Official Agency To Plan Growth Of Region Urged

Report Asks Legal Status For Metropolitan Council As Goverment Adviser

A proposal that the Metropolitan Regional Council receive “full and effective” legal status was put before the Regional Plan Association yesterday.

The association’s special committee on metropolitan government affairs urged in essence that the council, now a voluntary group, be transformed into the official planning and steering agency for all government in the region.

It warned that the future of the region hinged on the development of such an “official leadership institution with the capacity to foresee the region’s difficulties, to develop alternative solutions and to lead the way for the region, step by step, from specific recommendations to official action to firm accomplishment.”

The region embraces twenty-two counties in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

Congress Charter Urged

The report was produced after a three-month study by a committee of eight community leaders, headed by Prof. Wallace S. Sayre of Columbia. It found that no local or state government or ad hoc commission was equipped to provide the leadership the council could give.

But it stressed that the council, in which top elected officials of the area now cooperate informally, must be chartered by Congress and the respective state Legislatures "to make its proposals both authoritative and acceptable to the regional community."

In urging an official dual planning-steering role for the council, the Sayre Committee visualized recommendations emerging that would carry added weight at the national, state, regional and local levels.

Meeting Set for Today

It said that difficulties confronting the region were "already visible to many of its leaders, but the future dimensions of these problems, even within the coming decade, will be much greater, more complex and more critical than the present crisis in transportation."

Harold S. Osborne, president of the Regional Plan Association, has called a meeting of his board for noon today at the Century Club, 7 West Forty-third Street, to consider the report. The association is a voluntary citizen group.

If approved, the report will be presented by the association as its official position to the Metropolitan Regional Council at a public hearing Tuesday afternoon at City Hall. The hearing is the last of a series the council has held through the region to obtain a public expression on what its future should be.

Karl Metzger, chairman of the special council committee considering the problem, found the Sayre report "very interesting." Mr. Metzger is director of the Middlesex County (N. J.) Board of Freeholders. He said all proposals advanced at the hearings would receive "serious study."

Other members of the Sayre committee were:

* W.H. Baumer of Westfield, N. J., assistant to the president of Johnson & Johnson, medical supply manufacturer.

* Amory H. Bradford of New York, vice president of The New York Times.

* Edwin S. Burdell of New York, president of Cooper Union.

* Thomas H. Carroll of Darien, Conn., vice president of the Ford Foundation.

* Robert W. Dowling of New York, president of the City Investing Company.

* Dr. Luther Gulick of New York, former City Administrator who directs the Institute of Public Administration,

* H. Bruce Palmer of Madison, N. J., president of the Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Company.

Named Last October

The Regional Plan Association, which has operated in the region since, 1929, named the Committee in' October in an effort to get an independent appraisal of area governmental requirements.

Dr. Sayre, who is Professor of Public Administration at Columbia, put at the committee’s disposal the full resources of the Metropolitan Project, a five-year program he is conducting at the university.

In its primary finding, the committee held that the Regional Council "represents the important and promising beginnings of a leadership institution indispensable to the growth, prosperity and well-being of this tri-state metropolitan region."

In asking that it be given "full legal status," the committee said the council should employ "a small, full-time, talented and experienced secretariat."

This staff, it was said, would enable the agency, still made up of top-elected officials, to perform these functions:

* Fix the region’s potential for growth.

* Make a precise formulation of regional goals.

* Analyze regional problems in detail.

* Develop specific recommendations for solutions.

The seventeen-page final report said only continued growth could assure that the region maintained its social and economic leadership. The lack of adequate area authority to deal with metropolitan problems like transit, air and water pollution and land use, to name but three, was said to threaten that growth.

"The present mass transportation crisis," the report said, "is but a foretaste of the difficulties which will soon and increasingly press upon the region."

This warning came as Governor Rockefeller warned that metropolitan problems constituted a "major challenge of today." Noting the rail commuter crisis, he termed it every bit as serious as the state's financial difficulties.

The Sayre Committee said the fortunes of the region were interlocked, that "no locality can long secure advantages from a region in decline."

Even organizations like the Regional Plan Association, it was said, "cannot realize their full potential of usefulness unless there also exists an official regional agency, composed of elected public officials to which the citizen associations may present their proposals."