Coastal Planning: A Delicate Balance

When it came time to do his dissertation, Richard K. “Dick” Norton headed for the beach — but not for a vacation. Instead, Norton studied and assisted state and local government efforts to develop and implement land-use plans along the coast.

Photos courtesy of Dick Norton
Planners like Dick Norton try to strike a balance between coastal development and environmental preservation.	A North Carolina household tackles the problems emerging from building in a highly erodible area.

Now an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Norton says his involvement in North Carolina coastal management enabled him to get his feet wet in a region of special interest to many North Carolinians.

“People are drawn to sensitive areas like coastal or mountainous regions for the very reasons that make them so fragile in the first place,” Norton says. “The land use debates are really heightened.”

In 1974, the North Carolina General Assembly passed the Coastal Area Management Act, a coastal management program that required each coastal county to develop and regularly update a plan to accommodate and manage growth throughout the region. The plans were developed, but some in the environmental community questioned the thoroughness of their implementation.

“Nobody had done a systematic study to see how well these plans were being implemented since the program started 25 years ago,” Norton explains. So Norton decided to see for himself.

His ambitious research project included a detailed evaluation of 40 coastal county and municipal plans and phone surveys of 36 county and town managers and planning directors. Norton had just begun investigating the state of local planning in the present, when he suddenly found an opportunity to become a part of shaping the future.

“The state put a moratorium on the planning process because the program was becoming increasingly controversial,” Norton said. “They convened a stakeholder group of local officials, environmentalists and planning consultants to revisit the state’s planning rules. This became an ideal way for me to study in-depth what was going on just by attending these meetings.”

Although he wasn’t a formal member of the 12-person stakeholder group that met over an 18-month span, Norton was allowed to listen to and eventually contribute to the discussions. “I’d hear them talking about something that I knew from my work as a policy analyst and planner, and say: ‘You folks are talking about doing something that’s been tried in other places; and it has these strengths and weaknesses,’” Norton said. “It really was a two-way street. Sometimes I would ask them questions in an attempt to understand why they were doing things a certain way. So it was an ongoing dialogue.”

As a result, Norton had a noticeable impact on the proceedings. “I wouldn’t say that I guided the group in any way, but I do think that I made some positive contributions to the planning review team’s efforts and to the proposed rules that they worked up.” The members seemed to agree. At the final meeting in which the group’s proposals were adopted, Norton was introduced to the crowd and formally recognized for his contributions.

Norton’s dissertation advisor David Godschalk concurred with their assessment. “One of the reasons that Dick’s research was so important to the state was its time-liness,” Godschalk says. “Norton was able to tie his research into the work of that committee and really did become almost like a consultant in contributing his perspective.”

Norton’s considerable versatility didn’t hurt. While pursuing his doctorate in city and regional planning, he earned a law degree at Carolina. “Because of the importance of legal issues to the environmental field and local land use issues,” Norton explains, “I thought it would be very useful to combine the two.”

“Dick’s having a law degree was very helpful,” Godschalk agrees. “The fact that he could combine planning with a knowledge of its legal aspects really strengthened his recommendations and lent them more weight.”

Norton also found use for his master’s degrees in public policy and environmental management from Duke University and seven years of environmental policy consulting in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. It was the latter experience that solidified his interests in local planning. “Environmental policy involves issues that you really have to struggle with at the local level, and that usually means land use conflict,” Norton says. “It asks you to consider: how are you going to let different areas develop, if at all? How are you going to protect sensitive environmental resources?”

Photo courtesy of Dick Norton

While at Carolina, Norton also gained experience with two years of teaching, won three years of funding through an Environmental Protection Agency Science To Achieve Results (STAR) Fellowship, and received a dissertation fellowship award from the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy.

Considering the credentials and knowledge that Norton displayed at Carolina, it is no surprise that after successfully defending his dissertation and graduating in May 2001, he accepted a tenure-track job as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. Norton teaches in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning and plans to continue his involvement in coastal management. After all, Norton says, Michigan has a longer coastline than any other state in the country.

But even as Norton moved with his wife and their two young sons to Michigan, North Carolina remained a special place for him. “I think I got an excellent education at Carolina,” Norton said.

As a result, Norton was able to flourish at Carolina and give something back to the state. And Norton is optimistic about the stakeholder group’s impact. “I think North Carolina made some positive steps in trying to make the coastal planning program stronger,” Norton says. “I believe it’s really going to work to protect the coast in the long run.”

-Deborah Makemson

© 2002, The Graduate School, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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