Scott Wolf - Fighting for smart growth
As a Pawtucket native, Scott Wolf can recall the time when many Rhode Islanders attached a certain inferiority complex to living in their home state. Rhode Island in the ’70s, after all, was a small regional economic laggard marked by the flight of industry and the Navy’s departure. All in all, remembers Wolf, “There wasn’t much of a sense that there was a future here.”

Little Rhody has been viewed with fresh eyes for a while now, but the state’s heightened self-esteem doesn’t come without its own challenges. One particular hurdle is the need to cultivate economic development without increasing sprawl, the bland and wasteful use of land and infrastructure characterized by strip malls and big-box stores. As the executive director of Grow Smart Rhode Island ( www.growsmartri.com ), a public interest group dedicated to promoting smart growth, Wolf is on the frontlines of efforts to preserve Rhode Island’s historic character.

Local real estate prices soared as more newcomers discovered the state through the ’90s, propelling the subdivision of formerly rural tracts of land, particularly in southern Rhode Island. Little wonder, then, that a report commissioned by Grow Smart in 1999 found that more statewide land had been developed over the past 34 years than in the first 325 years of Rhode Island’s history. Wolf, though, is encouraged by the advent of more city-based development, a trend considerably aided by the state historic tax credit, and increased land protection in outlying areas. “That’s not to say we’re anywhere near where we need to be,” he cautions, but the trend toward sprawl has slowed somewhat over the last decade.

Overcoming the American proclivity for “progress” in the name of paving over nature is difficult, but it helps that Grow Smart — which grew out of a 1997 conference — has attracted considerable support from the Rhode Island establishment (its board is a veritable who’s who of local movers-and-shakers), and that Wolf is an energetic advocate whose strong progressive sensibility comes with a measure of political pragmatism.

Wolf, 52, joined Grow Smart as its first executive director, in 1999, following a long and varied career in politics. A Brown graduate, he went to work in Wash¬ington as a political analyst in the Watergate era, going on to assignments with the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, among others, before returning home. In 1988, Wolf fought the good fight, running a competitive, albeit losing, primary campaign against US Representative Fernand St Germain, who was then defeated by Republican Ronald K. Machtley. After another losing bid for Congress, Wolf served as a department head during Bruce Sundlun’s gubernatorial tenure and then returned to DC to help rally opposition to the Gingrich forces in Congress.

Wolf, a resident of Providence’s East Side, credits his parents, Irving and Ruth, who were active in community and charitable efforts, with fueling his sense of civic involvement (he recalls his mother taking him as a child to a General Assembly session on the Fair Housing Bill). Similarly, although losing two campaigns was both inspiring and devastating, Wolf says, seeing grassroots groups working hard and unselfishly on behalf of others left him feeling better about the state.

Working from Grow Smart’s office in the Foundry complex, Wolf and the organization’s staff are busily planning the “Power of Place” summit, to be held May 12 at the Rhode Island Convention Center. The gathering is meant to promote and speed the implementation of Land Use 2025, billed by Grow Smart as “a bold strategy for further revitalizing our cities and protecting our rural countryside.” The state Planning Council is expected to adopt it.

Wolf makes a persuasive case that economic development and environmental protection, rather than being conflicting goals, are mutually vital in a small state like ours.

“I really think it’s a key to Rhode Island reaching its potential,” he says, since the quality of life offered by Providence’s city ambience, combined with nearby beaches and woods, is one of the state’s biggest strengths. While the Ocean State will never have taxes as low as Florida or Georgia, or industrial sites as appealing as those in Tennessee or Ohio, “we have a combination of architectural and cultural assets that very few places, including those places, have. That’s our trump card. If we’re not vigilant about protecting that, then shame on us.” And while Rhode Island’s sprawl doesn’t approach the amount in places like Los Angeles or Atlanta, “[We] need to be a national leader because we have such a small margin of error,” Wolf says. “A place that’s brawnier can afford to be uglier. We sell ourselves on beauty, not on brawn.”
_Ian Donnis