“If you want to climb out of a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging,” common-sense cowboy sage Will Rogers once remarked. Wise advice but sometimes it’s easier said than done.

Take Calgary’s municipal development plan, better known as Plan It Calgary. Adopted in 2009, its main objective is to put brakes on Calgary’s sprawling growth by making the city morecompact, pedestrian-friendly and connected via public transit.

But even as these lofty goals are professed in our civic documents, we are approving new developments that keep us digging in the opposite direction.

For example, in February 2010 Calgary council approved a land redesignation for a new drive-to mall just east of Stoney Trail, north of 17th Avenue S.E. There, Ontario’s Trinity Development Group is developing East Hills, a big-box “power centre” — similar to Deerfoot Meadows — anchored by Wal-Mart, Lowe’s and Empire Theatres.

According to Trinity’s website, East Hills is slated to open in September 2012 and will be the future home to approximately 60 retail and food outlets with almost 330,000 square metres of developed floor space (that’s 23 acres). An equal amount of land is devoted to parking.

Compact? Pedestrian-friendly? Transit-oriented? Three thumbs down.

What’s more, evidence suggests the land was redesignated in haste. Normally such decisions are taken only after area structure plans are in place. However, no such plans existed for East Hills. Why the rush?

It’s simple. The city was playing defence. If Calgary doesn’t build it, Rocky View County certainly will.

It was a burning desire to avoid Balzac-type development on Calgary’s eastern outskirts that spurred Calgary council to hurriedly approve East Hills. As area Ald. Andre Chabot put it bluntly at the time: “It will avert fringe developments like CrossIron Mills.”

Indeed the county has approved land use changes for a new regional centre on the Trans-Canada Highway, but a lack of water has so far stymied progress.

The big reason the city detests developments like the Balzac mall is because although it relies on city shoppers for clientele, the significant property taxes it generates — well over $1 million annually — go to the county. Calgary loses revenue while Rocky View uses the money to pay for the new infrastructure they needed to make the mall possible. One can get dizzy thinking about it.

A perverse logic is at work. In contradiction to Plan It’s vision, Calgary council continues to approve bad urban development inside the city to prevent bad urban development outside the city. If bad development is inevitable, it’s dumb to let someone else collect the property tax.

If Calgary actually lived up to the letter of Plan It, its municipal competitors, with no similar obligations, would simply move in to fill the vacated niche. So the city approved East Hills. In the urban development game there’s no reward for being virtuous and no second prize. There is a booby-prize though: environmentally disastrous and socially isolating regional development.

But the players don’t make the rules; each simply pursues their own best interest. The game itself is created and run by the province. In fact, astonishingly, the laws governing inter-municipal relations — such as between Calgary and Rocky View — purposefully create the conditions that spawn these lose-lose competitions. The province wants municipalities to compete.

As it is now, each municipality, whether urban or rural, is entitled to develop virtually wherever and whatever they want. Why wouldn’t Rocky View use the rules to their advantage? Low taxes are a competitive asset.

Before 1995, the province used regional planning as an effective tool to manage growing cities and the competing interests of rural and urban communities. While there were many problems, one positive effect was that growth could be managed for the overall welfare of the region rather than for the individual benefit of particular municipalities.

Of course all politics is local and the rural folks hated regional planning because they felt they suffered most of its ills while cities gained most of the benefits.

So the rurals were gleeful when regional planning was de-funded, during the Klein austerity years, and replaced with legislation that freed local governments to pursue almost any development scheme they pleased. An eye-opener is that since then, Rocky View has approved concept plans that would see the county’s population increase from 35,000 to more than 300,000 if ever fully built out. CrossIron Mills is just the tip of the iceberg.

By unleashing free-enterprise on regional development, provincial lawmakers created a system that works against the public interest. We can’t stop digging because the rules punish you if you try.

When the Klein government abolished regional planning, the baby went out with the bathwater. East Hills and CrossIron Mills are two sides of the same coin. No matter which turns up, the public loses.

We need a new game, preferably one without shovels.

Next article: Demystifying density

Geoff Ghitter teaches urban studies at the University of Calgary and his blog is geeessgee.blogspot.com. Noel Keough is an assistant professor in the faculty of environmental design at the university, and is co-founder of Sustainable Calgary Society. He can be reached at nkeough@ucalgary.ca.