Editor’s note: This is a response to a recent commentary about the Minneapolis 2040 Comprehensive Plan, which argued the future of comprehensive planning is at stake in ongoing litigation over the plan.
Supporters of the Minneapolis 2040 plan like Alex Schieferdecker are understandably upset that the 2040 plan has been successfully challenged in court.
But the court ruling is not “bizarre,” as he calls it, and the sky is not falling on all comprehensive planning. There is no need for legislators to adopt a special exemption in state law for city planners, as he suggests.
We are lucky in Minnesota to be one of the few states — especially in the Midwest — to have strong state environmental protection laws. Most of these laws were passed in the 1970s with broad, bi-partisan support. While we’ve seen plenty of environmental missteps in the last 50 years, on the whole, these state laws — along with foundational federal statutes like the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act — have served us well. It’s hard to imagine what our lakes and rivers, forests or cities would look like without environmental regulation.
The law at issue in the case challenging Minneapolis’s 2040 plan is the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act, or “MERA”, one of the state’s most important environmental protection statutes. MERA provides every person the right to challenge activities and decisions that will result in harm to the state’s environmental resources. In the 50 years since its passage, MERA has been used to protect everything from wetlands to the armory building in downtown Minneapolis. It has helped reduce hard-to-regulate pollution from agricultural run-off and halted excessive noise pollution from gun ranges. It gives each of us the right and the responsibility to challenge bad decisions that will lead to what the law calls “pollution, impairment or destruction” of the environment.
The state’s highest court, in the 2040 plan case, correctly decided that comprehensive plans — just like any other governmental decision that could result in pollution, impairment or destruction of the environment — are subject to challenge under MERA. This makes sense. As the court noted, comprehensive plans have “the direct effect of controlling a city’s land use development” by limiting and dictating zoning decisions. If what is allowed in a comprehensive plan will cause pollution, MERA provides an avenue to challenge the plan.
— Kevin Reuther, Minnesota Reformer