The Farmington River Enhancement Grants: A Tale of Three Towns and the Path to Low Impact Development

摘要

This paper describes the process the towns of Harwinton, Plainville, and East Granby Connecticut used to adopt Low Impact Development (LID) strategies into their existing land use regulations under the Farmington River Enhancement Grants, which were administered by the Connecticut Department of Environmental protection (CT DEP). The CT DEP offered grants to communities located within the Farmington River Watershed to retain qualified consultants to review existing land use regulations in order to encourage the implementation of the LID. This paper discusses and contrasts the approach of the three communities. The Town of Harwinton, CT is a predominately rural community in northwest Connecticut having an approximate population of 5,000 residents. Most of the development in town consists of single family residential units on the typical two-acre building lot. There are several public drinking water supply reservoirs in Harwinton, which are owned by the City of Bristol so maintain the high quality of runoff going into them was a concern to Harwinton. The Town of Plainville is predominately an urban environment, located near the southwest corner of the Farmington River watershed. Over 90% of the community has been developed as either medium/high density residential and/or commercial/industrial. This has led to large, interconnected impervious areas in many areas. The Town of East Granby is mostly rural community with scattered agricultural uses in the western portion of the community and commercial/industrial uses clustered around Bradley International Airport. The paper describes the land use issues in each community which drove the process to consider LID. It also shows how LID development strategies were presented for consideration and adopted to address these issues. Lastly, the paper shows how public outreach was conducted to facilitate the adoption of LID.