runoff from land, development, and farm fields, that sort of thing. It’s no longer as much direct discharge anymore. It’s more of what’s running off the land. When you look at this community, for everything built before 1984, when Florida developed storm water rules, the water is funneled into the bay. So there’s a huge amount of community here that doesn’t have any storm water treatment at all. We need to go back in and try to retrofit that and create better water quality that can then support the natural systems we’re talking about. The city’s already doing it now. They put boxes under the street to catch storm water and separate the pollutants in that box underground. The other thing is what they did at Admiral Mason Park, which was a hugely successful project for our community, because you’re treating storm water and you’re doing it in an aesthetically pleasing way. Traditionally, storm water filtering has been horrendously ugly and nobody wants to be near it. There they created an amenity that’s going to bring people in around it. It’s going to attract some good development around it, where we want to see development where the infrastructure is already there.
I think it’d be smart of us to look at the new developments that are going to come in the future. Looking at ways to link that new development to preserving adjacent land in a smart way, so people have a place to go ride their bike or hike through the forest and go enjoy wildlife. BC: What other environmental issues would you like to see addressed? CW: Water quality and then habitat restoration and preservation, I would think. Restoring some of the systems I just mentioned to you and then also preserving terrestrial systems on land is very important. I think it’d be smart of us to look at the new developments that are going to come in the future. Looking at ways to link that new development to preserving adjacent land in a smart way, so people have a place to go ride their bike or hike through the forest and go enjoy wildlife. If you do it correctly, you connect these green spaces such as parks to streams and rivers. This is
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February/March 2013
something they did big time in the Jacksonville area and it was nationally celebrated, this network of parks around the city. I think there’s an opportunity to tie that to redevelopment that takes place and to smartly link those areas together in a way that maximizes the environmental value, so that wildlife can travel between them. Ecologically, you don’t want to surround a park with a development. Ecologically, its value becomes limited. Plants and animals can’t freely move about. With smart planning you can link those places. I also think about the need to develop and restore our physical infrastructure in a way that gives us choices in transportation. This is what smart communities all around the nation are doing. You think about the oil spill. It wouldn’t be smart for us to do infrastructure projects that further us down the path towards an addiction to oil. It’s going to make it more likely that another oil spill will happen; it will force us to drill even more into the Gulf of Mexico. The choices we can make will help pull us away from that addiction to oil, and will encourage people to get around by walking or biking someday. I’m talking about connecting the beach and Ft. Pickens with ferries and so on. I’m certainly on the lookout for smart investments in infrastructure that use the money wisely and that give us those choices in transportation. Nationwide people have realized that they cannot afford to continue to subsidize and pay for development in low-density, far-flung areas on the edge of town. It’s very expensive to continue to extend infrastructure when we have this tremendous amount of infrastructure we’ve already built that can be restored or revitalized. To reuse that is much more efficient environmentally and from a financial standpoint. Local governments are wrestling with budgets and keeping taxes low and providing services. It’s much more efficient to provide those services to the citizenry when development is smartly laid out in an efficient way, as opposed to pushing out to the edge of town. That may not be the smart thing environmentally or economically for the community. Communities that have had far more money than we do have realized that and are looking inward again. There are so many communities in need here. When we think about Brownsville and Warrington, places that were once thriving places, and the infrastructure is still there, but it needs to be retooled and renewed to help bring life back to those areas. That’s what smart communities all over the nation are doing, and we need to catch up and do that and not be behind. I’m certainly on the lookout for what might further us down the road toward the smart choices we need to make, as far as choices in transportation and use of our land. We need to extend the use of the taxpayer dollars, which we want to be prudent with. The other thing that comes to mind, as far as criteria for projects is longevity. Projects each have a different life associated with them, but a lot of environmental projects we think about are basically many centuries long. A lot of other parts of projects we may fund have a more limited lifespan, so we want to make sure the money is spent on projects that are really going to last. Why spend money on a project that is only going to last 10 to 20 years, as opposed to a project that will last many, many decades? We need to spend money smartly and well.