“If you do not know how to ask the right questions, you
discover nothing.” William Edward Deming, American Business Philosopher and
Consultant
Several seminal events have taken place recently that impact
land conservation in Baltimore County. Not all affect NeighborSpace directly,
but they are, nonetheless, noteworthy. As I reflected on them, they seemed so disparate,
which intrigued the problem solver in me who is, at once, owing to various
training, categorical, detail-oriented, and visual. What started as a simple
blog post to relay interesting news, ended up as a 12 hour extravaganza exploring
the plans, precepts, policies and people that have shaped land use and
conservation in Baltimore County for over 50 years – a veritable rabbit hole to
Wonderland – but, nonetheless, an experience that led to greater understanding
and appreciation of those who have laid a foundation for the next generation of
work that must be done.
Using
a timeline as an organizing element, I have begun to chronicle the precepts
(laws), policies and people (organizations) that have evolved to make the
landscape that we all know as Baltimore County look as it does today. This is
by no means a finished product and I welcome suggestions for changing what can
only be called an initial draft. As a rough drawing, the timeline succeeds in
giving us some information we might not have gleaned from prose alone. One
cannot help but notice a shift in concern in the last 10 years, for example,
from issues related to protecting rural lands to those concerned with the
thoughtful redevelopment (and infill) of more urban areas. Both urban and rural
conservation efforts are still simultaneously important, but if our timeline
has a story to tell, it is that we who are concerned with infill and
redevelopment in the 200 square miles of land that lies within the URDL should
take a page from our forbearers on the rural side and approach our conservation
tasks thoughtfully. And no organization has been more thoughtful in approaching
land conservation in Baltimore County than the Valleys Planning Council (VPC),
which dates to 1962 and is where I originally wanted to begin this post.
If you’ve witnessed the timeline, you know that VPC just
turned the corner on 50 years of age in 2012, and, in honor of that auspicious
milestone, its leaders commissioned a movie about the plan that was the genesis
of the organization. (There was a public screening of the movie at MICA in
February that I attended and we hope to arrange another showing for NeighborSpace
members shortly). The plan that drives the movie, known as the Plan for
the Valleys, dates to 1963 and
was authored by landscape architect Ian McHarg, who taught at the University of
Pennsylvania and was a principal at the firm of Wallace McHarg Associates in
Philadelphia. It is one of several chapters in a larger title called Design
with Nature, a text that has been required reading for students of
planning and landscape architecture across the country since the late 1960s.
And, because of the foresight and fortitude of the members of the Valleys
Planning Council, the McHarg plan was implemented, the Greenspring and
Worthington Valleys were protected, and the
Urban Rural Demarcation Line (URDL) was enacted with the result that,
today, 90 percent of the County’s 807,000 residents live below the URDL on 1/3
of the County’s land area and roughly 25 percent of the land beyond the URDL is
protected with conservation easements.
There are those who might say that the foregoing results are
hardly ideal given the many shortcomings we have outlined in earlier posts
about walkability,
underutilized impervious surface, and the lack of open space in communities
within the URDL. True. But what few people know is that there are rich aquifers
underlying much of the land within the valleys and that they feed the
reservoirs (e.g. Pretty Boy and Loch Raven) that provide much of our drinking
water. If they were densely developed,
the aquifers and our drinking water sources would suffer, a result arguably more unpalatable then the other
challenges we face.
Moving on, I want to note that, as is the case in every
General Assembly Session, Program Open Space (POS), which dates to 1969, and
its sister programs (Rural Legacy, MALPF) are once again threatened with having some their
funds diverted to other uses. If you don’t know, POS is what the State uses to
pay for parks and what county governments use to augment local funding for acquiring
and enhancing park facilities. It’s also
the reason that people complain that Maryland’s real estate closing costs are
so high – POS is funded from a modest tax on our closing costs. But that
resulted for many years (at least until 2002) in Maryland conserving as much
land as it developed annually, a claim that few states could ever make and an
especially important achievement for the 5th most densely populated
state in the country. Please see the
details of this year’s attempts to make an end-run around one of the soundest
land conservation ideas there has ever been, and what you can do to help by clicking
here. As we note in the timeline,
counties are required to update their plans for spending POS funding every six
years, and we are in one of those years.
Please click
here to comment on Baltimore County’s plans by March 31.
Another element of our timeline that is deserving of
attention currently is the Sustainable Growth and Agricultural Preservation Act
of 2012, also known as “the septics bill.” It requires counties to establish
development tiers indicating where major and minor subdivisions will be located
and what type of sewerage will serve them according to a framework established
in State law. There are few surprises in
Baltimore
County’s response to this mandate, made public last December. Most growth is planned on public sewerage
within the URDL, much of it through redevelopment in areas called Community Enhancement Areas,
which we have alluded to on many prior occasions.
What seems to be lacking from these and other plans the
County has put forth for the URDL are specifics on conservation of open space,
which is well documented as being in very short supply and key to the success
of any redevelopment effort. That’s
where we hope to make a contribution. Much like the citizens who turned to Ian
McHarg in the 1960s for help in crafting a conservation plan, we are turning to
the National Park Service’s Rivers, Trails and Conservation Assistance Program
and our constituents to develop a plan for conserving open space for a variety
of social, economic and environmental uses within the URDL. We are fortunate indeed to have strong support for this effort, including, but not limited to, a grant of $1,000 from the Maryland Environmental Trust and the Janice Hollmann Grant Fund, a one-year grant of technical support from the National Park Service, and, most recently, a $5,000 grant from the Rauch Foundation. A final meeting of
our stakeholder group to engage in the promised “pairwise comparison” of the
goals, objectives, and criteria we developed together will be announced
shortly. If you are interested in
participating, please let us know by filling out the
form available here.
