11-22-1999 Council Work Session - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

I I I Orono's urban and rural areas provide distinctly different lifestyles, amenities and services ivhich jointly benefit the community as a whole. Each area has separate planning priorities and separate environmental considerations. Urban areas and urban services will not be permitted to encroach on or destroy the rural community. Historic development patterns established 100 years ago are responsible for the dual personality that characterizes Orono. The lure of the Lake drew summer residents and resorters who established the crossroads of Navarre, which continues to this day as the commercial center of Orono. Likewise, away from the Lake, Orono has developed slowly as a farming or rural residential community of agriculture, woodlands and open space. While the rural estate lifestyle has overtaken a significant portion of Orono's agricultural lands.Tthe lakeshore and rural estate lifestyles are different, the needs and desires of the citizens are different and the requirements for public services are different. Orono ’s urban areas provide ample opportunity for a vast spectrum of housing opportunities and all of the neighborhood services necessary to support the residents of the City, urban and rural alike. These areas are provided with ty pical urban ser\ ices including sanitary sewer necessary to serve the historic developed density, typically ranging from one to three homes per acre. Orono ’s rural areas provide the opportunity fur low' density housing at affordable prices, orchards, greenhouses, hobby farms and recreation areas not possible in either urban areas or in commercial agricultural areas. This low density of land use is particularly valuable as a protection for the marshlands, woodlands and other natural resources that dot the area. Here, individual sanitation is accomplished with on-site sewage treatment facilities carefully designed and monitored to assure adequate sewage treatment and complete environmental protection. Orono ’s projected population increase can be comfortably accommodated within the existing zoned densities of the urban and the rural areas without requiring anv significant increases in urban service capacity or any decrease in environmental protection or the rural sense of community . Orono's planning programs have long recognized the Development Paradox, or Urbanization Spiral, which often ro.siilts 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 e.xtending sewer systems to eliminate individual septic sy stem discharges, but by 1968, lake water quality was still diminishing. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, together with 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 and urban storm water runoff. The first major pollution source, nutrient-rich effluent from the sewage treatment plants, has been was systematically eliminated by multi-millon dollar construction of regional sew*er interceptors to retnvwe eflluent from the watershed. But storm water runoff is a different matter. Unlike point- source sewage pollution, there is no eeonom ieally practieal Nvay to artifieially-eoHcct or treat non - CMP 6-9 i