Santa Fe County's development mirrors the degradation of many cities and towns in the West — leapfrog development, piecemeal subdivision, and illegal lot splits. It's a legacy of land use that has aided and abetted a settlement pattern known as sprawl.

The county has a chance to enact long overdue, progressive land-use reform with its revision of the 1988 Santa Fe County Land Development Code, whose complexity compromises the staff and decision-makers responsible for its administration.

But the county's recent attempt to push through an "emergency interim development ordinance" was inelegant at best; the black eye it received from the public's initial response was well deserved for the ordinance's lack of transparency and oblique public notice.

The development challenges facing Santa Fe are real and substantial, so they are worthy of a respectful and inclusive response — not a blanket approach that would end the very kinds of projects the county has endorsed and which unduly hurts many members of our community.

Instead of temporarily shutting down the third largest sector of our region's economy, the staff and elected officials of Santa Fe County should facilitate a socially progressive, resource-conserving compendium of laws and public policies while simultaneously facilitating an informed and engaged public dialogue about the future of our community development.

Despite many positive accomplishments in the Santa Fe area over the past 20 years, decades of economic boom and bust have imposed disfiguring scars on our land and communities. Capitalizing on the "rural lifestyle" ambitions of urban refugees, landowners and developers have impaired the region's fragile ecology.

Loosely linked by a labyrinth of poorly maintained roads, 2.5-acre ranchettes have proven increasingly difficult to serve with dwindling crews of emergency volunteers. Water and wastewater systems are disjointed and dysfunctional. Monsoon rains wreak havoc with inappropriately sited roads and home sites, exacerbating the effects of erosion and aquifer depletion.

While some Western cities and counties have constrained growth and protected open space by employing a complex algorithm of regulations and conservation financing, they have not escaped the laws of unintended consequence. The mayor of Boulder, Colo., once described her community as one "in which open space wraps the city like a moat to keep everyone but the wealthy out." In many amenity-rich communities of the American West, affordable housing is an oxymoron and economic development is something that happens "down valley."

During this period of relative calm in the real-estate market, Santa Fe County has an opportunity to bring new intelligence and creativity to our community's housing, commercial, transportation and resource-protection policies. A reconstituted code should encourage community-scale water catchment and reuse. It should insist on passive solar-oriented neighborhood design and local-energy supply technologies. It should support a broad mix of housing types to serve the needs of moderate-income households, as well as the needs of youth, elderly, families and individuals. New regulations should encourage publicly accessible trails and open-space recreation areas. Finally, the development review process should be streamlined and made more coherent and predictable.

Rather than imposing a indiscriminate prohibition on "the processing of applications and/or granting development approvals" for 6 to 12 months, Santa Fe County should put the development community on notice, as County Manager Roman Abeyta recently warned, that "your world is going to change."

By moving forward expeditiously through its code-writing and policy-making process, Santa Fe County can allow well-considered land conservation initiatives and "smart growth" neighborhood development to proceed in anticipation of a new code — one that will help reshape our experience of community and cultivate a sustaining relationship with the land we call home.

Santa Fean Ted Harrison is president of Commonweal Conservancy, a conservation-based development company.