When you get right down to it, Manchester, Md., is unlucky in its geography. Tucked away northwest of Baltimore, a half-dozen miles shy of the Pennsylvania border, its few thousand inhabitants live there because they like what small town life has to offer: neighborliness, a sense of place amid rolling fields and patches of woods, the languid pace of a farm hamlet.

Languid, that is, unless you happen to be on Main Street. Then Manchester's misfortune becomes clear: It has become a vehicular doormat. The town sits along Maryland Route 30, which in recent years has become the artery of choice for commuters who live in the subdivisions of surrounding Carroll County, for workers living in cheaper housing across the state line, and for truckers ferrying goods to and from the pretzel and potato chip manufacturers of Hanover, Pa.

The result is almost unbearable congestion. "This once quiet little farming community is no more, at least on Main Street," says David Warner, the recently retired town manager. "These days, you take your life into your hands just to back up." Homeowners don't live on Main Street these days -- it's too noisy -- so its venerable brick fronts wear the neglected look of downscale rentals. It's hard to find a restaurant open past lunchtime, since there is no point in serving dinner if customers can't cross the street to get to you. Shopkeepers worry about how long they'll be able to stay in business, since fewer and fewer locals want to visit, and rush-hour passers-by wouldn't dream of losing their place in the stream of cars.

It was precisely to get a handle on problems like Manchester's -- to find a way to reduce fall-out from untrammeled development -- that Maryland Democratic Gov. Parris N. Glendening a few years ago proposed his widely heralded growth-management plan. The idea was appealingly straightforward: to use the state's infrastructure dollars to discourage sprawl and encourage development in existing communities. Under the measure (actually a series of bills), the state no longer funds infrastructure projects outside designated growth areas, which are for the most part in established localities. Enacted in 1997 and implemented last year, Glendening's Smart Growth plan has been trumpeted nationally by environmentalists, planners, slow-growth advocates, anti-sprawl enthusiasts, and promoters of regionalism as one of the most compelling solutions yet devised by a state government for problems created by sprawl.

You would think the citizens of Manchester would agree. But they don't -- at least not entirely. That is because town leaders believe the only way to regain some of Manchester's lost community life is to build a bypass; that way, they can simply redirect the traffic around them. It's a simple solution, and there was a time when Maryland's highway department would have been happy to oblige. But not anymore. Projects like this are now subject to Smart Growth considerations, and bypasses often promote new peripheral growth. So while state officials haven't given Manchester a flat "no," they haven't embraced the idea either, which frustrates people like Warner. "Its full name is 'Smart Growth and Neighborhood Revitalization,' " he says. "Well, Main Street won't be revitalized until there is a bypass."

Lifting the Veil

Nationally, Glendening's growth policies have a certain cachet. At meetings with other governors, he invariably finds Smart Growth to be a leading topic of discussion. "I believe sprawl will be one of the powerful vote-moving issues of the next several elections," Glendening says. "People are focused, they're frustrated, and they're demanding change."

No state is likely to see more ferment on sprawl over the next few years than Maryland. That is because Glendening has pretty much guaranteed it: In essence, Smart Growth has made Maryland the first state to lift the veil from every town and county's growth agenda. Where development issues were once left to the localities to sort out on their own, Smart Growth has made them everyone's concern -- every proposed subdivision, road, school, sewer extension, and wastewater-treatment expansion can now be examined not just for its impact on the county it's located in, but its impact on neighboring counties and the state as a whole. "In the past, things happened on a piece-by-piece basis without looking at the whole framework," says Ron Young, the deputy director of the state planning office. "What we're doing now is bringing the issues up front where they have to be addressed, rather than hidden away."

In the process, Maryland has discovered it is much easier to condemn sprawl when it's left abstract. Smart Growth has particularized sprawl. By bringing into the open all the little decisions that together can create or reverse sprawl, Smart Growth has revealed a landscape filled with Manchesters, where arguments over growth and development are complex and laced with subtlety.

"It Scares the Hell Out of Me"

Nationally, the term "Smart Growth" has come to mean anything that smacks of growth control. But Glendening had something quite specific in mind: the idea that state infrastructure spending should be used to shore up existing communities and limit greenfield development. He had been headed in this direction even before becoming governor, when he ran on a platform promoting the revitalization of older communities. Once in office, Glendening found he had some leeway to shift the state's priorities -- he reshuffled school spending by executive order, for example, putting roughly 80 percent of the state's money into improving existing facilities and 20 percent into new ones, rather than the other way around. But for the rest -- roads, sewers, new state facilities, and the like -- he needed to lay out a clearer vision. He did exactly that in a package of bills that was warmly received in the state Senate but considerably watered down in the House.

The chief opposition to the proposal came not from developers but from the Maryland Association of Counties. As in many other states, planning in Maryland is a local affair; the notion that the state might tell counties where and how they could grow horrified county officials. "It scares the hell out of me and any planning director when you have to sit down with staff at the state level and convince them that something is the right thing to do," says Joe Rutter, planning director for burgeoning Howard County just outside Baltimore. "You never know what their answer is going to be, and it's millions of dollars at stake."

To the policy's backers, what Glendening wanted simply made sense. "The irony is that what we're talking about are state funds," says Democratic state Sen. Brian Frosh, who was one of the Senate's lead negotiators on the matter. "This was the genius of the bill. In a way, it's astonishing that Maryland and most other states have funded stupid growth for decades. It is only common sense that if growth or sprawl is a problem, that state funding for projects should be targeted at areas where you want growth to occur and not where you don't want growth." In the end, Glendening got a compromise: Smart Growth passed, but it left great discretion in the hands of the counties.

Jousting Over Priorities

The heart of the policy lies in two measures. One created the so-called Rural Legacy Program, which allows counties to apply for state funds to set aside undeveloped and agricultural land. The other created what are called "Priority Funding Areas," which are, simply put, where the state has agreed to put its money. Existing cities and towns automatically became Priority Funding Areas; so did all the areas inside the state's two beltways around Baltimore and Washington. But the legislation also allowed counties to designate whatever additional land they chose as Priority Funding Areas, with specific -- but not especially restrictive -- qualifying criteria.

Not surprisingly, this leeway troubles environmentalists and other backers of growth management. "The legislation, as high-minded as it is, is not going to be successful if the counties take the view that these Priority Funding Areas should cover most of their land," says Al Barry, a planning consultant and former assistant planning director in Baltimore. As it happens, only some of the counties have done so at least, so far. The counties' initial priority funding maps began arriving at the Maryland Office of Planning last fall, and they range widely, from narrowly targeted growth plans to just what Barry fears: a handful of plans essentially declaring the entire county open for growth.

The state planning office is not entirely toothless in such cases. Though Smart Growth's opponents did require the state to accept a county's territory for growth, the law also allows the planning office to "comment" when it thinks counties have stepped out of bounds. Those comments are bound to affect other state agencies' critical decisions about siting and infrastructure. Legally, these agencies can ignore the planning office, just as the counties can. But that is not a good way to win political favor in Annapolis. After the November elections, Glendening replaced the heads of two state agencies, in part, he says, because he "was not convinced they had taken the leadership in promoting Smart Growth up and down the bureaucracy."

Bringing Friction Out in the Open

One thing Smart Growth clearly will not do is make the politics of development in Maryland less contentious. Not long after it passed, for instance, Glendening canceled a long-proposed development known as Chapman's Landing, in rural Charles County along the Potomac River south of Washington. There were legitimate reasons for doing so, but to those interested in development the Democratic governor was simply pandering to environmentalists. "The governor had lauded that project many times, and people in the permitting process at the state level said it was the most thorough application and one of the best land-use plans they'd ever seen," says John Kortecamp, executive vice president of the Home Builders Association of Maryland. "Yet in the face of strong opposition by some environmental groups, it's gone. You get the feeling that everything's up for grabs, depending on the political winds that blow."

Charges like this are inevitable given the program's goals: Smart Growth is explicitly designed to favor older, established communities (whose voters tend to elect Democrats) at the expense of undeveloped suburban territory (whose voters tend to elect Republicans). So, for instance, when the state cited Smart Growth in its decision not to move the state police crime laboratory from the older Baltimore County suburb of Pikesville to the newer Carroll County suburb of Sykesville, the Republican leadership of Carroll County contended the decision had nothing to do with Smart Growth policies. "With the state and its funding decisions, it's always political," says Benjamin Brown, a county commissioner at the time.

All this is inescapable, not just because development issues are always political, but because at its heart Smart Growth is about creating friction between competing interests -- or, more precisely, about making clear where the points of friction lie. For Smart Growth is about more than simply finding a way to decide whether or not Manchester should get a bypass. It is essentially a plan to reorder how people live: By changing the way state government spends its resources, it asserts, we can reverse the course of the past half century of development -- we can make cities and older suburbs, all the places that people have been leaving for decades, attractive again. By fixing up schools in the right places, putting roads in the right places, and funding water and sewer improvements in the right places, Smart Growth says, the state can affect where people live, work, and create jobs.

This is untrod ground, and there are plenty of critics who believe that Smart Growth will fail, that it cannot change a market that has generally favored movement outward toward less densely settled areas. "Those plans," says Sam Staley, director of the Urban Futures Program for the market-oriented Reason Public Policy Institute, "are based on certain assumptions and fore-casts about population, household size, and preferences for transportation. But we don't know enough about the way people move or what they want to do to be able to make those kinds of forecasts in the way that Maryland's plans presume."

Ron Kreitner, the state planning director, thinks the critics are wrong. "Look," he says, "we've been affecting the market for decades by saying that regardless of the costs we'll be there to provide schools, roads, sewers and other community infrastructure support. That has impacted the market tremendously over the decades. Smart Growth is really a return to a discipline we'd gotten away from with regard to decisionmaking on public resources -- shared community resources."

"A First Big Step"

What Maryland is about to discover-- and the rest of the country has an opportunity to watch -- is just how politically complicated that discipline can be. As John Frece, Glendening's special assistant for Smart Growth, says, "These aren't easy decisions. There will always be those gray areas: One person's sprawl is another person's economic development." Developers have noticed, for instance, that while the state is essentially calling for denser living, neither it nor the counties seem entirely comfortable with the idea. If you want some areas to be protected, the development community has begun to argue, then you have to embrace the flip side: Other areas will have to accept denser development. But that will most likely mean facing down opposition from residents who don't want their communities to change. "All of this works if government has the backbone to stand up with a developer against communities that say, 'If I have to spend one more cycle at the light, then I'm against that field behind my house being developed,' " says John Colvin, a suburban Baltimore developer and member of the state planning commission. "I don't think local government has figured out that the key component of Smart Growth is supporting appropriate development against local opposition from people who just arrived and want to pull up the drawbridge behind them."

Both sides agree that it's too soon to reach conclusions about the policy's impact -- too much has yet to happen before anyone can decide what Smart Growth will do to the Maryland landscape. "What we have done is a first big step in the direction of beginning to change 50 years of policy that has subsidized and supported sprawl," says state planning official Young. "What has been done in Maryland at this point is not the answer to sprawl. It's not the savior alone of the cities or the final protector of open space. It is a real big step in the direction of doing all those things, but it's just a beginning. Has it solved every problem? No. Is every problem solvable? Maybe not. But because some bad things happen, is the program going to be a failure? No."

Rob Gurwitt is a staff correspondent for Governing magazine, where a version of this article first appeared.