Chatham County Comprehensive Plan Public Hearings are June 21, 22 and 23, and the county needs to hear that we care about protecting the environment through smart growth and smart green space protection. Please go to the public hearings and write comments. Here is the County webpage with details: http://www.chathamnc.org/index.aspx?page=1860
Chatham County's comprehensive plan will guide its future. There are public hearings and you should participate in an informed way. Land use planning will affect how Chatham feels, its sense of “place,” its citizens' health and wellbeing, whether it’s designed for people or for cars, property values, and many other things that we love or hate about our places.
Coming to hearings with goals, data, and examples makes you a more effective participant. Written comments with examples and numbers are effective, increase your credibility, and reinforce the more emotional, in-person, commentary. Do both if you can!
The Sierra Club has a great Smart Growth-Stop Sprawl webpage: http://vault.sierraclub.org/sprawl/community/
Here are some guidelines from the American Planning Association: Comprehensive Plan Standards for Sustaining Places, https://www.planning.org/sustainingplaces/compplanstandards/
MORE DETAILS BELOW IF YOU ARE REALLY INTERESTED!!
Background:
- EPA’s smart growth page: https://www.epa.gov/smartgrowth, with a whole section on rural smart growth. A good place to start is the report “Our Built and Natural Environments” which explains the interactions of land use, transportation and environmental quality: https://www.epa.gov/smartgrowth/our-built-and-natural-environments
- The Centers for Disease Control are very into healthy places right now, and their site has lots of good information about that. You will find that this aligns very well with smart growth, and a good way to talk about it if smart growth or sustainability are considered bad words. Health is a good goal for communities. http://blogs.cdc.gov/yourhealthyourenvironment/2016/02/24/designing-planning-and-building-healthy-communities/
- And here is a website that has videos from a great PBS series on healthy communities: http://designinghealthycommunities.org/category/design/
Some great information on the benefits of smart growth for localities:
- Smart growth illustrated! https://www.epa.gov/smartgrowth/smart-growth-illustrated
- Economic benefits: https://www.epa.gov/smartgrowth/smart-growth-and-economic-success-benefits-real-estate-developers-investors-business-and
- Comparing smart growth to suburban patterns: https://www.epa.gov/smartgrowth/smart-growth-conventional-suburban-development-infrastructure-case-study-completed-epa
- Branding and marketing smart growth (there are a lot of cities competing about “place”): https://www.epa.gov/smartgrowth/branding-and-marketing-smart-growth-communities
Some examples:
- A nice overview of Boulder's comprehensive plan focused on sustainability: http://www.bouldercounty.org/env/sustainability/pages/compplan.aspx
- NYC decided that all their plans were interacting, and wanted sustainability at the heart, and so developed PlaNYC with the help of ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability; it served as a prototype for a method for cities to use for such planning. They have added a big component of resiliency. http://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc/html/home/home.shtml
- Greensburg, KS was completely destroyed by a tornado, and decided to build back “green”: http://www.greensburgks.org/residents/recovery-planning/sustainable-comprehensive-master-plan/view