CitiesGoGreen - February 2009 - (Page 30) any deficit is made up. Once the deficit is eliminated, the community can adopt a new, lower eLoS to sustain the new households (the “pace” principle). Affording Green Infrastructure As we have seen, development extractions are one way to create Green Infrastructure. In this example, the City required the developers to set aside what amounted to two-thirds of the proposed development envelope, but still came up short in terms of providing the necessary Until the public says “enough!” at the voting booth, I would argue that we have not protected enough. Green Infrastructure. While each development set aside will vary depending on the scale and ecological characteristics of the site, it may not be financially feasible to set aside enough land within a development envelope and keep the unit price of each home affordable. Another affordable way to add to the Green Infrastructure is by publically acquiring greenspace, just as the Utility did in protecting 7,000 acres around the wellfield. In 2000, the voters approved the Alachua County Forever land conservation program (www.alachuacountyforever.us). While its mission is “to acquire, manage and improve environmentally significant lands to protect water resources, wildlife habitat, and to provide natural areas suitable for resource-based recreation,” it is really about protecting and providing Green Infrastructure. Alachua County Forever has protected 16,000 acres of greenspace since 2001. This conserved land protects 5 billion gallons of groundwater recharge area. This amounts to an additional 50% of the current demand assuming all this land eventually contributes to the wellfield. We were able to do this for a relatively small local investment ($33 per property per year) which was leveraged 1:2 with outside funding. Public acquisition of greenspace spreads the burden of paying for the cost of providing and retrofitting the Green Infrastructure over all the tax-paying public, not just new residents. After all, we who lived here allowed the existing deficits to occur and must share in the cost to rectify them. 30 One critical ecosystem service is sustaining viable wildlife populations. These are not homogenously distributed and a specific development proposal may impact the core breeding or nesting area. Loss of that area will hasten extirpation of that species. A community would identify certain umbrella species and the Green Infrastructure that sustains them. The “quality” principle requires us to incent developers to set aside the best, most functional greenspace to protect these species if they occur within the development envelope. The developer can also conserve core habitat areas off-site if additional Green Infrastructure acreage is required. It is important to note that the amount of land that should be set aside for continued viability of a species is not at all dependant on the number of new residents. It is a function of the habitat quality and location. In this regard we could borrow a page from the world of wetlands mitigation. Developers and regulators work to calculate the quality and size of the impact on the8171 development site and hence the required mitigation. For a given im10093 pact, the developer will have to set aside 25484 more land if it is low quality than if it were 7988 high quality. They could propose restoration of the25730 low quality in addition to setting it aside so that they would not have 9110 to set aside as much land. Not all the land that is, or can be, set aside from development proposals will be great ecosystem service providers. We are again limited by just dealing with the four corners of the development envelope. Again, public land conservation that targets core areas to sustain viable populations of species can make this process affordable. Alachua County Forever lands are in fact selected for purchase due to their ecological sensitivity and serve to protect many of these species’ habitats whilst providing drinking water recharge and resource-based recreation. While Alachua County Forever has protected a lot of high-quality land, it is not adjacent to the existing wellfield. Only after decades of gradual underground water flow may it contribute to the actual water source. Targeted protection closer to the existing wellfield creating connected, continuous sources would be ideal (the “location” principle). Green Infrastructure should be located to serve the human and wild communities. Passive recreation, another ecosystem service, should ideally be located within the proposed development (and provided by the developer) or within walking or biking distance to residences. Public acquisition can again relieve some of the fiscal pressures on individual developments. 86576 by Land Use and by Population Density of Parcel Neighborhood ,00 0 Enhanced Value from Open Space Proximity 30 25 ,00 0 25,484 25,730 20 ,00 0 15 ,00 0 10 ,00 0 8,171 5,0 0 00 10,093 7,988 9,110 High Density Near Touching Medium Density Single Family Residential Low Density Vacant Land Condos February/March 2009 http://www.alachuacountyforever.us http://www.alachuacountyforever.us http://www.CitiesGoGreen.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.