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Chattahoochee-Hill Country gets accolades

Four new communities, two in the south and two in the west, have been selected to participate in the second round of the Smart Growth Leadership Institute’s Implementation Assistance Program, including Georgia’s own Chattahoochee Hill Country. They join just nine other communities stretching from Florida to Alaska selected last year to work with the SGLI team in advancing smart growth policies.

The four new communities are:

•Chattahoochee Hill Country, Fulton County, Georgia

•Coconino County, Arizona

•Davis, California

•Greenville, South Carolina

Selected from a pool of more than 100 applicants, the four communities will work with a team from SGLI and its partners, the University of Southern California and the University of Colorado, on such issues as revitalizing their older neighborhoods, protecting valuable farm and ranch land, providing transportation and housing choices, and enhancing the quality of the environment. Funding was provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The Smart Growth Leadership Institute anticipates selecting more communities to work with in the fall, with emphasis on brownfields redevelopment.

“Many communities want to make Smart Growth a reality, but aren’t sure how to make it happen,” said former Maryland Governor Parris Glendening, president of the Smart Growth Leadership Institute.

“These communities represent a broad range of local innovation to address growth and revitalization. Hopefully, we can help them become more livable communities and they can demonstrate the value of smarter growth to communities across the nation.”

Over the next nine months, the experts will be providing assistance to the four new communities in two specific areas:

•A “project scorecard” that will assess the smart growth attributes of a given project as a way of improving projects, making development expectations more explicit and allocating any local smart growth incentives; and

A “strategic growth assessment” that will broadly examine all the opportunities for and obstacles to change and give communities strategic options for how to achieve short and long-term results from their smart growth efforts.

Stacy Patton, President of the Chattahoochee Hill Country, remarked “This technical assistance grant will move our smart growth community certification program to an implementable level with the assistance of the Smart Growth Leadership Institute. Developers will understand early how to improve their projects. The community, the county, and the region will all benefit as a result.”

In the first round, technical assistance to communities addressed:

•Assessing codes and zoning ordinances to identify inconsistencies between smart growth policies and implementing codes that may still contain obsolete standards;

•Creating design standards and review protocol that will help achieve Smart Growth objectives and mitigate neighborhood concerns.

•Evaluating growth-related policies in a variety of areas: transportation and public works, planning, economic development and environmental protection.

•Targeting revitalization efforts at “Smart Sites,” strategic locations designed to catalyze broad-based re-investment and redevelopment.

Experiences and lessons learned from all the selected communities will help to shape a national Smart Growth Implementation Kit that will provide guidance to other communities around the nation to use as they work to implement smart growth.