Grants: Land Use
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Midland County River Inventories
June 1998The RC&D conducted surveys of road stream crossings and stream bank erosion along the Chippewa, Pine, Little Salt, and Tittabawassee Rivers and along Bullock Creek in Midland County. Erosion from these sites is creating significant water quality problems in the region’s rivers and in the Bay. The inventory allowed the RC&D and other conservation agencies to prioritize areas for remediation based on the severity of erosion and other conditions. Project partners included the City of Midland, various lake associations, and City of Sanford.
“Green Development†Educational Tour
June 1998Project complete. The Land Use Task Group sponsored a tour of open space developments in Genessee and Oakland Counties. The purpose of the tour is to help inform local developers, township officials, realtors, and engineers about development practices that preserve open space and protect the environment. Forty-nine people participated in the tour, which included visits to four conservation developments, and question and answer sessions with the developers, engineers, local officials who worked on the projects. As a follow up to the tour, the Land Use Task Group worked with Thomas Township on an ordinance that provides incentives for conservation development practices. This ordinance will be adopted in December 1999. Two of the developers who participated in the project are in the early stages of planning a conservation development in Swan Creek Township in Saginaw County. The Township and the Task Group raised an additional $1,230.65 to cover the cost of the tour.
Conservation Development Recognition Program 2002
The 2002 Saginaw Bay Watershed Initiative Network Conservation Development Program was designed to follow the successful 2001 program. Based upon the WIN Conservation Development Recognition Program guidelines published in 1999, this program honored developers who employed successful open land or farmland conservation techniques within their projects.
Identifying Priority Conservation: A Green Infrastructure Based Strategy for the Tittabawassee River
East Central Michigan Planning in collaboration with the basin’s land conservancies is developed a green infrastructure based strategy for the identification of priority conservation lands within the Tittabawassee River Watershed. A steering committee made up of members of these conservancies provided project direction and model input based on the working priorities and strategies employed by their respective organizations, while facilitation and strategic visioning was guided by members of the National Park Service RTCA program. The development and need for a green infrastructure based strategy was driven by the diverse needs of these conservancies and the need for a cooperative, systemic approach to resource protection in the Tittabawassee basin. Utilizing the principles of green infrastructure, a strategy was developed which allowed the region’s conservation organizations to evaluate potential protection projects against an overall planned preservation framework while taking into account relative risk of development. Such a strategy can be used on a broad scale to target the most logical properties to protect, and on a much smaller scale for a detailed site analysis of individual ecoblocks. Geographic Information Systems and other planning information systems, utilized in conjunction with the goals and operating strategies of the collaborating organizations, were the predominant tools used in creation of this strategy.
Genesee, Lapeer, Shiawassee Greenway Initiative Project
This project continued the greenways planning activities that began in Midland, Saginaw, and Bay counties to other counties of the watershed. This project included research, planning, design, public involvement, information and education activities. Spearheaded by the University of Michigan-Flint and the Flint River Watershed Coalition, this project connected already planned greenways in the Detroit area and those being planned in mid-Michigan.