Title: Is Home Rule The Answer? Clarifying The Influence Of Dillon’s Rule On Growth Management
Headings: Is Home Rule The Answer? Clarifying The Influence Of Dillon’s Rule On Growth Management
Is Home Rule The Answer? Clarifying The Influence Of Dillon’s Rule On Growth Management
Executive Summary
Jesse J. Richardson, Jr.
Meghan Zimmerman Gough
Robert Puentes
Nonresident Senior Fellow - Metropolitan Policy Program

Content: Conversely, legislatures in home rule states can pass laws that restrict municipalities from engaging in exclusionary practices or other activities that appear to undermine important state objectives. However, strong local autonomy can complicate regional collaboration. In practice, the contention that states should afford local governments more autonomy in order to enable them to manage growth conflicts with the notion that local governments acting independently may actually hinder, rather than further, effective growth management. Regional approaches lie at the heart of successful growth management. Effective growth management almost always requires adherence to a set of broad principles designed to accommodate growth and fundamentally affect region-scale metropolitan growth dynamics. By contrast, local governments generally act in a parochial manner, or lack the geographic breadth or ability to manage growth on a meaningful scale. To that extent, additional home rule probably offers no panacea for growth management challenges. And to the extent it contributes to greater fragmentation and localism it probably hinders problem solving. In sum, localities-rather than blaming Dillon’s Rule for the shortcomings of growth management-need to reexamine their own regulations (which set the rules of the development game) and urge states to take a leadership role. Local rules-such as zoning, comprehensive plans, subdivision regulations, and infrastructure investments-play a powerful role in addressing metropolitan growth challenges.