Planning process another beneficiary of high-tech

Vermont Business Magazine, Aug 01, 2000 by Barna, Ed

Developers come to local planning boards seeking to learn if applying for permits makes sense, and go away frustrated because only the permit process can clarify the issues.

Towns struggle to maintain a high quality of life and also ease the tax burden for their residents, which depends on increasing the tax base by attracting more businesses.

Homeowners buy dream properties in the countryside, then find their peace destroyed by the arrival of a quarry, a shooting range, a private airport, or some other project allowable under current zoning.

Land use planning, often controversial and famous in Vermont for imposing obstacles through regulatory processes, has never been easy, especially in such a diverse landscape occupied by such independent people. But technological developments are promising to facilitate everyone's decision- making, if not exactly make the decisions easier.

Geographic Information System software and data has been making steady progress, and has reached the point where in some cases threedimensional visualization of projected scenarios is possible. Along with this application of steadily increasing computational power, other technological developments, such as those in map-making, promise to help give better access to information.

Computerized GIS was a major advance from the old technique of

using overlay maps, which had information printed on a clear

background so they could be stacked to visualize the way different

elements (eg, roads and houses, or zones and wetlands, or

developments and wildlife habitat areas, etc) were related.

Brandon's Planning Commission recently learned that in doing the first comprehensive re-write of their town plan in a decade (they had readopted the old plan five years ago), they would probably be able to cut its size to a third, with more compact and focused maps helping in that process.

A number of key players are working in this field, often cooperatively. Much of the work is centered around the state's land grant college, the University of Vermont, which as part of its charter has wider public service as a mission.

The Vermont Center for Geographic Information, Inc. set up by a state law in 1994, and located at the University of Vermont, it is a nonprofit public corporation charged with the development and implementation of a comprehensive Vermont Geographic Information Strategy (VGIS). Further, VCGI makes sure that all relevant data gathered by state agencies is in a GIS-compatible form.

VCGI projects have included work on surface waters, soils mapping, the enhanced 911 emergency response system, land use in the Lake Champlain Basin, rural community development, and assistance to regional planning commissions. The regional planning bodies in turn are often called on by towns to help with the plans that by state law they must update every five years.

Some of the state's technical capability comes from UVM's Spatial Analysis Laboratory, a research facility located in the School of Natural Resources. Most of the laboratory staff are employees or students at the School of Natural Resources, but as their Web site indicates, "Our facilities are often shared with colleagues from other units, such as the Geography Department, who collaborate on our research projects.

"The mission of the Laboratory is to apply appropriate techniques in GIS, remote sensing, and spatial statistics to problems in natural resource ecology and natural resources planning. The Lab specializes in biodiversity analysis, land-cover mapping, planning for conservation lands, and development of new applications for natural resource management. The Laboratory is supported entirely by grants and contracts for research."

The tools of the trade at the lab include six Silicon Graphics

workstations (linked to provide about 43 giga-bytes), two X

terminals, two Calcomp digitizers, an air-videography interpretation

station, one black-and-white Postscript printer, one color Postscript

printer and one Hewlett Packard 650c color plotter. For software, they

have licenses to use Arc/Info 7.0.4, ArcView 2.0, Erdas 7.5, Imagine

8.2,

ERMapper 5.0 and GRASS 4.0.

In recent years, the official state capability has been joined by efforts of the Orton Family Foundation, begun in 1995 by the family that has made the Vermont Country Store and its mail order catalog worldfamous. It has undertaken a number of projects to help preserve Vermont's traditional way of life, including grants to assist country stores, citizen retreats, the publication of the book "Hands on the Land" and associated school programs about land use, and an effort to focus community issues through the making of videos keying on interviews with local residents.

In 1999, the Orton Foundation spun off the Orton Institute, an educational arm that in its own words "seeks to engage and assist citizens of all ages in making informed decisions about economic, social, and environmental issues that affect their rural communities. The Institute places a deep faith in the citizens of rural America. It does not advocate a particular position on any issue, but instead seeks to create an environment for more informed decision-making by citizens and leaders of rural communities."