraged environmentalists to see their work in the context of the smart-growth movement that was taking shape in the region.
Cleaning up the Potomac River was the most unifying environmental issue of Greater Washington over the past half century. In the early 1970s, the river, like many in the United States, was heavily polluted because of inadequate wastewater treatment, storm-water runoff and erosion from land development, and poor regulations on industry. In 1972, Congress passed the Clean Water Act (CWA), which featured strict water quality standards and a permitting system to govern the discharge of pollutants. Over the next decade, state and local officials built and upgraded wastewater treatment facilities to comply with federal policy, but they still had to find the political will and resources to clean up pollution—and that often depended on pressure from grassroots activists. Environmentalists were supportive of cleaning up pollution but worried that increasing treatment capacity would unintentionally spark growth in outlying areas. In the mid-1980s, the limitations of federal policies for addressing indirect or “nonpoint” sources of pollution that were not connected to sewage treatment infrastructure became more visible. Controlling storm-water runoff, for example, was a significant problem in built-up urban and suburban environments with a high percentage of impermeable surfaces such as roads and rooftops.2 As a result, citizen-led activities that tapped into, and grew, public investment in the health and welfare of the Potomac became even more important.
Through the interplay of policy making and grassroots activism, the “nation’s river” is healthier now than at any point in the past fifty years. Citizens pushed officials to clean up the Potomac primarily through community-based debates to address the environmental impact of existing development rather than seeking additional growth. In the mid-1990s, grassroots activists began to take more direct ownership of pollution cleanup. Greater political cooperation across the region supported public-private partnerships between government and environmental organizations. Environmentalists also broadened their approach from a focus on lobbying public officials to more direct activities including trash cleanups, river monitoring, and environmental education. Finally, they adopted a more holistic perspective on river cleanup to address the issues of habitat and species protection, ecological restoration, and open space preservation. The focus of local environmentalists on critiquing both the environmental and financial costs of growth reflected a critique of 1970s metropolitan America that returned with renewed force in the late 1990s under the more formal banner of smart growth. The cleanup of the Potomac, then, was an environmental success story as well as an integral part of metropolitan Washington’s smartgrowth movement.
The Potomac in Postwar America
Postwar growth took a heavy toll on the Potomac. The river, which is 383 miles long with a watershed of 14,700 square miles, knits together Greater Washington as it reaches into West Virginia and Pennsylvania. At its southern end, the Potomac has an estuary with the Chesapeake Bay.3 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Washington built a combined system to convey sewage and storm-water runoff into the Potomac. By the late 1930s, the most developed sections of the region had their own sewer systems, including the District of Columbia, the City of Alexandria, and Arlington County, and the southern third of Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties. In 1938, Washington opened a regional wastewater treatment facility known as Blue Plains to screen and remove suspended solids as
