Smart Links: Turning Conservation Dollars into Smart Growth Opportunities

We need to improve the effectiveness of conservation investments by federal, state, and local governments. The Smart Links concept links conservation
funding with techniques to promote smarter growth and compatible development on nearby lands. A Smart Links funding program has two goals:

1.to ensure that the public’s acquisition funds are not spent in a way that allows conservation lands to be surrounded and degraded by continuing patterns
of sprawl, and
2.to ensure that conservation expenditures play a leveraging role by putting into place smart growth policies—such as urban revitalization, development
patterns that conserve waterways and habitat, and well-targeted improvements to transportation and infrastructure.

Public funding is used as an incentive to ensure that development is compatible with smart growth rather than sprawl. Such programs also ensure the long term
vitality of the conservation investment. No state has wholly integrated its conservation funding programs with programs to address land use and development.
Five states have committed substantial amounts of open space funding in ways that encourage local governments to strengthen their control of development.
These Smart Links states – Delaware, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey – have begun to show that a statewide vision of important
ecological lands, when coupled with attention to local land development planning, can enhance both conservation and the management of development.
Another eleven states have conservation funding programs that show some promise for the adoption of Smart Links approaches.

All fifty states are in a position to take advantage of the Smart Links concept. In general, conservation funding is rising. Indeed, proposals for substantial
federal conservation funding to states (under the proposed Conservation and Reinvestment Act – CARA), if adopted, would offer substantial opportunities
even to those states that have not yet enacted major land conservation programs. Experience indicates that model Smart Links programs should have the
following features:

1.Substantial dedicated public funding for conservation land acquisitions.
2.A single—or coordinated—statewide plan that identifies conservation priorities and development priorities for use in providing both state conservation
funding and state economic development/public infrastructure funding.
3.A grant program to local government that conditions grants for conservation funding on local governments’ (a) adoption and implementation of local
conservation plans and (b) adoption and implementation of smart growth development techniques on lands in the jurisdiction that are not slated for
conservation.

Environmental Law Institute®
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View the report at: http://www.eli.org/pdf/d12.04.pdf