The political pendulum seems to have swung away from pro-growth sentiments here in Maryland, in Northern Virginia and in Oregon, a high-profile battleground over growth controls in recent years.  

Voters in Aberdeen yesterday turned out their mayor, S. Fred Simmons, in a bitter election contest fueled in part by a backlash to the mayor's efforts to promote the town's growth.  As colleagues Mary Gail Hare and Madison Park reported in The Sun today, a citizen's group that first squared off against Simmons over a large annexation last year campaigned against him and figured in the election of his opponent, Michael E. Bennett, a retired state trooper.

Simmons and town officials had approved annexation of a tract called "The Wetlands" for development, but residents petitioned the boundary expansion to a referendum late last year and soundly defeated it.  They argued it would strain town's water supply, crowd schools, worsen traffic congesion and raise taxes.

Slow-growth candidates won eight of nine seats yesterday on the board of supervisors in Loudoun County, Virginia - one of the fastest growing counties in the US, where voters have seesawed in recent years between pro- and slow-growth sentiment.  According to a story today in The Washington Post, slow-growth Democratic candidates defeated four pro-growth Republican incumbnets, while four other slow-growth incumbents won reelection.

"In 2003, a slate of pro-growth Republicans wrested control of the Board of Supervisors." The Post's Sandhya Somashekhar reported. "The previous board, elected in 1999, had angered property rights advocates by trying to institute one of the country's strictest growth-control policies."

In Oregon, meanwhile, voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure rolling back the property development rights they had approved just three years earlier.  Oregonians, who for decades had lived under the the tightest land-use controls in the country, rebelled in 2004.  They passed Measure 37, requiring state and local governments to ease development restrictions or compensate landowners. 

This year, in a heated debate that pitted conservationists against timber interests, and with farmers on both sides, voters decided they'd gone too far, approving Measure 49 by a 61-49 margin.

As the Portland Oregonian reported today, "Under the new law, rural landowners will be allowed to build one to 10 houses under various scenarios. The measure prohibits larger subdivisions and commercial and industrial development, however".