11-04-1999 Council Work Session - Laserfiche WebLink

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BASIC LAND USE CONCEPTS AND PRINCIPLES t * The land use plan is an integral part of Orono's Communit>’ Management Plan. Although the detailed policies apply specifically to this one element of community planning, the overall goals and objectives have been derived from joint and concurrent consideration of all community planning elements. Therefore, the policy decisions relating to Orono's urban-rural service areas and to appropriate use and density considerations complement and balance Regional plans with local concerns for historic development patterns, environmental protection, availability of utilities, transportation and recreational facilities, and finally fiscal responsibility. Orono's planning programs have long recognized the development paradox, or urbanization spiral, which often results from arbitrary planning assumptions or from incomplete analysis of planning alternatives. The most striking example in Orono's situation is the documented evidence that over-extension of sanitary sewers, ostensibly to solve a pollution problem, can easily in itself cause irretrievable water quality degradation of Lake Minnetonka. In the 1950's increasing urbanization all around Lake Minnetonka threatened to environmentally "kill ' the Lake by uncontrolled discharge of nutrients. Lake area municipalities began extending sewer systems to eliminate individual septic system discharges, but by 1968, lake water quality was still diminishing. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, together w ith the Lake Minnetonka Conservation District, commissioned a study of lake pollution. Completed in 1971, the "Harza Study" (A Program for Preserving the Quality of Lake Minnetonka) found that this nutrient input, particularly phosphorus, was being generated from two principal sources: the seven municipal sewage treatment plants within the watershed and urban storm water runoff. The first major pollution source, nutrient-rich effluent from the sewage treatment plants, has been systematically eliminated by multi-million dollar construction of regional sewer interceptors to remove effluent from the watershed. But storm water runoff is a different matter. Unlike point-source sewage pollution, there is no economically practical way to artificially collect or treat non-point source storm water pollution. The development parado.x is that if municipal ser\ ices are extended into rural zones, the cost of these services taxes the land to the point that development is required. Particularly in the case of sewers, even if extended to existing pockets of development "to solve a pollution problem", inflation, topography and sparse settlement combine to send costs skyrocketing. Such costs can be paid only by increasing new development, w hich in turn causes density increases, loss of wetlands CMP 3B - 4