The Borderlands Project Web Log

H&S VISIONING UPDATE

admin — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:22:00 GMT

In June, the first set of Heart and Soul Visioning Workshops were held in Killingly and Exeter. Preliminary results of the online community surveys and focus group interviews were presented. The most exciting part of the evening was the key pad polling exercise. Images and questions were posted on a screen and folks were asked to rank or prioritize - what they liked or didn't like, what was important to their community, and a whole range of questions. This was a really fun way to get everyone in the room participating in the workshop. The results of the key pad polling are posted on the town pages of the Borderlands website. http://www.borderlandsproject.org/index.asp?col1=villagepilot_Exeter.asp and http://www.borderlandsproject.org/index.asp?col1=villagepilot_Killingly.asp

Over the summer the pilot teams in both towns will be busy planning the next steps of this process and the fall workshops. If you'd like to become involved in this project or just have some questions, please feel free to contact me, Susan Westa, Borderlands VIP Coordinator at susan.westa@uconn.edu or 860-774-9600.

HEART AND SOUL VISIONING PROCESS

admin — Tue, 13 May 2008 19:36:00 GMT

The Borderlands Pilot towns, Killingly CT and Exeter RI, are off to a great start with Phase I, the Heart and Soul Visioning Process. The pilot teams have been meeting on a monthly basis to plan the activities of this phase. The first public outreach activities are focus group interviews. Pilot team members have reached out to the community to identify members of the various stakeholder groups and encourage them to attend group interviews. This is the first step in identifying the heart and soul of the pilot towns. Questions will be asked such as, "What if lost in your town, would change it forever?" and "What three words or phrases would you use to describe your town?" The results of the focus group interviews will be used to inform the rest of the visioning process.

Next steps of Phase I include an online community survey and visioning workshops. The surveys will be online within the next two weeks and we encourage everyone to participate. This activity is designed to get input from folks who won't or can't attend group events and to ask more detailed questions based on the results of the focus group interviews. The survey results will be presented at the Visioning Workshops which will be held on June 9 in Killingly and on June 12 in Exeter. There will be a variety of hands-on activities as well, including the use of key pad polling to get immediate feedback from the audience. There will also be another Visioning Workshop in September where all of this information will be compiled and used to develop a vision for future of the pilot towns.

Please help us spread the word about these exciting projects. If you are looking for more information you can see the project website at www.borderlandsproject.org or contact me, Susan Westa Borderlands VIP Coordinator, at susan.westa@uconn.edu or 860-774-9600.

Pilot Towns Selected

admin — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:06:00 GMT

The Borderlands Project recently selected the towns of Killingly, CT and Exeter, RI as the two towns for the Village Innovation Pilot. They were selected from a pool of 12 towns that applied (out of the possible 20 Borderlands towns).

The Pilot is a strategic planning initiative that will examine ways to conserve critical lands by channelling new growth into existing or planned village centers. Killingly and Exeter expressed a strong interest in working through this challenge as part of the Pilot.

Both towns are currently putting together local teams to help guide the Pilot at the local level. These groups will work with Pilot staff and the Pilot's bi-state Advisory Group to help shape the Pilot process in the coming months.

The first phase of the Pilot will be a robust visioning process where we hope to learn from the community members what qualities and places are most important to them to protect and enhance and what challenges they see facing their town in the future. We hope to kick off the visioning work in early 2008.

While the two towns will be going through this process seperately, we plan to provide opportunities for the two to learn from each other as well as share lessons learned with the larger Borderlands region. We'll be posting information regularly to the Borderlands website and plan to hold several regional sharing events throughout the course of the Pilot.

For more information on the Pilot and to find out how you can get involved in Exeter or Killingly, go to http://www.borderlandsproject.org/index.asp?col1=villagepilot.asp.

Ariana McBride, Economic Development Planner, RI Economic Policy Council

Village Innovation Pilot

admin — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 03:51:00 GMT

The Borderlands Project launched its Village Innovation Pilot today. The Pilot is a strategic planning initiative being offered to two Borderlands towns (one in CT, one in RI) who want to conserve critical lands by channeling new growth into existing or planned village centers. We've issued an invitation to Borderlands towns to express their interest and are looking forward to questions and ultimately responses from these towns.

The Pilot is the evolution of an idea raised at a pair of Borderlands meetings in 2005 - that the relationship between traditional village development and surrounding rural lands is an important one and can offer us lessons about how we go about achieving economic and residential development as well as land protection. Unfortunately, a lack of resources and a complex web of regulations often hinder communities' ability to explore this link.

The Pilot aspires to rise to this challenge. It aims to bring resources and expertise to two towns to help them work through these issues. With a strong bi-state Advisory Group and support from innovative organizations like the Orton Family Foundation, I think we're off to a good start. But the key to the Pilot's success will be the two Borderlands towns who ultimately serve as the Pilot communities - we intend for this to be a process driven by the towns and their citizens - we want to respond to your challenges and aspirations. We know it may seem like a very open-ended invitation - it is! You tell us what you need. And in the process we may find new ways to address community growth and conservation.

It will be experimental, it will be hard work, it will result in on the ground implementation, and it will on occasion even be fun! So, please look over the materials on the website and feel free to contact us with questions. We look forward to your input!

Ariana McBride, Economic Development Planner, RI Economic Policy Council

Innovative Planning & Development

admin — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 02:29:00 GMT

by Susan Westa (Green Valley Institute)

Last year I was lucky enough to spend a year on sabbatical with my family on the “left side” of the country (as my daughter says). As a planner it was especially interesting to see how different parts of the country are addressing many of the same land use issues we’re struggling with here in New England.

While in CA, we lived on the central coast in San Luis Obispo (SLO) County. SLO County had been addressing growth through innovative planning and development techniques for over 20 years. They decided early on that they didn’t want to grow the same way they saw Southern CA growing.

One of the tools they have used to focus growth and protect important open space is Transfer of Development Rights (TDR). The Land Conservancy of SLO County acts as a TDR Bank, facilitating the purchase of development rights from rural areas and selling development rights for increased density in downtowns and other areas identified for new growth.

The City of SLO, population of 45,000, is the center of the county and the home of Cal Poly University. Morro Bay, population 10,000, is located about 20 minutes west of SLO on the coast. Both cities have developed at urban densities and there is no sprawling development along Route 1 in between the two – no 2-acre residential lots and no sprawling commercial development. There are some institutional uses and there is a significant amount of protected land. This land has been protected through a variety of programs – agriculture, coastal zone and TDR. It was really interesting to see how these programs can be used to make a difference.

A region can grow smarter with the right tools in place and with innovative planning techniques. The Borderlands Region and the Quinebaug-Shetucket Heritage Corridor should learn from the experiences of higher growth regions and implement theses tools before it’s too late. Before we’ve lost those important farms, wildlife corridors and other open spaces we cherish and before our village centers and downtowns are lost to sprawling new development. TDR is one of the many tools that could make a difference in how this region grows.

Frugality

admin — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 19:20:00 GMT

by Vilma Gregoropolous

My family is known for being able to fix anything. One day my uncle, Lino sent his son, Abe, out to the alley to fetch an old wheelbarrow he wanted to straighten out and use. Abe walked up and down searching for a long time. He saw a pile of rubbish but he didn’t see a wheelbarrow anywhere. He finally went to his father empty-handed. Lino walked him back out to the pile of rubbish, picked up some broken down parts that had in fact been a wheelbarrow in better days, and proceeded to rebuild it. 60 years later it still works better than anything you could buy at Home Depot.

My relatives came from a little town in northern Italy called the “Furnace of Zoldo”, where people knew how to make do with what they had. After they moved to North Stonington Village, Lino and my grandfather, Noah, ran a garage and forge that had clients from as far away as New York City. People knew they could fix anything, make parts from scratch, and, just as important, they didn’t charge much. They were in business to make a living, not make a killing.

Their mindset fit right in with the local Yankees who were just as well known for their frugality as their ingenuity. (I often think my family’s ability to fix anything was in fact, inspired by parsimony, and I’m guessing the same was probably true of the Swamp Yankees here in Connecticut.

North Stonington and many of the towns around it were working-class farm towns. The character of the people who lived here was as important in shaping the town as the character of the land. Nothing was wasted, everything that could be used was put away for a rainy day or a long winter. Land was kept for farming and firewood. People built farmhouses to fit the many generations of working hands that lived in them. They built small cottages by lakes – just enough room to eat and sleep in, because they knew they were going to be fishing and picking blueberries the whole time anyway.

All this has changed. Frugality has become a lost art. People build houses that are five times as big as they need and burn what’s left of their money heating cathedral ceilings that give their homes all the cozy warmth of a hotel lobby. They build airport runways instead of driveways. They clear-cut land to create views they will never see because they are never home: two incomes are generally needed to keep up the payments. And in five years they relocate and build another mansion. Building has become an end in itself – conspicuous consumption designed to flaunt wealth.

The irony is that people move to towns like North Stonington in the first place because they want to live in the country. And thus, the guiding principle of every town plan is to “preserve the rural character”. We are more than willing to support conservation projects and land trusts. But we must also be willing to adopt the character of the people who made Connecticut what it was, realizing again, as the Yankees did, that frugality is a virtue. If the Borderlands region has preserved its character, it is because the people here knew enough not to squander what they had - whether it was a wood lot or a wheelbarrow.

Learning More About Exeter, RI's New Mixed Use Ordinance

admin — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 17:46:00 GMT

David Schweid

On August 7, 2006 the Exeter Town Council approved an ordinance to amend the zoning regulations to allow, by special use permit, residential development on the second and third floors above commercial structures in the B (business) and LB/R (light business/residential) zones.

This is a concept that has been talked about in Exeter for some time. It was discussed in the early 1990’s as part of the original work on the Comprehensive Plan for Exeter. It was formally adopted in 2005 as one of the five strategies proposed in the approved Affordable Housing Plan (now Appendix C of the Exeter Comprehensive Plan). In the Affordable Housing Plan, this strategy is forecasted to produce 40 units of low or moderate income housing over a period of twenty years. Some of the advantages of this type of development are:

Encourages economic growth
Facilitates village-style, pedestrian friendly development
Promotes compact growth with a small footprint, minimizing sprawl
Promotes the “live-work” concept, allowing people to live above their workplace
Produces low and moderate income housing (the ordinance requires 20% of all units be deed restricted for persons of low or moderate income)

There is good reason to believe this type of development will be attractive to private developers. First, there is very little multi-family development in Exeter, so a healthy demand exists. Second, this type of development is generally very cost effective as it builds on and shares the infrastructure already in place for the commercial development; septic, well, storm water management system, parking, driveways, and even foundation and utility connections, may already be in place, thus greatly reducing the construction costs.

The ordinance has built-in controls designed to insure that the regulation is used to create the type of development intended. It has a maximum density of one unit per acre, it severely limits ground floor construction, and requires that residential development does not exceed the square footage of commercial development. Finally, there is a requirement that any such development contain a minimum of 20% low and/or moderate income units.

Partly because the commercial zones in Exeter are limited to Route 2 and Route 3, there was little local opposition to this proposal. The process moved fairly smoothly, if not quickly, from concept to ordinance. The only significant controversy came from an unexpected quarter, RI Housing. RI Housing had concerns about the economic viability of the density, and even went so far as to suggest that this ordinance might not be considered a “local subsidy”. Without that designation, the LMI units produced under this ordinance would not count toward Exeter’s required 10% quota. On the face of it, this seemed extraordinary, since RI Housing had already approved this strategy in the Town’s Affordable Housing Plan. Ultimately, this has been resolved with the understanding that this ordinance is a density bonus and that if it creates qualifying affordable housing, that housing will be counted.

RI Housing also pointed out technical concerns with the ordinance, including the need to establish a process for monitoring the continued affordability of the LMI units over time. This concern and other similar technical issues, will be addressed in our inclusionary zoning ordinance, yet to be written. Exeter,like seven other South County towns, is looking to a regional Targeted Assistance Grant (TAG) from RI Housing to help develop an inclusionay zoning ordinance. In retrospect, it would certainly be preferable to develop a comprehensive inclusionary zoning ordinance that would address subdivisions, age-restricted housing, and mixed use at one fell swoop. Due to the fact that there is an opportunity to create a mixed use development now, it was not possible to wait. After all, it is true what they say, timing is everything.

Presentations from Reinventing the Village Event

admin — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 23:16:00 GMT

We've just posted four of the five presentations from the panel discussion, Reinventing the Village: Perspectives on Economic Development and Affordable Housing in the Borderlands (held May 4, 2006). In addition to the presentation slides, we have provided audio of the event so you can get the full experience! We hope to have the fifth presentation and Q&A up soon. Some of the files are on the larger size (up to 10 MB) so may require some time to download. Also, if you are interested in receiving a cd of the presentations at a higher resolution, please email me at ariana@ripolicy.org.

We'd love to get your feedback on the event if you attended or on the presentations if you are just hearing them for the first time. Did the presentations meet your expectations? Do you still have questions you'd like to pose to the panelists?

And as we plan for future events, we would love to have your suggestions on topics to cover. To post your ideas, just click on "Comments" underneath this message, which will take you to a screen where you can post your own comment.

We look forward to your thoughts!

- Ariana McBride

Wednesday Night is the Super Bowl!

admin — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 00:32:00 GMT

David Preston

There can't be a much bigger event in Borderlands history in recent memory - or in the foreseeable future - than Wednesday night's West Greenwich town meeting. This is the Financial Town Meeting where the town will decide whether to sell bonds to preserve 1,500+ acres of open space. If you have friends, relatives or even vague acquaintances who live in West Greenwich, please contact them and URGE THEM TO ATTEND WEDNESDAY NIGHT'S MEETING AND VOTE YES!

The meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, 7:30 pm at the high school on Rt. 3.

The Borderlands: Past, Present & Future?

admin — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 22:06:00 GMT

by Kevin Essington, The Nature Conservancy

When you hear “The Borderlands,” the twenty towns along the CT/RI border, what do you think of? Forests? Farms? Villages? Rural homesites? Dark skies? Quiet roads? Easy trips to cities? Families? Jobs? Recreation? Open roads?

Of course. You probably think of all of these things. Sometimes contradictory things, all at once. Because like many rural places in America, it is a complicated and dynamic place, where people and “nature” meet. Each on their own terms. The rugged landscape of the Borderlands tells us where we can and can’t build or farm. The demands of our modern society in turn set prices for the use of land and water that dictate how we build and where.

Indeed, for thousands of years, people have lived in the Borderlands. Sometimes permanently, sometimes just passing through. As Europeans “settled” the area, the axe and plow were put to work to make way for farms and later, villages. But the Borderlands was one of the last places in Connecticut and Rhode Island to be “settled” and then one of the first to be “un-settled” as the tough, unforgiving rock, sand, and muck finally wore down the areas farmers.And while the people who settled these places have moved on, their names and the places they lived remain. Tillinghast, Tefft, Dawley, Campbell, Brown: the list is too long and could never be comprehensive. As farming faded as a way of life in the Borderlands, the forests reclaimed the fields but roads, hills, and ponds kept their names.

Like the farm and forest economy, the villages in the Borderlands faded, to varying degrees, too. Places like Escoheag, Ashwillet, Pachaug, and West Greenwich Center are hardly recognizable today, if they’re there at all. But other villages like North Stonington, Rockville, Greene, Oneco, Voluntown are there, with businesses, libraries, homes, town halls, stores, restaurants, and most of all, people. These places are alive with people and history and, I daresay, with a future.

To me, it seems that these villages will be here for generations to come. Conversely, who believes that the rural housing pattern that we see unfolding before us on an almost daily basis will be here when our grand-children are grown? When gasoline is $9 per gallon will we still want to live by ourselves in our two-acre enclaves? When the large lot development pattern has used up all the remaining spaces in our towns will we still have the “country” at our doorstep?

Could there be a better approach? Could we use our villages as the nodes for future commercial and residential growth? Can we create new villages? Can we create (pardon the euphemism) “village of tomorrow” that will provide economic and housing opportunities while also retaining the rural landscape in which the village is nested?

In working for and with The Nature Conservancy since 1995, I have been fortunate to visit many beautiful natural places all over the country and (somewhat) the world. But even as a conservationist and a naturalist, my memories of these places are seen through the windows of the built environment in which I traveled. As human beings, we need both a quality built environment and a rural place to grow food and fiber. As Americans in particular, we need to know that a “wild” place exists – is a proven part of our national psyche. Villages can get us there.

I propose that the Borderlands collaborative use the deep experience of the people living and working here to guide the region towards a vision that achieves both goals: creating a living, working, built environment that is nested within a much broader undeveloped landscape. Give our grand-children the flexibility they will need to live in a world that we can only vaguely predict. Make our villages the center of our civic and working lives…and leave the farms and forests for the future.

Welcome to the Borderlands Website & Blog

admin — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 16:54:00 GMT

Thank you for visiting the Borderlands Project Website and Blog. As the homepage states, the purpose of this site is to provide you with information on the Borderlands Project, stimulate discussion on its future direction, and give you links to related resources that may be of interest. I encourage you to surf the site and send me any thoughts or suggestions - better yet, use the blog by adding a comment to this posting

Please note that we will improve this site over the coming months so make sure to check the website regularly for updates. Also, I'll be sending out notices on upcoming events and new postings via email. If you are not currently on our email list and would like to be, please fill out the contact form under the Contact Us tab on the website.

We are looking forward to your interest and participation in the Borderlands Project!

Ariana McBride, RI Economic Policy Council

A Response to the Propositions: Innovation & the Rural Village

admin — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 16:21:00 GMT

by Kip Bergstrom, RI Economic Policy Council

When I first became involved with this project my focus was on preserving the forests of the Borderlands. While I think this is still a central goal, it is much more powerful when combined with the idea of re-inventing the villages of these communities, which came up as a key idea from the small groups in the last meeting we had.

The third of the three propositions speaks to this potential. It aspires to preserve the historic form of the village… defined as a dense, mixed-use, mixed-income, distinctive, walk-able place of “human scale”…as well as by the farm and forest lands that surrounds it. A village surrounded by other villages is an urban neighborhood. A village surrounded by low-density residential neighborhoods is a town center. A village, or at least a rural village, is not a village unless it is surrounded by farm and forest.

One of the interesting things that happened when the towns in the Borderlands were expanded to the north and south, beyond those 10 we were initially considering, to the whole rural corridor on the RI/CT border, is that the most populated villages emerge as a necklace around the forest. The earlier definition of the Borderlands did not have this distinct form, which I think is very powerful.

How can this necklace of villages become nodes in a network of innovation? That is the essence of the re-invention notion: embrace the 21st Century, with its promise of collaborative networks of innovators, connected globally via the Internet and broadband communications, but also locally in the nodes of “third places” like a coffee house, pub or restaurant in a village.

We do not have cheap labor, cheap land, cheap energy, abundant natural resources to exploit, or a particularly central location in the global logistics system. We have no choice but to innovate. There is nothing else for us to do. And virtually everything we do now will be done faster by a computer or cheaper in China or India within 20 years. We have about that much time or less to invent a new economy, or else face a precipitous decline in our standard of living.

All evidence indicates that the pace of innovation is increasing in scale and scope. The years ahead will not be marked primarily by a slow, steady stream of sustaining innovation by large, established firms. We should instead expect constant and accelerating disruptive innovation, much of it driven by networks of collaborating firms that create whole new business models, rather than just new products or technologies, as the basis of competitive value. Our state economic development strategy not only acknowledges this future; we aim to help bring it on by making our state, and the eastern CT/Rhode Island/southeastern Massachusetts labor market of which we are part, one of the world’s pre-eminent test beds for business model innovation, leveraging the advantages inherent in our dense, compact geography, our short idea and supply chains, and our multi-dimensional market singularity (Rhode Island is one media market served by one regional airport, one principal healthcare complex, one retail distribution network and one primary cultural hub. How might the Borderlands piggyback on that strategy?

Over time, as collaborative innovation networks proliferate, a significant amount of work is likely to be organized on a project basis, rather than on a permanent basis. The labor force will likewise be globally mobile (both in a physical and virtual sense) and much more of it employed flexibly, on a contract basis, rather than as permanent employees. This will include the top talent, not just low-skilled temps. For many of us, the line between entrepreneur and worker will blur. Business writer Daniel Pink describes this prospect as a new “free-agent” world. Individuals will need to be global and flexible in their skills set to effectively engage emerging networks.

Much of work in the future may be organized the same way people organize themselves today to make movies. There is a core team that produces and directs the effort, assembling the various groups of talent to get the project done. When the movie is completed, the team dissolves and is reassembled in new combinations by other teams of producers and directors. So imagine a world of “production companies” and pools of “contract talent”. Imagine further that some of these “production companies” (for whatever the good or service is, not just a movie) actually have two homes: a winter location (e.g., Florida) and a summer home (e.g., Rhode Island or Connecticut. The villages of the Borderlands have a play in this scenario as both the summer home of some of the “production companies” as well as the “permanent” home of some of the “contract talent”.

One of the essential pieces of infrastructure to play in this game is broadband communications, via cable, DSL, or via the latest WI-FI or WI-MAX technology, which provides broadband wireless access at relatively low cost of tower infrastructure. Rhode Island is in the process of piloting a statewide wireless infrastructure using this new technology. It would probably not be costly to extend this network to encompass the villages of the Borderlands.

The other piece of essential “infrastructure” for Borderlands villages to play in the innovation game is a K-12 education system that produces graduates who are innovation-capable…who can think, not just memorize, who can work in teams, make decisions, take risks, learn something in one setting and apply it to another…all skills that our schools (nationwide, not just in the Borderlands) are doing a poor job of cultivating.

Some of the best work in high school reform is being done by the Big Picture Company, which operates 24 model high schools at sites around the country including six in Providence.

The focus of the Big Picture model is “Learning Through Internship.” Each student, beginning in ninth grade, spends two days a week in an internship with an adult mentor who shares with the student a passion for a particular type of work, igniting a love of learning that will last a lifetime. All the academic work in the other three days of the school week is structured on a project basis around the internship. Every 9 weeks, students defend their project work before a team consisting of their mentor, their advisor (Big Picture’s name for a “teacher”), other Big Picture Company advisors and students, and a parent or guardian. The student is responsible for the development of the internship, with support from his/her advisor.

Placing the primary responsibility for the development of the internship on the student instills the principle that students are responsible for their own learning. Consistency in the application of this principle is one of the reasons why the Big Picture schools graduate students who are self-directed learning machines, the prime talent for an innovation economy. Big Picture students go onto college in higher percentages than their peers and demonstrate an ability to apply knowledge to new situations

This model has been exported from Providence to 24 sites around the country, typically as a public charter school. It could work in the Borderlands.

Some initial thoughts. Look forward to the conversation.