Land Use Planning
Regional Service Center Methodology and Data for Determining Regional Service Centers
History & Background:
The late 1960's and 1970's were a period of rapid suburbanization of the population in Maine as well as elsewhere in the US. In the late 1970's the State Planning Office first began to examine changing development patterns in Maine. The research led to identification of primary and secondary centers and of communities that had become suburbs of those centers. It also led to the definition of "community" as something larger than a municipality and identification of 36 small socio-economic regions, or "extended communities" made up of region centers, suburbs and outlying rural communities.
By the mid 1990s the State Planning Office had begun to accumulate evidence that sprawl had become a much more widespread ocurrence in Maine and was having major costs and policy implications. Indeed, sprawl was often found to be driven by fiscal and policy decisions of state government. SPO began renewed research into the changing patterns of development in Maine and the costs that sprawl had incurred. The research began by identifying the communities that served as regional centers and examining the shifts in population and development away from the centers into lesser developed or undeveloped areas.
Agencies (governmental and non-governmental) became interested in reducing the effects of sprawl and strengthening the regional service centers as a strategy for building strong local economies and communities throughout Maine. Having little else to turn to for identifying centers, the research conducted at SPO was the only systematic analysis of regions. It became the basis for targeting resources to certain communities. The Maine legislature created a Task Force on Regional Service Centers to examine the problems and characteristics unique to them and recommend strategies for strengthening centers.
In 2001, with several state agencies either targeting the regional centers identified in the SPO research or interested in using the list of centers, the Maine legislature felt it important to recognize regional service centers formally, and enacted legislation requiring rulemaking.
Rule: Chapter 220, List of Regional Service Centers
In the spring of 2002 the Maine State Planning Office began the rulemaking process. A list of regional service centers was created according to the proposed methodology based on data available at the time and used for illustration when the rulemaking process was underway.
The Rule was officially final on October 17, 2002. It requires the SPO to prepare a list and to periodically revise and update the list of regional service centers based on currently available data from generally accepted sources, including but not limited to the United States Bureau of the Census.
