If you want to build a 10-home subdivision, a strip mall, a condominium or a big-box store in Connecticut , there are no state or county officials to give the plans a hard look, or switch the green light to red.

It's up to the towns, all 169 of them, to do that work. And in the rush to attract developers who aren't building homes -- houses mean kids and schools and buses and snowplows -- towns compete against each other, regardless of what's best for the region.

Balancing all the competing interests -- city, suburbs, exurbs, open space, economic development, agriculture -- is like a variety show juggler keeping plates spinning. Sooner or later, something is bound to fall off.

"You try lots of things,'' Christine Todd Whitman said by telephone this week. "A lot are unsuccessful.''

Whitman was the governor of New Jersey from 1993 to 2000, before taking on the job of administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the closest thing the United States has to a Secretary of the Environment. After three years, she quit.

In her seven years as governor, Whitman fought the battle against sprawl in a state very similar to Connecticut : a small, densely-populated Northeastern place with rundown cities, well-to-do suburbs, lots of highways, and open space that's disappearing fast.

So Whitman applauded the decision Gov. M. Jodi Rell made last week to create the Office of Responsible Growth for Connecticut . Governors can't necessarily stop developers or tell towns what to do. Nor should they necessarily want to. But they can shape the debate.

"It's tricky,'' she said. "But the state can lead the way."

Whitman said she was lucky to inherit a progressive framework in New Jersey : Each of the state's counties had completed a plan of development. Her administration used them to steer state funding; projects that followed the development plans went to the top of the state grants list. Towns and counties learned quickly which projects to promote.

She learned some state regulations, such as those that kept builders from adding apartments over new commercial space, actually stymied the urban growth she was trying to promote. So did too-restrictive enforcement of state building codes, for example, requiring city brownstones being renovated to meet all handicapped codes.

And, with full public support, she committed the state to preserving 40 percent of New Jersey as open space -- either farmland, forest or parks. That meant preserving a million acres of land. In her time in office, she preserved about a third of that. Then the program stalled.

"Now it will cost more. The price of land has gone up," she said.

But Whitman said the concept of smart growth requires everyone -- from the governor to the town zoning enforcement officer -- to try to arrive at results that really are smart.

Rell's new Office of Responsible Growth has to understand the impetus for change must come from the bottom up, not the top down.

"The towns have to be involved,'' Whitman said. "Otherwise you risk losing local character that's so important."