Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 12, 1992 TAG: 9201100219
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: TANIA BOARDMAN
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
A FEW HOPE TO KEEP URBAN SPRAWL FROM SPRAWLING
Randi Lemmon wants to preserve Montgomery County's beauty and cultural heritage. He wants to make sure the scenic views, natural water supplies and prime farmlands are still around for his children.In other words, he doesn't want to see the New River Valley resemble the urban sprawl that has grown up around Virginia Beach or Northern Virginia.
Lemmon is not alone.
Lemmon, environmental and regional planner for the New River Valley Planning District Commission, is working with the Montgomery County Planning Department and graduate students at Virginia Tech on developing details for the county's open-space plan.
The plan is designed to help guide growth, to avoid helter-skelter development in rural areas that in the future could cost the county government thousands of dollars to serve with water, sewer and other public services, said Lemmon, project manager.
The idea is to blend development with conservation, he said.
Montgomery County's population grew nearly 17 percent from 1980 to 1990, to 73,913 people. The county and the city of Radford, which grew 12 percent to 15,940 in the same decade, are the only areas west of Roanoke that are growing, Lemmon said.
Consequently, Lemmon said, the county faces development problems not being experienced elsewhere in Southwest Virginia.
Growth can be very good for the area, said Lemmon. It's all a matter of how it's done.
"We want to reap the positive benefits of growth, not the costs of unplanned growth," he said.
The county already faces substantial future costs from unplanned development. Increasing water problems in rural areas, such as Lusters Gate, may require the county to provide treated water at great expense to low-density communities miles from public water systems.
Beautiful rural land is being developed rapidly - often in unsightly ways, he said. The U.S. 460 corridor is a prime example of strip development, Lemmon said.
"We must ask ourselves: Do we want, as citizens living here, sprawl development?" he said. "Or do we want development in a planned way that blends in with the resources that attracted us here in the first place?"
The open-space plan, for example, could include concentrated, high-density housing and village concepts that would allow more of a development site to be open space and require fewer roads and sewer lines. This would make the development more cost efficient, said Susan Swain, planner for Montgomery County Planning Department.
"There is no set way to do it," Swain said.
Open-space planning has been used in communities in New England, Washington state and Maryland.
Many people in those areas came forth on their own after realizing something needed to be done to save their communities, said Van Anderson, a landscape architecture graduate student.
On Cape Cod, Mass., the people came together and said, "if we destroy what people come here for, then we will go out of business," Anderson said.
The open-space plan depends on public participation to be successful, Anderson said. Public workshops throughout the county, starting in February, will ensure that opportunity.
The plan began last spring with graduate students in an environmental planning class that targeted features such as karst sinkholes, which are important to ground water; 100-year flood plains; rivers, streams, lakes and ponds; threatened and endangered plant and animal species; wildlife habitats, corridors; historic, scenic and recreational areas; and prime farmland.
Once all the data are collected, the information will be computerized and used to develop the plan.
The importance of the environmental data will depend on what the public says it wants during informal meetings, Anderson said.
The workshops, which will be held beginning in late February, are intended to involve as many people as possible in discussing what aspects of the county they want preserved, how they want the county to grow and how to encourage that growth.
"We need them to set priorities for us," Anderson said. "This is a plan for their county."
After the workshops, the county Planning Commission will come up with a draft plan to offer the Board of Supervisors, probably by May, Lemmon said. The supervisors then will decide whether to make the open-space plan part of the county's comprehensive plan, which was adopted in 1990.
If the open-space plan is adopted, the county will revise the subdivision ordinance to be more sensitive to the environment as suggested by the plan, said Joe Powers, county planning director.
Developers, engineers and landowners then could come to the planning board, use the data base to obtain environmental information about on the site and use the open-space plan to consider options for development.
Then, said Swain, "we can ask the developer if he is interested in also protecting the land."
The open-space plan is being developed with a $35,000 grant from the Virginia Environmental Endowment, a privately funded organization that awards money to innovative environmental projects.
As part of the plan, interested landowners could have their farms or woodlands used as demonstrations of the open-space plan at no obligation, said Lemmon.
For instance, a person who owns such land could contact the planners and have them draw up a proposal for developing the land under both the county's current subdivision and zoning laws and under the new open-space plan. The open-space plan would allow clustering houses in greater density so more of the woodland and pastureland could be preserved for open space for the community's use.
For more information, contact Lemmon at the New River Planning District Commission at 639-9313.