CNY ecoBlog

Dryden Democrats has a post on the Natural Feature Focus Areas in the Dryden Township. Included are a number of PDF documents that show the areas and summarize their significance.

This got me browsing the Tompkins County Planning department website and the Tompkins County Comprehensive Plan which is on line.

The document is broken up into managable PDF chunks and presents a fascinating read for anyone interested in this sort of planning inforation. Even if you live outside of Tompkins County, many of the principles, analyses, and action items in the plan have currency for any upstate New York region:

On the Environment:

Natural features that define our community, and form the foundation of our local and regional ecological systems, should be preserved and enhanced.

Groundwater, surface water, and wetlands do not function as separate systems but are part of an interconnected whole….

These three major classifications of water resources are distinct parts of a larger interconnected water resources system and should be considered and managed as a system. The United States Geological Survey has recently determined that approximately 60 percent of the flow in surface water streams in central New York originates from groundwater resources.

On Communities:

Common characteristics of strong communities are friendly relationships between neighbors, satisfaction with the quality of the built environment, and a feeling that residents can live a safe and healthy life. There is a national trend for skilled workers and employers to move to locations – often smaller cities – that offer a variety of strong communities.

An indicator of a strong community is how frequently people walk in their neighborhoods….

Development should not only respond to basic commercial or housing needs, but should also help create communities that are distinctive and welcoming.

There is some real solid research and thinking in these comprehensive plans. But when you see how much needs to go into such a plan even at a County level, it makes your head spin at the complexity required to truly balance all these divergent elements. And then to think how different counties may have different approaches…

At some point one would hope that these plans could become integrated at nested scales of government.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 4th, 2006 at 9:40 pm and is filed under Local Communities, Urbanism and Planning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.