(Ed. Note): We had technical difficulties on Wednesday. Some of you may have missed this post, as a result.

Could Polk County’s future population be capped at 1.4 million?

A group headed by John Ryan, a veteran Polk County environmentalist and planning activist, has a plan to do just that, and he says he’s willing to work to put it on the ballot.

The plan would cap the number of residential units allowed under county and city land-use rules at 2008 levels. That would support a population of about 1.4 million, Ryan said. The plan would then would establish urban development areas into which rural landowners could transfer and sell their development rights. The idea is to concentrate residential development inside strictly defined urban service areas while protecting more rural areas from sprawl.

“This is cap-and-trade for development,” Ryan said. “If it works for emissions, it can work for this, too.” Cap-and-trade is the term often given to schemes designed to reduce air pollution by capping the total amount of pollution and then allowing cleaner plants to sell their pollution rights to dirtier plants.

Under Ryan’s theory, the cap would make the development rights in the rural areas more valuable, providing an incentive for property owners to transfer them.

The county’s population is about 550,000. It’s not projected to hit 1 million until 2050. So the 1.4 million population figure allows for extensive growth, Ryan said. But that growth would be concentrated in urban service areas, Ryan said.

Ryan asked for county commissioners to join his group and write the plan into comprehensive plan changes, with the intent of taking it to voters in 2010. Commissioners Bob English and Sam Johnson were openly skeptical of the plan as an intrusion on market forces, but commissioners did agree to ask their staff to look into the plan.

Ryan said that if the commission chooses not to back the idea within about 30 days, he’ll file papers with the supervisor of elections and aim at a 2008 referendum to change the county charter.

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