The Environmental Protection Agency recently presented a "smart growth achievement award" to the Lancaster County Planning Commission.

But the county's chief planner, James Cowhey, said the community as a whole deserved the award from the federal agency because it is "preserving agricultural land as a working landscape and balancing it with growth occurring in the growth areas."

Ideally, that is what is happening.

But what is really happening?

The county designated urban growth areas around boroughs in the 1990s and has encouraged growth there while preserving farmland so that it can never be developed.

But even though Lancaster County's farmland preservation and smart-growth initiatives are cited as national models, nobody knows precisely how well the big plan is working.

Asked how many acres are being developed inside versus outside Urban Growth Areas (UGAs), Cowhey points to an eight-year-old study — the most recent information he has.

Of the 11,000 acres developed in the county between 1994 and 2002, that survey showed, 40 percent were within UGAs and 60 percent were outside.

Planners believe those percentages have improved since 2002 in favor of development inside the boundaries.

But they are several months away from being able to make new calculations.

"Anecdotally, I think we're definitely heading in the right direction," said Cowhey. "We're definitely not seeing the strip subdivisions we used to see — five or six housing lots along a rural road."

Also, more municipalities are changing their building codes to permit only one subdivision per 50 acres, rather than one every 25 acres.

University of Pennsylvania planning professor Tom Daniels, a former director of the county's Agricultural Preserve Board, asked his students to perform a related calculation three years ago. They found about 65 miles of the county's 450 miles of growth boundaries have preserved farms along them.

"So roughly one out of every eight miles is blocked," Daniels said. That assumes that planners would not allow development to leapfrog preserved farms.

Preserving farms along growth boundaries was the rule until six years ago when the county commissioners decided to place more emphasis on preserving large chunks of farms out in the agricultural areas.

"The best neighbor of a farmer is another farmer," County Commissioner Dick Shellenberger said at the time. Clustered farms can support each other, he added, and thereby maintain agriculture as a viable business.

But not everyone thinks the shift in emphasis was entirely positive.

"It would be nice if the farms that were preserved butted up against the UGAs so you could seal the system," said Jim Adams, president of Wenger Feeds.

Some farms along UGAs are still being preserved, said Matt Knepper, who directs the county's Agricultural Preserve Board. But they're no longer the priority.

The primary question remains: Are Urban Growth Areas drawing more new housing and thus reducing sprawling development into the farming areas?

"I think the growth boundaries have created a situation where a number of developers are going to look there first because they're going to have access to sewer and water," said Daniels.

He believes that Lancaster County is unusual because developers for the most part accept the boundaries and "we don't have these knock-down, drag-out rezoning battles that you see many other places."

One example: Penn Township last spring rejected a developer's request to rezone agricultural acreage just outside a UGA south of Penryn.

"There is available land inside the urban growth boundary," township manager Dave Kratzer told the developer, Pioneer Management.

"You want us to go outside our boundary," he said. "We're asking you to go outside of your boundary."

In fact, Kratzer says now, the developer may return with the same plan but under vastly different conditions.

One condition, he noted, may be that the township would rezone existing an agricultural area inside the UGA to make up for the loss outside.

One of the big impediments to moving more development inside UGAs is opposition in some communities to what are called Traditional Neighborhood Developments (TNDs).

Planners and many township leaders support TNDs, which allow for unusually dense development inside UGAs. But neighbors often don't like the idea of living next to dense housing.

Independence, a plan to build 3,000 homes on 309 acres in East Hempfield Township in 2008, never got off the ground because neighbors persuaded township supervisors to reject a new ordinance that would have allowed the development.

Several smaller TNDs — for example, Brighton, a community of homes and shops off the Fruitville Pike in Manheim Township — have been developed in recent years.

Even so, some residents remain concerned that denser housing in the suburbs will reduce their property values.

That's not going to happen, said Cowhey, the county planner.

He said the Urban Land Institute generally has found no evidence of property-value deterioration next to denser housing and some evidence that high-density development can increase values.

"There is no evidence in Lancaster County that TND has decreased property values," Cowhey added. "Anecdotally, we understand that TND communities are selling units at a premium and that has had a positive effect on adjoining property values."

Most people understand that in a developing county the tradeoff for preserving farmland is denser residential areas, says Karen Martynick, director of Lancaster Farmland Trust.

"Intellectually, people understand the issues extremely well in Lancaster County," she noted. "But when it's in their back yard, they don't connect the dots."

Frank Christoffel III, executive vice president of the Lancaster County Association of Realtors, believes some municipalities are not sufficiently enthusiastic about locating dense housing in UGAs. He said that drives developers out into rural areas.

"The growth plan is working efficiently some places," he noted, "but it's not working as effectively as it might after all these years."

jbrubaker@lnpnews.com