Environmental Stewardship Regional Practices

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Although development in northern New Hampshire has occurred slowly over the past several decades, the North Country Council is working with its member governments to prepare for potential future growth and consider long-term sustainability. In response to local planning boards' requests for information on new land use techniques, in 2004 Council staff developed Managing Growth, a handbook that outlines actions that local planning boards can take, such as encouraging cluster/open space development, planned mixed-use projects and protecting agricultural and other open spaces by selling the rights to develop them and transferring those rights to more dense planned growth areas.

Creating the handbook initiated a new community outreach project. North Country Council's Principal Planner Stacey Doll explains, "We're doing ongoing training for the local planning boards on how to make land use decisions. We also have a new lending library with resources such as the Environmental Planning Handbook and other books from the American Planning Association (APA). Our members can use these guides to make growth decisions." The outreach project is funded a combination of several grants from the New Hampshire Office of Planning, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Department of Transportation and private foundations.

The outreach program has sparked interest from local communities in guiding economic growth and natural resource protection in tandem. Doll says, "Several of the planning board members are apprehensive of being overly strict if they don't need to be, but the more information that we give them on innovative land use planning techniques, the more they seem to come back to us with specific questions on how to adopt them." Towns in the North Country region are beginning to implement capital improvement programs to plan and budget for the maintenance and expansion of community facilities, as well as incorporating natural resource studies into the master planning process.

According to Doll, growth management solutions are becoming more commonly used because "these innovative techniques force you to do longer range visioning. In the past, we spent so much money and time planning one topic at a time. But now we're looking at how a new road will have an impact on the environment. If we're asking for a road to be widened, we also ask what land use decisions caused that road to need to be widened. We don't have the extent of development that has happened in the southern part of New England, but it's slowly creeping into the North Country. We're trying to help the local planning boards make educated decisions on land use as needed, with holistic and long-term thinking."

North Country Council 107 Glessner Rd Bethlehem, NH 03574 Tel: 603.444.6303 Fax: 603.444.7588 http://www.nccouncil.org/