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Full-Text Articles in Environmental Health and Protection
Issue Brief: Auditing Your Town's Development Code For Barriers To Sustainable Water Management, New England Environmental Finance Center
Issue Brief: Auditing Your Town's Development Code For Barriers To Sustainable Water Management, New England Environmental Finance Center
Sustainable Communities Capacity Building
This issue brief is intended for town officials who want to understand how development regulations in their community affect local water resources. Municipal development codes – the set of regulations that control the built environment – can have a great influence on the availability of clean and healthy water for drinking, recreation, and commercial uses. This in turn affects the community’s social, environmental, and economic vitality.
Comprehensive plans, zoning codes, and building standards are just a few examples of regulations that intentionally or unintentionally regulate the way water is transported, collected and absorbed. Regulations that produce dispersed development or large …
Policy Tools For Smart Growth In New England, New England Environmental Finance Center
Policy Tools For Smart Growth In New England, New England Environmental Finance Center
Smart Growth
Across New England communities have been experiencing a rapid outward surge of development away from our community and downtown centers. Effects of sprawl include a loss of wildlife habitat, farm and timber lands; increased costs of community services and higher taxes; auto-dependency, longer commutes, and increased congestion; increases in air and water pollution; a sedentary lifestyle and increased obesity; and losses to one’s sense of place and social ties.
State-level responses to sprawl have surfaced throughout New England in recent years. This report describes 11 examples of these responses, representing all six New England states and a diversity of recent …