Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
those areas not suitable for development and those areas best suited to specific uses and
certain development densities. In this process, the specification of density comes last.
Significant opportunities to reduce the science-policy gap also exist within the steps of
the land development process outlined above. These opportunities include the elimination
of ordinance cloning and the participation of environmental scientists during the reviews.
Local zoning and subdivision ordinances—some in place since the National and State
Planning Enabling Acts of the 1920s—were updated to reflect environmental concerns
(Hagman 1975). By the mid-1980s, most municipalities had adopted ordinances related to
soil erosion and floodplains, and many were in the process of implementing ordinances
for wetland protection, recycling, and stormwater management (Kaufman et al. 2002).
The differing origins of local environment-related ordinances and their application raise
several questions. For instance, who developed them? How did they come to exist and
evolve over time in a particular place—for example, what sort of environment and prob-
lems did the authors address? Are the ordinances equally suited to local physical condi-
tions in other places, places far from and different from the places for which the authors
designed them? Finally, if an ordinance is unsuited to local physical conditions, what are
the environmental consequences?
In a review of the ordinances of the 1778 villages, townships, and cities (minor civil divi-
sions [MCDs]) of Michigan, Kaufman et al. (2002) found that many MCDs had developed
their own ordinances, others had cloned or copied ordinances, such as those regulating
subdivisions, stormwater, wetlands, and floodplains/coastlines from other communities,
while other MCDs had adopted (copied) these ordinances from higher levels of govern-
ment “by reference” (MCL 2000).
Ordinance cloning or copying by reference can be environmentally detrimental because
the process often ignores significant differences in local environmental settings and their
physical processes and systems. For instance, there are profound differences in soil, topog-
raphy, and surface drainage patterns between the flat, clayey lake plains of the Saginaw
Valley in east-central Michigan and the hilly, morainic terrain of the Traverse Bay region
in the northwest part of the lower peninsula, yet subdivision ordinances and stormwater
infrastructure are the same in both (Kaufman et al. 2002). Figure 15.1 shows the different
landscapes of a lake plain and moraine.
In this case, the practice of cloning or copying by reference may increase the discharge
of stormwater to nearby streams and result in local flooding. Additionally, the specifica-
tion of a predefined density requirement, without considering the local environmental
conditions such as soil infiltration capacity, may lead to the overbuilding of drainage infra-
structure. From an economic efficiency perspective, the extra infrastructure is a wasted
Lake plain
Moraine
FIGURE 15.1
Lake plain and moraine. (Photo by Daniel T. Rogers.)
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