Testimony of Joe Oliva, Communications and Outreach Director of GrowSmart Maine in support of LD 1247, An Act to Restrict Municipal Ordinance Requirements Regarding Housing Developments
April 25, 2025
Senator Curry, Representative Gere, and Honorable Members of the Joint Standing Committee on Housing and Economic Development,
My name is Joe Oliva and I am the Communications and Outreach Director for GrowSmart Maine. We are a statewide non-partisan non-profit organization helping communities navigate change in alignment with smart growth. We advocate for comprehensive policies and funding for smart growth practices and outcomes.
We partner with Build Maine to co-host a transparent crowd-sourcing of policy proposals that has drawn together over a hundred people from across Maine and beyond. Policy Action 2025 follows Policy Action 2023 from the 131st Legislature. Each session we strive, “to address barriers to and create incentives for equitable, sustainable growth and development that strengthens downtowns and villages of all sizes while pulling development pressure away from productive and open natural areas.”
This is the corrected version of the testimony already submitted by GrowSmart Maine. Our support for this bill is contingent on the presence of language that specifies designated growth areas as the target of the proposal, in addition to areas with sufficient sewer and water infrastructure.
GrowSmart supports proposals that direct development towards places where it makes sense in the long term, and LD 1247 would significantly lower barriers to infill-oriented development patterns once common in Maine communities. Infill development in areas with sufficient infrastructure costs less for the municipality to service for the same population compared to sprawling development, serving a huge fiscal benefit to the municipality. Living in these areas also has potential to reduce household budgets for things like commuting, and protects open and working lands.
Through their comprehensive plans, many communities have already identified the areas in which they want to see growth, only to run into minimum lot size ordinances that limit the use of this strategy. . LD 1247 instantly alleviates those barriers without municipalities undertaking the process of changing their zoning.
One of the core tensions within the current scramble to meet the state’s housing needs is balancing protection and access to the natural resources that define Maine communities with sufficient places in which people feel secure, that they belong, and where they can thrive.
Addressing the housing crisis must be done without undoing the good work to address the climate crisis, and without creating the next crisis of access to farmland and food. This bill will protect productive farmland and forests from sprawl by once again allowing traditional compact village development patterns to continue in places where the State has already set that goal.
We urge passage of LD 1247 because it unlocks housing development in places where it makes sense while protecting Maine’s iconic open spaces and productive farmlands that, once developed, will never come back.