The next installment of One Region Forward’s Community Congresses is scheduled to take place next week. According to Darren Cotton, Associate Planner University at Buffalo Regional Institute School of Architecture & Planning, “after several months of Workshops, nearly 800 participants, and 115 citizen-created maps, we’ll be sharing four alternative scenarios for Buffalo Niagara’s future growth and development over the next 40 years based on what the maps have told us. The presentation and following open house session will give citizens a chance to compare and give feedback on the impacts of the four scenarios on key regional indicators such as vehicle miles traveled, transit accessibility, energy consumption, farmland lost to development, housing abandonment, infrastructure costs, property and sales tax revenues and many more.”
We’ve all seen the impacts of sprawl. It’s hard to go anywhere these days without seeing wooded areas marked with “For Sale” signs. How much land do we need? How many developments must we build? How much further must we trek? How many resources must we consume? How much infrastructure do we need to sustain the developments?
“We’ll ask participants in the open houses to consider these estimates of future costs and benefits and then let us know which of these scenarios make the most sense to them now,” said Hal Morse, chair of the One Region Forward steering committee and executive director of the Greater Buffalo Niagara Regional Transportation Council.
Moving forward, workgroups have proposed different scenarios on how to grow at a sustainable and practical rate. Whether that’s the “Back to the City” approach, or “Region of Villages” or “Sprawl Smarter” or even “Business as Usual”, it’s put to all of us to make sense of our region’s growth, now and in the future.
“It’s not about choosing one scenario over the other,” said Robert Shibley, Director of the University at Buffalo Regional Institute, which is staffing the planning effort. “We will borrow ideas from all of the scenarios and combine them in a broader shared vision for the future of the region. But we need to know what citizens think in order to get the mix right.”
From One Region Forward:
The work to date has identified some important public values. Participants so far tend to agree that we should:
· Grow where we’ve already grown to save on infrastructure and land;
· Build walkable, livable communities and preserve those that are already working well;
· Connect places better by providing more and better transportation options;
· Protect farmland, open space and natural areas; and,
· Promote growth to increase public revenue but reduce demands for service.
Check out the Share it Forward toolkit today.
The open house-style events – the third in a series of Community Congresses for One Region Forward – are scheduled as followed:
- Monday, July 21st, 5PM at the Palace Theater, 2 East Avenue, Lockport, NY 14094
- Tuesday, July 22nd, 5PM Erie Community College City Campus, 121 Ellicott Street, Buffalo, NY 14203