 Torrington Selected for UConn’sSmart Growth Educational Program
August 2, 2004 - Mayor Owen Quinn and the Smart Growth Work Group are pleased to announce that the City of Torrington has been accepted into the NEMO 2004-2006 Municipal Initiative. Nonpoint Education for Municipal Officials (NEMO) is a University of Connecticut educational program for land use decision makers that addresses the relationship of land use to natural resource protection.
NEMO usually selects two municipalities to work with each year, and Torrington is delighted to be chosen this year. NEMO officials were impressed with the level of commitment and issues being addressed by the Mayor’s Smart Growth Work Group. The Group has been meeting weekly in order to oversee growth and development in a responsible manner while maintaining goals for economic growth, open space, farmland protection, and protection of natural resources.
The NEMO program fits with current initiatives already underway within the City of Torrington. These include the downtown redevelopment project, the proposed Litchfield County Courthouse, the new Parks and Recreation Master Plan, the sewer capacity and use study, and the updated economic development section of the City’s Plan of Conservation and Development.
The NEMO team will provide educational workshops, publications, plan and regulatory reviews, and Internet resources to guide Torrington through smart growth planning. Upcoming workshops offered through the NEMO program for City staff, boards and commissions will include:
Developing a Geographical Information System for Torrington – A general overview of GIS and how towns can use this information in their everyday operations.
Roads and Road Standards – Gives an overview of how roads are constructed and how planning officials regulate the construction of roads. Provides ideas on how communities can design their standards to protect public safety, community character and water resources.
Economic Development – This workshop gives an overview of how communities can plan for their economic future. Looks at common economic drivers and how towns can plan for the type of development that will improve their tax base while preserving community character.
Buildout Analyses – This workshop will be specifically designed for Torrington. It will provide ways that Buildout Analyses can be done, and how Torrington can use this information for community planning.
Lot size, net buildable area, and other zoning options – A workshop that looks at specific ways Torrington can address lot density within the community in a rational and nonarbitrary way. The workshop stresses the importance of the carrying capacity of the land, particularly in areas with few public utilities.
Stormwater at your Fingertips: the new CT Stormwater Quality Manual – A new program that will debut in fall 2004, in association with the release of CT DEP’s new Stormwater Quality Manual. The program provides an overview of this document and how commissioners can use the manual to evaluate applications.
The following members of the Mayor’s Smart Growth Work Group have been named as the NEMO Project Task Force: Mayor Owen Quinn, Zoning & Wetlands Enforcement Officer Kim Barbieri, City Planner Marty Connor, Economic Development Coordinator Christina Emery, City Engineer Ed Fabbri and Public Works Director Jerry Rollett.
About NEMO: NEMO originally was conceived as a pilot project to assist local officials in three Connecticut coastal towns address the issue of nonpoint source pollution, and therefore help to better protect the water quality of Long Island Sound. The original stimulus for NEMO was the creation of a land cover database for the state of Connecticut, for the purposes of estimating nonpoint source loadings of nitrogen to the Sound. Recognizing the educational potential of the land cover information, and with funding from the USDA/CRSEES Water Quality Initiative, NEMO was created in 1991-1992 as a collaboration between three branches of the University of Connecticut: the Cooperative Extension System, the Natural Resources Management and Engineering Department, and the Connecticut Sea Grant College Program.
It took about a year to develop the initial NEMO educational program, Linking Land Use to Water Quality, that is built around geographic information system (GIS) images of natural resources and remote sensing-derived images of land cover. After a year of development and a second year of operation in the pilot towns, interest in the NEMO educational program began to spread to other towns, and Connecticut initiatives began to widen in scope. By about 1995, colleagues in other states began to express interest in adapting NEMO, and the National work was initiated. In 1999, both the Connecticut and National efforts got a technical shot in the arm from the formation of the NAUTILUS Regional Earth Sciences Applications Center, a partnership between NEMO and the Laboratory for Earth Resources Information Systems (LERIS) remote
sensing lab at UConn.
At present, NEMO has worked with almost two-thirds of the 169 municipalities in Connecticut, and the National NEMO Network has funded projects in 19 states. NEMO staff conducts about 150 educational workshops a year.
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