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Interest in land use management
Q: No, that was very thorough. It covered several questions. I do want to go back just a second, though. You earned your Juris doctorate and then returned from Europe and earned a masters in urban planning. Reading your resume, it seemed to me that there was a big jump there. Was there something that had happened before going into the military or during the time you were in the military that encouraged an interest in land use management? Can you explain that?
MR. REILLY: Well, I was always interested in land and I have often tried to figure out why that was - whether it was because we had a farm early on and I spent a lot of time there, or because my father was interested in land. We used to look at land, he used to think about buying it - he liked to think about buying a lot more property than he ever bought. I can remember looking at beautiful oceanfront property with him near Point Judith in Rhode Island.
I honestly don't know where the motivation came from, but I did my law school thesis on land reform in Chile, with Charles Harr. I worked one summer on a book with a team of people headed by Lawrence Wylie, who was then C. Douglas Dillon Professor of French Civilization at Harvard. The book we wrote was called Chanzeaux: Village d'Anjou, published by Harvard University Press in English and by Gallimard in French. Basically, my part of it was to write about land tenure, agricultural law, the passage of property to children, credit systems, how the French were trying to reassemble parcels that had been divided through generations of Napoleonic law.
In fact, I chose to go to work for Ross Hardies in Chicago, because they were the premier law firm dealing with land use issues, certainly in Chicago and probably in the country. I found myself working on gas rate regulation, which was also a large part of their practice. Later, I decided to go to planning school partly to get reintroduced to the country, having been away at a time of great social change and turmoil, but partly also to help ensure that if I did, or when I did, go back to the law firm, I would be used in the area of my interest because I would have a degree in urban planning.
Urban America, Incorporated, for which I worked following my studies at Columbia, was concerned with what seemed to me the two great themes in American city development: one was race and civil rights and the other was planning, the city beautiful movement - the Frederick Law Omsted tradition and the parks and the rest. Very few of our institutions have been successful at bridging the divide between those two concerns, social policy and development policy, generally, for the broader population. They tried to do that. I became an expert in how you prevent communities from using large lot zoning or minimum lot sizes to exclude minorities and poor people. At that time I didn't think that I knew very much about conservation law or how to protect land.
I can recall saying to Timothy Atkeson, who was my immediate boss at the Council when I started there - he was General Counsel and he later became my Assistant Administrator at EPA for International Activities in 1989 - I said to him, "I don't really know much about how you protect land from development. I'm really an expert at breaking down restrictive procedures and laws." He smiled and said, "Well, it's really just the oher side of the same coin, isn't it?" And, of course, it is.
I found myself then working on protection schemes - but not completely. With the help of Fred Bosselman, a Ross Hardies lawyer, I drafted a federal legislative proposal to provide funds to communities to protect what we called areas of critical environmental concern and also to ensure that "development of regional benefit" be accommodated, even against the wishes of localities that resisted it. It was a balanced approach, which I think we have to have in our land use and development law. So, I kind of sidled into the conservation side of law and can't say that this was a charted course or a direct route, but it happened to be mine.