Text of Report Urging Full Legal Status for the Metropolitan Regional Council

Following is the text of a report on the future of the Metropolitan Regional Council, made public yesterday by the Special Committee on Metropolitan Governmental Affairs of the Regional Plan Association:

Findings and Recommendations of the Committee:

The Metropolitan Regional Council, established in 1956 and including in its membership the top elected offielals of all the counties and major cities of the tri-state New York metropolitan region as well as a number of its smaller municipalities, represents the important and promising beginnings of a leadership institution indispensable to the growth, prosperity and well-being of this tri-state metropolitan region.

This metropolitan region is already in the midst of several urgent and self-evident difficulties. These difficulties–among which the transportation problem is presently the most obvious and the most immediately urgent--are the product of growth and change in the region's economy and society. The region does not yet have adequate leadership institutions for the solution of its present and future problems.

The Metropolitan Regional Council has demonstrated its great potentialities for becoming such an official regional leadership institution. (The Regional Plan Association has a similar potential as a significant private leadership institution.)

The committee, therefore, recommends:

First: that the Metropolitan Regional Council acquire full legal status as a regional agency. Such status would be conferred by (1) the enactment of identical statutes in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York establishing the council as a tri-state agency, and (2) the approval in the United States Congress of an interstate compact recognizing the council as a regional agency.

Second: that the council improve its organization to carry out these new leadership responsibilities, especially by adding to its present resources a small full-time, talented and experienced secretariat.

Third: that the council, when thus possessed of full legal status and a capable staff, focus its attention and its energies increasingly (1) upon the discovery and identification of the region's potential for growth, (2) upon the precise formulation of regional goals which will maximize the usefulness of the region's human and material resources, (3) upon the careful analysis of the region's problems, and (4) upon the development of specific recommendations for solutions to the region's difficulties.

The Future Growth of the Metropolitan Region

The tri-state New York metropolitan region is the nation's premier metropolitan area.

The region's continued health and vigor as a social and economic community is a national asset of great importance. Any decline in its effective functioning would be a national liability of equal significance.

The region ranks first in population and employment among the nation's metropolitan areas. It is the headquarters of the nation's economic system. It contains the nation's greatest port. It is a leader in the nation's cultural and intellectual life. And it has the unique honor of serving as the capital of the United Nations.

All these make the region a center of international leadership, an object of attention to the world at large, its social, economic and governmental effectiveness representing special share of the prestige of the United States among all the nations.

But the tri-state New York metropolitan region can maintain its position as the nation's top rank region only by continued growth.

The region's sheer population growth is assured by the inexorable forces of population increase now in motion and by the steady migration of population into the nation's metropolitan areas. These increases can now be confidently projected for at least the next two decades. By 1965, the region's population will increase from its present 16,000,000 to 17,400,000; by 1970, the region's population will most probably reach 18,300,000 by 1975, 19,100,000; by 1980, it will approach 20,000,000.

Leadership Needs Cited

The leadership of the region is not assured by population growth alone.

The region must grow also as an effective economic and social community. It must provide the economic and social base upon which can be built the careers and opportunities, the expanding choices, amenities and varied satisfactions which will be demanded by the increasing millions of people from a flourishing metropolitan civilization. These requirements cannot be met by a region which is standing still, waiting upon time to provide the answers. Instead, the region must find leadership institutions which can guide and accelerate the optimum use of the region's resources and opportunities.

The tri-state metropolitan region stands in a changing competitive relationship to other metropolitan regions in the United States. Its continued place as the naton's premier metropolitan region cannot be taken for granted.

The opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway presents strong possibilities that the ports of the Great Lakes and of Canada will increasingly challenge the primacy of the ports of this region.

The future role and status of the tri-state metropolitan region within the complex megalopolis now emerging along the Atlantic seaboard–a great belt extending from Portland, Me., to Norfolk, Va.--is surrounded by uncertainties. The tri-state region’s rank and function in this great seaboard urban community will depend upon the promptness with which the region establishes an official regional leadership institution and upon the imagination with which that leadership defines the region’s role and effectuates it.

The leadership status of this region is also challenged by the rise of other metropolitan concentrations in the Middle West, the Southwest and on the Pacific Coast.

Without leadership institutions alert to these great forces of change and competition, the tri-state metropolitan region risks the loss of its first-rank position in the nation and the world.

Problems of the Metropolitan Region

The present difficulties of the region are a product of growth and change in the region's economy and society. Only if they remain unsolved will they become an index of the region's decline.

Most of the region's problems are the consequences of technological revolutions, of higher incomes and standards of living for the people of the region, their rising expectations and the initial impacts of a metropolitan population upsurge which will continue. These forces will compel extensive changes in many present regional arrangements.

Mass transportation facilities–commuter railroads, buses, subways–present the clearest example of a current crisis.

The region's economy is now built upon assumptions concerning the speedy and economical transportation of persons within the region–assumptions which the existing transportation systems can no longer sustain. Nor is the problem merely one of meeting current deficits in facilities and finances. New and additional facilities are imperative requirements for regional growth.

Council Is Suggested

The region has no leadership institution equipped to solve the mass transportation problem in any long-range and comprehensive sense. The local governments of the region cannot grasp the problem whole. The three state governments have neither the necessary machinery nor sufficient incentives to give the problem the required priority. Improvised ad hoc regional commissions have not been able to move the problem beyond the stalemate of limited and controversial recommendations.

The way out of the mass transportation problem is not likely to be found except through the work of a broadly based permanent leadership institution for the region. Such an institution, possessing the legal and representative status to make its proposals both authoritative and acceptable to the regional community, should be built upon the beginnings already represented by the Metropolitan Regional Council.

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

As the region continues to grow, as the population upsurge continues and as the economy of the region responds to all the changes brought by population increase, by the continuous redistribution of the region's economic activities and by the complex dynamics of the national economy, the region will be confronted by a series of problems requiring regional action.

The "total transportation" network of the region will be one of these. Control over air and water pollution will be another. The equitable apportionment of the region's water supply, the growing scarcity of recreation space and facilities, the changing patterns of land use within the region and other difficulties of comparable complexity will crowd the regional agenda.

Most of the region's difficulties are multiplied by intraregional rivalry which, since it hurts the whole region, does injury to the region's localities also.

The mass transportation problem, for example, is made more difficult by rivalry between separate parts of the region, the sectional failing to perceive that inadequate transportation for the whole region forces great and inefficient changes in land use throughout the region. The fortunes of the region are interlocked; no locality can long secure advantages from a region in decline; the growth of the local communities is tied closely to the growth of the whole region.

The region greatly needs an institution which can conciliate intraregional rivalries. The Metropolitan Regional Council represents such an institution.

The difficulties of the region are 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 mass transportation unless the region establishes and develops 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’s Need For Leadership

The fundamental liability of the tri-state New York metropolitan region as it faces a decade of growth and change is its lack of a fully developed regional leadership institution which has the status and the capacity to formulate effectively the goals of regional growth, to define clearly the alternative solutions for regional problems which inhibit the growth of the region and to make specific recommendations of public policy to insure the region's optimum development.

The region has several specialized regional institutions of great value. The Port of New York Authority, the Interstate Sanitation Commission, the Palisades Interstate Park Commission and the Waterfront Commission are examples of regional instituting with specialized assignments developed in response to urgent problems of the region. These institutions have by their performance demonstrated the great values of regional agencies, and their records point the way to the creation of a general-purpose regional institution with a broader leadership assignment.

The region also has several regional citizen and professional associations of great usefulness. Among these, the Regional Plan Association is the oldest, the most consistently active and has the widest range of interests. These nongovernmental associations have a highly important function to perform in the future growth of the region, But they 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.

The Metropolitan Regional Council

The most important single step toward the development of an adequate regional leadership institution for the New York region has been the establishment of the Metropolitan Regional Council.

The council, a voluntary association of more than thirty leading local government officials in the counties and cities of the region, is the sole institution in the region now capable of undertaking to speak for the whole region and to define the public interest of the whole region on the full range of the region’s problems.

The members of the council are elected public officials, accustomed to the responsible conduct of complex public affairs, their responsibilities as local, county, and city officials and their individual responsiveness to the constituencies which elect, insure that their views will be sensitive to the distinction between matters which are local in character and those which are regional In their consequences.

The successful functioning of the council is, therefore, impressive evidence of the emerging recognition that the region as a community does in fact exist, and that this regional community needs such a general leadership institution as the council represents.

The Metropolitan Regional Council, in its two years of work, has pursued modest but highly important regional goals.

Local officials from the counties and cities of the region have learned to work together on regional problems which they have experienced and identified as regional while serving as responsible local officials. They have thus learned to define the regional dimensions of their local responsibilities, while working as members of a regional institution.

The council also represents, in its membership composition, a plan for the representation of local communities in a regional leadership institution.

The members of the council have found effective ways for performing its work through the organization of permanent and special committees.

The council has defined its assignment as one of broad regional leadership, concerned with the analysis and solution of any problem recognized as regional in its character by the members of the council.

These are the simple but indispensable beginnings of a governmental leadership institution for the region.

Strengthening The Regional Council

The continued growth and evolution of the Metropolitan Regional Council into a fully developed general-purpose regional leadership institution is the immediate common-sense, high-priority objective for the tri-state New York metropolitan region.

The council should perceive itself as the region's central leadership institution. As such it would be responsible for defining, for extensive public discussion, the dimensions of the region's possible growth. Its responsibilities would also include proposing the immediate and long-range goals for accomplishing regional growth, appraising the region's resources for (and the barriers to) the desired regional development and recommending the required courses of action for the optimum growth of the region.

The council would thus bring to the consideration of the opportunities and problems of the region the kinds of leadership resources which are now available to many local communities, to the states, and the national government, but which are still lacking in the regional community.

In performing this leadership function of systematic attention to the growth and to the problems of the region, the council will be strengthening both the local communites and the regional community.

The local communities can survive and grow only if the regional community can establish the conditions essential to the region's continued growth. Unless the region is made a viable economic and social community, all the local communities will share in the region's decline.

The residential suburbs cannot prosper unless the commuter transportation problem is solved for the whole region, nor can they maintain their desired land-use patterns in the midst of regional decline or even a regional stalemate on any crucial issue.

The satellite cities cannot escape the costs to them of regional failures in transportation or any other significant regional crisis; their economic and social well-being is tied to the economic and social health of the whole region.

Nor can the central city perform its essential functions effectively except as the region is itself vigorous in its growth.

All the localities in the region are in the same boat. Their opportunities and risks are shared, not separate.

Legal Status for the Regional Council

The Metropolitan Regional Couricil should now seek a charter which will give it full and effective legal status as a continuing leadership institution for the region.

This new and important legal status for the Council should be accomplished by:

First: The enactment in the states of Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York of identical statutes establishing the Metropolitan Regional Council as a tri-state agency with responsibility for considering the conditions for growth and the solutions to the major problems of the region.

Second: Approval by the Congress of the United States of a tri-state compact establishing the council for the above purposes.

Duties and Responsibilities of the Regional Council

The Metropolitan Regional Council should be given by these statutes the following duties and responsibilities:

First: To define the conditions essential to the continuing and optimum growth of the region, by: (1) analyzing the resources and opportunities of the region for such growth; (2) inspiring and encouraging the systematic attention of others to the growth of the region–including the attention of the national government, the three state governments, the other regional agencies, the local governments in the region, and the associations of citizens and other nongovernmental groups and institutions in the region; (3) formulating immediate and long-range goals for the growth, prosperity and well-being of the region.

Second: To identify and analyze the urgent and speclfic problems with confront the region and threaten its growth, by: (1) conducting or arranging for studies of such regional problems as the council itself identifies; (2) responding to requests for the conduct of regional studies from agencies of the national government, governors or legislatures, regional agencies, local governments, or nongovernmental groups; (3) responding to requests from such groups for advice on regional problems; (4) distributing the results of all such council studies to the public officials and other leaders in the region.

Third: To recommend solutions in public policy terms for regional problems, by: (1) presenting council proposals to national, state, regional, and local government agencies; (2) presenting council proposals to the public for discussion at public hearings held by the council, for appraisal by citizen groups, and for other forms of consultation with the regional public.

Fourth: To assist the local governments in the region in accomplishing regional goals and solving regional problems, by: (1) mobilizing cooperatively the technical and professional resources of the Region, including those of its local governments and its regional agencies, for such assistance: (2) facilitating and promoting the use of intraregional cooperative agreements and arrangements among local, state, regtonal and national government agencies; (3) providing research and technical, advisory and other services to local governments in the region.

To carry out effectively these duties and responsibilities for the region, the Metropolitan Regional Council should seek authorization in the enabling statutes: (1) to employ a small, high-quality staff to serve as the council's secretariat; (2) to secure the loan of temporary staffs, from time to time, from the local government members of the council, from state, regional, and national government agencies, and from other sources; (3) to enter into contracts with such agencies for research and other purposes; (4) to receive and use financial and other grants-in-aid for carrying out the council's work from national, state or regional agencies, from the local government members of the council, from private foundations and other proper sources.

Membership of the Regional Council

The membership of the council should continue to consist of elected public officials of the highest rank in their respective local jurisdictions, serving ex officio as members of the council.

Membership on the council should be determined as follows Membership on the council should be determined as follows: 1) each county of the region in New Jersey and New York should be represented on the council by its highest ranking elected official; (2) each municipality in the region, having a population of 50,000 or more and the Town of Greenwich, Conn., should be separately represented on the council by its highest ranking elected official; (3) additional memberships on the council may be authorized through by-laws of the council to permit, for example, the direct representation of a group of municipalities in a suburban county.

The council should invite the attendance at its sessions of four representatives designated by the Governor of each state: one designee representing the state's executive branch, two representing the houses of the Legislature, and one representing the public.

The council should also invite the attendance at its sessions of representatives from national and regional governmental agencies, under rules to be specified by the council, and attendance at its public sessions of citizens and representatves of nongovernmental groups.

Progress in metropolitan thinking and action in other urban center of this country rests on vigorous and continued cooperation between political, business, labor, educational, and civic leaders. The tri-state New York region needs the same kind of cohesive activity. While we feel that the membership of the Metropolitan Regional Council should, as suggested, be official, we urge that every step be taken to develop joint thinking and action on the broader basis.

Committees of the Regional Council

The council should continue to develop and improve its use of committees. The council committees should consist of at least two general types:

(1) standing committees of the council, composed of members of the council; (2) special committees of the council, composed of some members of the council and (a) representatives or national, state, or regional agencies; (b) representative citizens of the region, or representatives of nongovernmental groups in the region; (c) experts in the subject matter being considered by the committee.

The council should arrange for and encourage the regular appearance at its own public hearings, and at those held by its committees, of representatives from the citizen groups of the region, the region's professional associations, and other leadership groups.

Boundaries of the Metropolitan Region

The Council should review the question of the boundaries of the region.

Dutchess County, New York, should be added to the region, since it meets the relevant tests for membership and is generally regarded as being clearly within the regional community.

The council should seek authorization in its enabling statutes to extend the boundaries of the region by mutual agreement between the council and the communities seeking admission to membership. The boundaries of the region will undoubtedly be affected by the future growth of the region.

The Regional Council and Mass Transportation

The above recommendations are intended to establish the Metropolitan Regional Council as a general-purpose, representative and responsible leadership institution for the region, capabla of leading and guiding the region toward its optimum growth.

The leadership opporunities of the council in the urgent present crisis in mass transportation provide an example of the important role which a council for the region, composed of elected local public officials, may perform.

The council should be charged with the responsibility to review and evaluate, and to make public recommendations concerning any and all proposals for the improvement of the region's mass transportation facilities.

The council should be given an official advisory status to any regional agency hereafter established to study or to administer the region's mass transportation system.

This function for the council in the field of mass transportation should serve as a model for the council's duties and responsibilities in all other present and emerging problems of the region. The council should regularly be given, and should itself anticipate and assume its responsibilities for, an official advisory role--whether the problem be the region's total transportation system, the need for recreational space and facilities, the necessities of air and water pollution control, the allocation of water supply, land use patterns in the region, or some other regional need or difficulty.

But it needs to be emphasized and re-emphasized that solutions to these specific problems of the region, urgent as they now are or may become, are less crucial to the long-range future of the region than is the careful shaping and development of the Metropolitan Regional Council as the central general-purpose official leadership institution of the tri-state metropolitan region.

Wallace S. Sayre, Chairman

William H. Baumer

Amory H. Bradford

Edwin S. Burdell

Thomas H. Carroll

Robert W. Dowling

Luther Gulick

H. Bruce Palmer