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Rep. Kate Harper (R-61st - Montgomery County) I got into politics twenty years ago at the local level because I wanted to save some open spaces and trails in my township in Montgomery County. In those days, we were in the early days of what the Brookings Institution Report recently called the "hollowing out" of Pennsylvania. People were moving out from the City of Philadelphia and the older first generation suburbs and every day another farm field or meadow was plowed under and paved over. Every day, another forest or woodland was bulldozed, and replaced with a development --- usually named after what we had lost: "Hidden Pond," "Farm View," "Shady Lane," "The Orchards," "Gwynedd Estates." We learned to fear the surveyor's flags in the field, the colored tapes on trees, the deed transfers to entities instead of families, and we learned to show up at Planning Commission meetings, to support our local land trusts, conservancies and watershed associations, and to understand that if we couldn't buy it, it would be developed. And we then learned that if it was going to be developed, we wanted it developed in a way that respected our environment and our community. We learned about planning and zoning. We learned to "buy the best and zone the rest." And we learned that things that last, like land, are worth fighting for, and worth paying for. Montgomery County did its first open space program in 1993, pledging $100 million dollars over the next decade, and recently embarked on its second ten year open space program, earmarking $150 million for the next decade. Several of our communities have their own dedicated open space funds, and every single one of our 62 municipalities has an open space plan. Montgomery County has been a leader in the effort to contain suburban sprawl, to preserve the places that should be saved, to keep farming viable and forests sustainable, and through it all, to manage our tremendous growth and bustling economy at the same time. Our most recent County program, while continuing farm land and open space and natural habitat preservation, also places a special emphasis on encouraging our older communities to revitalize their existing parks and re-green their Main Streets, as part of their economic redevelopment strategies. In Montgomery County, we don't choose between the environment and a healthy economy. We have both. We don't choose between growth and preservation. We have both. We refuse to choose between shopping malls and family farms. We have both. I am proud to support the House Republican caucus' Growing Greener for a Generation proposal. Along with Governor Rendell, I recognize that we need to ramp up our environmental spending so that we don't miss the window of opportunity in which we find ourselves. If we don't, we need to confront reality: "Once the land is gone, it's gone forever." Essentially, we are proposing to remove the sunset date from a proposal I authored a few years ago called "Making Trash Pay," and propose to rededicate our existing $4 per ton landfill tipping fee to:
The program will provide $115 million every year for the next six years, and $110 million in the seventh year in bond money for Growing Greener's most popular programs : buying open space , acid mine cleanup, watershed protection, and money for our state parks and forests. At the end of the program, in 2033, our bond debt will be paid off, and we'll have $178 million in the bank to start the next Environmental Stewardship program. Most importantly, we should not merely have preserved Pennsylvania's enviable natural resources for the benefit of the next generation -- which is our constitutional duty as trustees of our environmental resources-- but we will have actually improved them. Really. We can leave this Commonwealth for the next generation better than we found it. Really. We can bring streams deadened by acid mine drainage back to life. We can recreate lost forests, and re-establish meadows. We can build trails and parks that bring the people back to the land they loved and young people back to Pennsylvania to raise their own families. We can encourage and support a new generation of farmers. And we can do all of this without passing the buck to our children.
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