Protect Goal
Protect and restore critical natural resources to ensure a resilient environment that supports healthy communities.
Why it Matters
The county's natural environment is integral to the high quality of life enjoyed by residents and visitors and serves as a foundation for our vibrant economy. Protecting woodlands, streams, wetlands, riparian buffers, groundwater, floodplains, soils, and wildlife habitat provides significant and wide-ranging benefits.
Natural resources are essential to our health and well-being. Appropriate stewardship practices provide clean air, potable water, and a safe food supply for communities. Trees and woodlands provide shade, capture stormwater runoff, filter pollutants, mitigate urban heat islands, remove carbon from the atmosphere, and provide wildlife habitat. Nature preserves, state forest lands, parks, and trails provide opportunities to enhance our physical and mental health.
A healthy environment and unimpaired natural resources are crucial elements of the county's economic well-being. Raw materials from nature are necessary for the production of many goods. Businesses require a reliable supply of water. Food production, a major component of the county's economy, depends on healthy soils. Businesses and their employees greatly value the natural and scenic beauty of the county, as well as our many parks and recreation areas.
Natural resource based planning considers the location of resources first and then plans around them. Comprehensive and coordinated planning and implementation for protection of natural resources can guide development away from critical natural areas, minimize impacts on environmentally sensitive resources, and mitigate impacts that do occur, helping to ensure overall environmental and community health.
Objectives
- Guide development away from sensitive natural resources and toward areas appropriate for accommodating growth.
- Support comprehensive protection and restoration of the county's ecosystems including woodlands, wetlands, surface waters, riparian corridors, groundwater, floodplains, soil health, steep slopes, aquatic and wildlife habitats, and natural heritage areas.
- Support municipal and regional natural resource protection efforts, and promote a resource-based planning approach.
- Promote the environmental, aesthetic, and economic value of protecting and restoring natural resources to residents and municipalities.
- Promote groundwater recharge, stormwater runoff and pollution reduction, flood mitigation and resiliency, and water quality improvement and protection to support safe and healthy communities.
- Ensure a safe, clean, long-term supply of water to meet the current and future needs of residents and businesses.
Recommendations
- Promote benefits of natural resource protection.
- Provide natural resource policy and ordinance assistance.
- Enhance countywide water resources planning.
- Monitor impacts of change on water resources.
- Enhance stormwater technical assistance and collaboration.
- Promote innovative practices for improved water quality.
- Enhance flood resiliency.
- Support municipal on-lot sewage management programs.
Metrics to Measure Success
- Natural Resources Protection — Adopted comprehensive natural resource ordinance regulations
- Improving Stream Health — Aquatic life diversity
