MODULE-4 Land Use Planning

Land Use Plans

The Open Space Plan

A community's Open Space Plan provides both a "road map" and detailed inventory of existing natural resources and open spaces, along with guidance on how to protect and manage these resources in the face of increasing development pressures. Planning for the protection of a community's water supply, land, working farms and forests, viable wildlife habitats, parks, recreation areas, trails, and greenways is as critical to the economic future of a community as planning for schools, roads, water, and wastewater infrastructure.

Along with preserving water quality, protecting open space can provide profound economic benefits. It can help a community avoid the costly mistakes of misusing or overwhelming available resources. A contaminated water supply, for example, must be treated or replaced through expensive solutions such as piping water from other sources. In contrast, protected open space usually raises the taxable value of adjacent properties and is less costly to maintain than the infrastructure and services required by residential development. Even with the immediate increased tax base that results from development, open space protection often proves to be less costly to towns given time.

Once completed, an Open Space Plan is a powerful instrument to implement community goals, as defined in the Comprehensive Plan. It establishes the community's vision for its future and recommends patterns of development that will support this vision. It has been shown that towns with Comprehensive and Open Space plans are more likely to win land use cases and other challenges to their municipal statutes. Having an Open Space Plan can also make a community eligible to apply for certain State and Federal Land Acquisition and Resource Protection Grants. Open space plans also help to coordinate multi-tiered conservation efforts of state environmental agencies, and local and regional land trusts, which can help to leverage funding and technical resources.

Parks and open space are often created as part of the development process. A developer can donate park land or other open space areas as part of a project. If there is high quality undeveloped land in your area, your community should earmark this as future potential park land or conservation land. Open space can be owned by the community or it can be private open space, owned by the homeowners in a development or a local conservation group, such as a land trust. It can also be permanently protected through a conservation easement or deed restriction on the property (see Conservation Easement section).

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