Webcast Two: Land Development and Growth

This webcast discussed land development and its impact on source water protection.  It specifically addressed the following questions: How can land easements and/or purchases protect source water? How does one obtain and leverage funding for land purchases? It also examined development and redevelopment tools used to address source water problems and explored the incentives that exist for developers to minimize source water contamination.

Caryn Ernst, of the Trust for Public Lands, discussed TPL's experience in partnering with large municipal water suppliers to protect their source areas through visioning, finance, and land acquisition tools.  She also talked about TPL's work raising public funds for source protection through local and state ballot measures, and leveraging those resources to bring other funds at the local, state, and federal level to bear on local source water protection.
 
Steve Jones, of the Suffolk County Water Authority in New York, discussed how drinking water agencies could promote source water protection by funding open space purchases, or helping local jurisdictions strengthen their regulatory reviews from the aspect of drinking water protection through providing GIS tools and other technical expertise.
 
Ed Holland, of the Orange Water and Sewer Authority in North Carolina, presented a case study on OWASA’s aggressive and proactive source water protection program during the past 15 years. Although watershed land is largely in private ownership, local governments in OWASA’s service area have enacted aggressive land use and zoning controls to manage development density to help ensure future water quality.