Title:داستان های موفقیت در پایداری: برنامه زمین مشترک

تاریخ پخش وب: ۲۳ آگوست ۲۰۱۳ با حمایت: Western Central Chapter توضیحات: برنامه زمین مشترک یک برنامه باغبانی و کشاورزی شهری است که توسط شهر لارنس، کان ایجاد شده است. در زمستان ۲۰۱۱، شهر املاک خالی و کم استفاده خود را بررسی کرد. ، سایت های مناسب برای کشاورزی را شناسایی کرد و این سایت ها را از طریق فرآیند درخواست برای شهروندان در دسترس قرار داد. در طول فصل رشد ۲۰۱۲، پنج سایت آزمایشی از طریق مشارکت با انجمن‌های محله، سازمان‌های غیرانتفاعی و مدارس به روی عموم باز شد. این پنج سایت شامل دو باغ محلی محله، یک باغ متمرکز بر جوانان در پارک شهر، یک باغ میوه محلی برای چیدن رایگان، و یک مزرعه بازار است که توسط دانش آموزان کالج و دبیرستان هماهنگ شده است. این وبینار یک نمای کلی از برنامه زمین مشترک، یک طرح کلی از اهداف پروژه، مزایای جامعه و درس های آموخته شده ارائه می دهد. این وبینار همچنین بینشی در مورد منابع مالی و مشارکت های بالقوه ای که جوامع یا سازمان های دیگر ممکن است در پیگیری تلاش های مشابه از آنها استفاده کنند، ارائه می دهد. توجه: این پخش اینترنتی در حال حاضر فقط برای مشاهده در دسترس است و برای اعتبارات AICP CM قابل اجرا نیست.

قسمتي از متن فيلم: It’s an only mode hello everyone and welcome to the webcast my name is Christine derse and I’m the executive director of APA Ohio and vice-chair of the Norbit ISM division today friday august twenty-third we will hear the presentation success stories and sustainability the common ground’ program for technical help during

Today’s webcast type your questions in the chat box found in the webinar tool bar to the right of your screen or call the 1-800 number shown on your screen is a list of the sponsoring chapters and divisions I would like to thank all the participating sponsors for making all of

These webcasts possible today’s webcast is sponsored by the western central chapter for more information on this chapter and how to become a member visit WCC APA org to learn more about all the chapters visit planning org slash chapters on your screen is a list of upcoming webcasts to register for these

Webcasts visit utah APA org slash webcasts and of course like us on facebook planning webcast series to receive up-to-date information on the planning webcast series sponsored by our chapters and divisions to log your cm credits for attending today’s webcast visit planning org slash cm select today’s date august twenty-third and

Today’s webcast success stories and sustainability and the webcast is available for 1.5 cm credits we are recording today’s webcast and it will be available on our YouTube channel just search planning webcasts on YouTube and a PDF of the PowerPoint will also be available upon request just email me

Planning webcast at yahoo com I’d now like to turn it over to Allison Breck who is the vice president of the western central chapter in a neighborhood planner the city of Bozeman she we’ll introduce our speaker and get us going today Thank 15 good morning and afternoon everybody as 15 mention my

Name is Allison brekkie vice president of the western central chapters of the APA which represents the states of Montana Wyoming North and South Dakota I’m excited to introduce to you Aileen horn who is the sustainability coordinators for douglas county and the city of Lawrence in Kansas and as a

Privilege of one piece of listening to Eileen speak about the common ground’ program and another webinar sessions and immediately thought of how the topic is for planning professionals across the country and Eileen’s well she coordinates the city and county initiatives and energy efficiency renewable energy waste reduction in

Cycling and local foods in addition she serves as chief public contact for these initiatives and coordinate citizen outreach programs to communicate the city and county sustainability goals and projects previously Eileen works as education outreach coordinators for the climate and energy projects which she co-created and where is she co-created

In an award-winning energy efficiency contest between six Kansas City and founded the Kansas chapter of interfaith Power and Light assisting congregations as they put their faith into action to address climate change hylian holds and master and science and national resources and the you know nearly today

PO box and a BS in biology of the Catholic University of America thanks Eileen excellent well well thank you allison and thank you christine for the opportunity to present today I’m really I’m really thrilled that we have so many registrants for the call and I’m really

Excited to to get to share this this program with you and then to take your questions at the end because they’re I’m sure you’ll have a lot of questions about the program it’s it’s been a lot of fun and I’m sure you all will come up with with great questions for me so

Thanks again to the western central chapter of the APA and and to all of you for attending today I’m really I’m really hopeful that you all can take something away from this presentation that we useful for your communities and I’m sure you know like like us here in

The Midwest and in Lawrence especially you all are experiencing you know this growing movement for local and sustainably produced food and and so many of you are probably experiencing a lot of the same pressures that led to the creation of the common ground’ program and so hopefully you can see in

It you know a potential solution for your community or or potentially you know just for some additional good ideas so just to kind of take a step back for a second and explain why a sustainability coordinator is working so feverishly on local food systems is that you know for my opinion sustainability

Is really you know these three pillars I’m sure you are all familiar with them but there’s you know economic vitality environmental preservation and then social equity and so sustainability and sustainability programming and policies are about balancing the needs of of these these three interests and what I

Love about working in local food systems and community gardening is that these are solutions that address each of the three pillars of sustainability because you know as we build a robust and vibrant local food system we can create local jobs both on farm but also throughout the food sector there are

Environmental benefits because you know the fewer miles that our food travels that’s fewer emissions and you know many of these are smaller and mid-sized farms and many of them practice sustainable agricultural practices so there are benefits to the environment as well and then there are their myriad social

Equity benefits you know improved health is critical but also making sure that our low-income populations can access this fresh healthy food produced locally and and also does community gardens really foster a great sense of community connectedness and I think that’s a that’s important facet of sustainability

As well so just for a little bit of background about why a lot of my work here in Lawrence Kansas and Douglas County is focused on local food systems so kind of back to those those pressures I was telling you about so here in Lawrence we’ve we’ve seen this rising

Demand for local food in our communities we’ve seen a meteoric increase of vendors at our farmers market we’ve had a lot of eat local events organized around food day there are school gardens now in in many of the elementary schools and all four of our our middle schools

And there’s a general enthusiasm in our community for for food production and community gardening and whether that was driven by the recent recession and people’s desire to maybe produce some food you know in a more economical manner or whether it’s you know by this by this overall focus again on our on

Our food and health we just we definitely have seen a spike in interest in the past three or four years and as a city we kept getting requests that we establish a community gardening program and many of you might be from cities where this is something that’s managed

By the city but here in the city of Lawrence we really struggled because you know many models that we kept looking at were managed by the parks and recreation department within a city and you know the city was responsible for coordinating sign ups and maintenance through the Parks and Recreation

Department but but you know many of you might also be experiencing this reality where we’ve had a parks and recreation department that has suffered significant staffing setbacks and therefore couldn’t take on another another program and in the past we’ve had these you know munity Gardens can scattered throughout

Our neighborhoods but they were run by neighborhood organizations they often weren’t well coordinated and so sometimes after a couple years the enthusiasm would die out you’d end up with you know a weed patch and then further skepticism in the community about the value of community gardening

So all of those elements were kind of happening in in 2010 and 2011 when we first started talking about how to formulate the common ground’ program the other important contextual piece is that here in douglas county we have a Food Policy Council that was established by our County Commission in late two

Thousand nine that group works on identifying benefits challenges opportunities for a successful food system and that group reports directly to our County Commission and provides recommendations for policies and programs that we can undertake in Douglas County to increase our local food supply build jobs etc so this is an

Important stakeholder group in the conversation in our community and I wanted to show you a little bit about the sectors that are represented on our Food Policy Council so we worked really hard to create a Food Policy Council that represented producers but also consumers so restaurants grocery stores the large institutional food purchases

In our community like the hospital and the school district and then many of our nonprofit extension and business community partners and and I think the important point and the reason I wanted to share this with you is that ideas that like common ground and like others

That are going to require a lot of stakeholder engagement you know it was great to have the Food Policy Council to vet this idea with first and to have a body to go to to to get some feedback on the program and so this was a really

Useful tool for us to kind of have this mini focus group that represents a broad swath of the community so the Food Policy Council when it was when it was formed was charged with recommending policies to improve our local food system and so there’s a general wreck mission amongst the stakeholder group

That well we could I guess makes him stuff up or maybe we should just educate ourselves first and so we we spent about a year in the process of conducting a food system assessment so we worked with Kansas State University and we looked at the three counties surrounding lawrence

And douglas county and as you can see from the table of contents what we looked at in this food system assessment is what is the current level of production what is order consumption patterns looking like across the county how do we process and distribute food within this region what food insecurity

Challenges what might we have and were the economic impacts of food in our community and so understanding our local food system and really thinking hard about all of these components was a really great foundational move for the Food Policy Council and and we found you know a lot of really enlightening

Statistics but there were a couple key ones that really turned our focus towards community gardening urban agriculture and this focus on increasing food production within city limits and so those are on this slide you know we looked at the entire local food systems model from growing to processing to

Buying cooking and eating and disposal we looked at all of those pieces and there were a couple things that jumped out at us first there is a definite need from a health standpoint because fifty-four percent of our community is either overweight or obese and so we knew we needed to provide some healthier

Food choices we also as part of our food system assessment used the USDA food desert locator tool and now I believe it’s called the food environment atlas but it’s a tool provided by USDA that allows you to enter in census census tracts or zip codes and find out information about your citizens access

To foods and we found it to be a really useful tool and discovered that 10,000 of our residents in Lawrence which is a community of just 90,000 have limited access to grocery stores and limited access to healthy food choices we also found in our food system assessment that we’re spending 392

Million dollars in our tri-county area and so there’s a significant economic impact of food and a potential to bring that bring some of those dollars back locally but the other one that really focused our attention on urban food production and bringing some food production back into the city was that

Less than point 1 percent of the farmland in our tri-county area is actually devoted to fruit and vegetable production and don’t get me wrong we have lots of lots of farms in Kansas and we produce a lot of you know beef cattle and also the three you know three major

Quantity grain crops corn wheat and soy but we have very few acres that are devoted to fruit and vegetable production so the fact that a lot of our community members don’t have access to healthy food and we don’t have a lot of land in production right now we’re we’re

Two pieces that that kind of led us to this discussion about increasing urban food production but the Food Policy Council kind of gas dell buyout until until we got a new mayor so on the right is mayor Bob Shum he is he’s been on the City Commission several times and and he

Became mayor in 2010 and is an enthusiastic gardener himself has an urban gardening plot and started talking to the Food Policy Council about what can we do to to start to get some some more local foods grown in our neighborhoods so the stars for us really aligned because we had a food system

Assessment and robust data that made the point that urban agriculture is important in our community we had a lot of citizens and requests already 44 gardens and community gardens and now we had some political will behind it as well and you can definitely achieve a community gardening program with you

Know without this this trifecta of events but for us they were really three key components that helped create a fertile sorry for the pun environment for the development of community gardens an urban agriculture in our community so you know as you’re thinking about if this is a potential fit for your

Community I wanted to provide you some background on kind of the the context that that led to us developing the common ground’ program and like all good ideas the the common ground’ program didn’t come out of nowhere I want to give credit where credit is due and cite

Some of the programs that we looked at early on to help us design the model although you know Cleveland and boston are much larger communities than Lawrence there were some inspiring lessons to be learned in these in these two cases I really learned a lot from the two communities in terms of their

Process for identifying vacant properties and also the the component that really attracted me to these two programs is that they put the responsibility on the applicant and not the city so they didn’t develop community garden programs that were run through the city as a city function but instead looked around at their vacant

Land and said let’s create a competitive RFP process that it makes this land available for urban agriculture but at that point what kind of turn over the keys if you will to to the proposal to the proposing entity and and this really shaped our thinking about designing a

Program that we didn’t have to actively manage as much and that was key for us as I explained because we didn’t have the staff to do it and and you know definitely needed an alternative model so we started gearing up the program in 2011 and I wanted to share with you some

Of the some of the goals that helped us form the program so the overarching goal right is to you know license City properties for the cultivation consumption and potential sale of fruits and vegetables and that could either be a for-profit or not-for-profit enterprise so we were very open in our

General goal but then we also wanted to you know make sure that we were meeting the community’s needs in terms of local food nutrition and economic development so you’ll see that many of our goal here have to do with meeting these broader community goals related to local

Food economy we had heard her we had heard from many small and beginning farmers that land prices out in the county were we’re prohibiting them for from starting up you know small vegetable and fruit production farms so providing land for some small entrepreneurs to get started was was

Part of the impetus for the program we also wanted to support our communities healthy food initiatives that were happening throughout the county we also wanted to address food access issues and this was a this was an invention I think of ours because I haven’t seen it in it

Replicated another model but the piece of a community benefit plan is something that was unique to our program and I’m really thrilled that we stumbled upon the idea because it has been one of the best successes of the program but basically we required citizens when they applied to the common ground’ program

For a piece of property to to grow food on that they would include a community benefit component and the reason for this is that you know we have to make the case that there’s a public benefit here that that you know if someone gets to start a farm on an acre of city-owned

Property there’s a they already kind of have a leg up on the competition because they’re not paying to lease the land or to buy the property and so the community benefit plan was a way to build in the recognition that they have to pay back

Or or pay it forward if you will but that community benefit component was proposed by them in their applications and i’ll talk more about those examples in a second but i wanted to highlight them we’ve also wanted to support neighborhoods and you know the staff

Bonus is that now we don’t have to send staff out to to mow these properties so that was a win-win for us in that way as well it’s a little bit about the process we met with key city staff in in planning in stormwater and Public Works

And Parks and Rec and surveyed are vacant city properties and what we’re really looking for here were vacant or underutilized properties we wanted them to be near neighborhoods we especially I wanted them to be near some of our low-income census tracts that had been identified as food deserts we were also

Looking for access to an existing water meter to avoid that infrastructure costs we were also interested in knowing a little bit about the land use history to make sure that we weren’t making a property available for agriculture that potentially had a use on it previously that would have made it not fit for

Growing food you’re actually in the soil and we also were looking for ones that were unlikely to experience development pressure anytime soon because you know that’s one of those like worst nightmare headlines for a commissioner is like Beloved Community Garden bulldozed for a warehouse or something so those were

That those were the key components that we were looking for and then we also went to the next step in designated some of community gardens and some as preferred farming locations because we wanted to have a little control and say we really don’t want you to farm in the

Middle of this subdivision but we’ve got a great spot for you to farm just outside of town or Drina just on the edge of city limits and we thought if we managed it a little bit that way by designating them as preferred for one of the other that we could you know

Hopefully mitigate any kind of citizen complaints or issues so our process was we posted a map of available sites on the city’s website we did a press release we hosted a couple open meetings met with neighborhood associations and nonprofit groups and then we also sent out neighbor notification letters to say

You know we’re looking around we’ve identified a spot for a potential community garden please let us know if you have any concerns if you have any questions or if you’d like to apply because we really wanted the neighbors and the neighborhoods to apply themselves if they were interested so

You know as you can see we in that first year selected a wide variety of acreages and you know ranging from little third acre plots to to some that were you know almost 20 acres the larger plots actually didn’t get much interest at all it was the smaller in town Lots that

Were much more popular so our process was we published a request for applications on the city’s website and we asked for the components in the application we said we want a narrative description what are you going to do is it a community garden is it is a children’s garden orchard you

Know what what’s your plan we want to design drawings and as planners you’ll appreciate this we wanted to know which crazy outlandish things they were trying to put in a flood plain or you know just to make sure that it was consistent with with our vision for for that site we

Also wanted to know their business or fundraising plan because this was really critical since we weren’t going to be offering them any infrastructure support or helping them build fences we wanted to make sure that they had a plan for how are they going to get that community

Garden up and going and and make it look nice or how are they going to get their business going you know from that from the get-go we also asked for a detailed description of that community benefit plan so we asked them to tell us you know recognizing that this is this is

Public lands that you get to utilize how would you how would you like to to benefit the community and so many of them outlined plans related to donations to food pantries or classes that they were going to teach or field trips they were going to be open to and so that was

Really fun to see those creative responses that came back and then we also ask them to sign a rules and procedure sheet that says that they would adhere to our city codes and procedures and i’ll talk more about that a little bit the applications were reviewed and scored by the Douglas

County Food Policy Council and then we sent our recommendations on to the City Commission and so these are our 2012 sites and so as you can see in 2012 we opened up for properties to community gardens one was a community orchard and one was a market farm so we had great

Diversity that year and the applicants if you look down the applicant column you’ll see that they varied considerably so we had you know a nonprofit organization we had a community college citizen group and then the lawrence fruit tree project which is not an organized nonprofit but kind of a neighborhood

Represented group so we had a variety of applicants and they all came up with really interesting community benefit plans in terms of classes on gardening and food preservation partnering with the Ballard Center which is a center that serves low-income members of our community workshops and supplying food

To schools so those are some of their community benefit plans that we we found really inspiring so I thought I would show you some before and after photos because this is really the fun part so these the before photos were all taken in February of 2012 and then after

Photos were taken in July so in just five short months so this first one is a vacant lot sits in a neighborhood in East Florence which is one of our identified food desert so we purchased it as a stormwater lot and therefore was it weren’t planning to develop it and it

Was just sitting there so by July it was the Penn Street community garden that has 15 10 by 10 plots available for for rent and so the sustainability Action Network applied to us as the licensee and then they subleased and managed a community garden so we didn’t have to

Deal with taking you know the the money from any of the community gardeners or helping with infrastructure they they did it all themselves the next is a vacant lot that was it also in east lawrence and one of our identified food deserts and also adjacent to a city-owned recreational path so just

Across the bridge there’s a little recreational path that you can see and the lawrence fruit tree project approached us and wanted to design a community orchard so they planted over 30 perennial fruit trees and berry bushes and i’ve gotten some great grants to do signage and educational kiosk and

Have really developed that in to almost an arboretum like setting and so now on year to some of the some of the bushes are starting to bear fruit but it’ll be at the long-term investment but their goal is is that it’s you know kind of a walkable food forest that citizens can

Easily access for recreational trails or from the neighborhoods the Nexus this is the groundbreaking at John Taylor park so this is a park that you know city-owned and there was a half acre in the back that was really underutilized the only conflicting use we came up with was that

One neighbor was illegally letting their dog run around on it so there wasn’t much competition for this space and in that same park there’s a great new playground system and a walking trail so it was already actively used but the back was just kind of ignored so we took

The back half acre and broke ground and I believe this was in march i think it was actually st. patrick’s day because we were planting potatoes but we broke ground and by july it was the garden incubator at john taylor park so this this group the applicants that applied

For this one actually really wanted to focus on young children and creating sensory gardens of plants that smell good they have these little adorable meter by meter plots for for kids to garden in so their focus was on a community garden and also a children’s educational garden and then our fourth

Property was a vacant lot that we purchased actually for a pro pump station which you can come see in the back of the photo there and it was leased by Johnson County Community College and an a student organization to do a market farm so this is community college students and middle school

Students that partnered to run a market farm and they actually sold produce at the farmers market and learned all about kind of that the entire process of producing food marketing and and selling food from the site so this is kind of the summary of 2012 we had for gardens a

Total 41 gardeners participated in these in this space is so these are people that rented actual plots all of those gardens hosted classes and community work days throughout the year so 59 total community work days and then you know you can see the the number of volunteers that participated over 640

People helped with that and then you know we estimated based on the acreage that we probably produced about 6,000 pounds of food with a market value of almost twelve thousand dollars on those sites and a full ten percent of that was donated to just food our local food

Pantry so the community benefits were definitely evident as we you know as we monitored and evaluated the program so it gave us the confidence to try it again so this year we added three new properties to the common ground’ program the the first one was one we really have

Been trying to get was it was a focus on an incubator farm to really meet the needs as i was telling you those young farmers who want to start fruit and vegetable production operations but can’t afford county land prices and therefore kind of get stuck and so the

Incubator farm was our way to to try to make some larger acreage available so that was a five acre site we ended up sub dividing it by into three different plots because we had three applicants that were all very capable and none of them wanted all five acres at once so we

Have three independent market farms growing vegetables perennial crops and we have a hops grower turu some local beer so that one’s been a lot of fun not not brewing on site just to be clear and so they are donating their produce to food pantries then we also started to

New community gardens the one once the one in the middle is kind of interesting they they’ve built a permaculture garden so based on the principles of permaculture and so there aren’t actually individual plots but it’s all kind of communally worked and maintained and then the third one is kind of a

Neighborhood association adopted community garden they’re also really smart with their community benefit plan they’ve been advocating to get a water meter installed and so they all summer have been diving produce to the water department to kind of butter them up which i think is fantastic so here’s

Some photos of those here’s the perma common garden this is the permaculture one they participated in a food garden tour a day so you can see all the people that turned out for that this is mellow fields urban farm set up at the farmers market they’re one of our farm

Earth that’s growing in the incubator farm and and then this is the pearl Clark community garden the one that’s been donating produce to the water department to try to get their their water meter installed in a timely manner so those are our three new additions

This year and and I would say that you know that the urban the urban farm has been and the incubator farm has been a challenge it’s dramatically different we thought of these community gardens are so easy but managing you know five acres and coordinating three producers on that

Space has has definitely been a little more challenging this year so we’re learning a lot okay so for the details of the program and how we make it work so we it is a three year rolling license if the city establishes with a grower a business or a non-profit in our case we

Decided to install water meters at our own cost because we have a municipally owned water utility and we felt that you know these are City properties and therefore you know the infrastructure that is installed on them should be to be ours and is a cost that we can pay

Also because at about you know twenty five hundred dollars in installation that would be a significant barrier to all of these community gardens and urban farms and would probably have killed the program early on we do ask the growers though to pay for any additional water infrastructure passed the meter so any

Irrigation systems they set up spigots hoses etc are their costs and then of course we ask them to set up an account with our billing department to pay for any water that they use we also ask the growers to maintain the properties in compliance with all of our ordinances

And codes relating to you noise and weeds etc so we walk the boat through those with them to make sure that they understand because farming can be noisy operation and also from the community gardens like to have parties and events and barbecues and and so we wanted to

Make sure they understood how they need to be good neighbors in our case we pay the liability insurance and a little bit about that so in our license we were choir the growers to have liability insurance up to believe $500,000 but the in the reason we do this you know is to

Protect them to protect our property to hold the city of Lawrence harmless etc but what we found is that it’s really hard to get an agricultural liability insurance coverage on such small properties we found that insurance companies would ensure and you know they would charge three hundred dollars a

Year but their risk they you know what they communicated to us because their risk is actually higher because they’re you’re in an urban setting and they felt like the three hundred years as they were getting wasn’t really justifying them writing the policy and so the first

Year we went out and we encourage the gardener’s to buy their own insurance and most were able to do it no problem but this year we found that those same companies that were willing to do it last year had taken a second look in it

And decided not to so what we did is we found an insurance policy where we aggregated all of the acreage and and added that you know pulled them all together into one one set of properties for insurance purposes and then the city paid the bill to have that done because

Again the cost was high enough that it would have been prohibitive for those gardens to get started this is where that political will piece becomes really critical when you have to start paying for water meters and insurance so we do allow subleases to the garden participants but we don’t have any hand

In that so what we do is we we lease it to the nonprofit or to the neighborhood association and then they take it from there they set their own community garden rules they set their own prices for plot rental and they said you know their their own schedule it’s all up to

Them we do ask them to adhere to our Parks and Recreation approved agricultural chemical policy we do have a integrated pest management policy and some pesticide free parks here in our community and so we asked them to adhere to the list of banned chemicals and and preferred chemicals in case although on

All of our cases they are growing organically and then the oversight is by me the sustainability coordinator and the food Elsie counsel and this is a question I get a lot about its how much time does this actually take in terms of staff time and as you can imagine there’s a

Lot on the up front while you’re looking for properties and establishing licenses and doing the paperwork piece but once the growing season gets going I hardly ever hear from my growers except for them to sometimes say hey we have way too many tomatoes where can we donate

These or in the very few handful of cases where I get a neighbor call you know with a concern so you know i would say that there’s more work on the upfront obviously to get started but once the gardens are going there’s very little staff time and administrative

Oversight required so this is these are two things I get a lot of questions about so I thought I would try to address those you know kind of at the outset the license is a three-year rolling license and the reason we did this is because we wanted growers to

Feel like they can invest in the soil fertility we wanted them to understand that you know the city wasn’t going to yank this land out from under them and so they could feel like they could invest in some infrastructure and and soil fertility so the way the rolling

License works is the ban of three years if all is going well we just pack on three more years on to the end of the lease so there’s a built-in kind of evaluation point and then and then lease extension if they’re complying the license also references our program

Guidelines we ask them to sign off that they’ve you know read the city codes and they they know all of those pieces and then it outlines their insurance requirement which is comprehensive general liability which as I stated earlier the city has this year in 2013 picked up for our gardens and a couple

Things about that guidelines document so you know we say they have to maintain properties and compliance with noise and weed codes but we also got a bunch of questions about these items I wanted to give you a heads up a lot of them want to have community work days where they

You know barbecue or grill so we had a lot of questions about that we ended up compromising and saying you know with written permission but we really didn’t want people to be able to use it at any time on the sites and potentially create a fire situation we did get a lot of

Requests for building tool sheds our potential gazebos or bench is and so what we did for that is we said you know by written permission of the planning department we also had a lot of questions about on-site sales and farm stands directly at the garden or

Farm site and that is not allowed in our lawrence city code so we did not allow on-site sales but it’s something to consider if that’s allowed in your community and then the community gardeners often wanted access to rest rooms which is something we’re still trying to figure out how to do putting a

Port-a-potty in in a community garden seems like a pretty quick way to get some citizen complaints so we’ve really encouraged them to work with the neighbors and the adjacent homeowners and you know garden with them so that maybe the neighbor would let them use the restroom but really that’s the best

Solution we’ve come up with so if anyone on the call today as a better idea I would love I would love to hear it and so just just a couple last few slides to wrap up some of the key considerations if you’re considering doing a common ground’ program and I’ve talked about

Many of these is establishing that license terminal lengths that works for the city and also works for the growers figuring out who’s responsibility the water meter and infrastructure is what we found is that if we hadn’t done it I don’t think any of these would have

Gotten started or if they had they would have spent all of their money and all their grant funding on the water meter and therefore not had any money to do the other things that really makes them look like vibrant spaces with signage and fencing and sheds and raised beds

And all of that so we felt in the city of Lawrence if that was though the cost that we should there and be really clear about your goals I’ve seen models that do market farms I’ve seen models to do community gardens were attempting to do both but really you know understanding

What audience you’re trying to reach and and designing a program that reaches that audience one lesson that we learned was the land use history you know we got a lot of questions from citizens about you know what was on this what was on the vacant property before and is it

Safe to to grow food in the soil and so you know many of the Extension Office soil tests do not include looking for heavy metals and so we actually partnered with a research team from the University of Kansas to come out and do some soil sampling

And test for heavy metals and we found that to be a great way to do the data collection to make sure that we were offering properties that were that were safe to our citizens so that’s something to think about as you’re you’re picking sites we also found that we had

Originally listed some sites but because they’re close to our levee the Army Corps of Engineers had some strong opinions about what can and cannot happen there so we ended up having to pull some from that first round because we we found other additional restrictions also the neighbor participation and notification process

If you can go to neighborhood association meeting send out notification letters that has really helped us not receive a lot of citizen negative citizen feedback and comment because they felt like they were notified and engaged early and then you know a lot of questions that we had will

We allow fences what about hoop houses for season extension what about chickens on the property so those are all things to kind of think through as you’re potentially considering a program like this so a couple of our lessons learned we found that this program has been great because we targeted our so-called

Food deserts that areas in our community where there are low income members of our community who lack lack access to fresh and healthy fresh healthy foods in the first year we did a great job of partnering with organizations with proven capacity so we’re really picky

And I would encourage you to be picky in those first couple years to make sure that you get organizations that you know have the capacity to pull together neighbors to run a community garden and to do it well because as you know it only takes one bad example to really

Jeopardize a program the the commissioners were kind of our audience that was most skeptical in terms of weight so we’re going to we’re going to do this for free we’re going to give them this land for free and and you know what do we get back further how do we

Answer to you know any taxpayers who say wait a minute this person beginning to make money off of off of publicly owned land and I think the two things that helped them understand was that we were requiring this additional community benefit plan we’re requiring these growers to donate to food banks or to

Host classes if there was another of public benefit there and and then also you know when the plots are small the the money that the city would make on charging a market lease was was minimal so once they understood that it wasn’t a wasn’t a tough sell monitoring

And evaluation so you can tell the story you know ask the growers to keep track of of their production they’re doing that anyways if you know if they’re selling it and so understanding how much they’re growing and for the community gardens we didn’t ask them to waive

Produce but instead you know track how many events you’re having track how many workshops you’re having tell us how many people came so that we can tell the broad story together and then also partnerships you know reaching out to the community to make sure that all the

Organizations that you can think of that would be interested in this heard about it in the beginning we did some you know really targeted marketing to make sure that a lot of the groups that we knew were active in local and sustainable food and gardening and you know the food

Community were engaged and also many of them works with corporate sponsors so they went to our hardware stores and went to businesses and in solicited donations so we know many of our signs say fence brought to you by Cotton’s hardware and so it shows the the community business support as well so I

Wanted to you know kind of wrap up the common grounds discussion and take some questions in a second but I also wanted to point out this resource that has been really helpful for for us in douglas county with our Food Policy Council work and this is a report that was a

Partnership with APA and several other entities to look at how do we plan for food access and community based food systems and what are the planning components of that so it was a scan of comprehensive plans and sustainability plans to find where and how cities and counties are addressing local food

System development and it has been really helpful for us and engaging our planning department we now have the associate director of our planning department sits on the Food Policy Council and is a very active member and so you know that it was a helpful way for us to

Speak the planter language of you all to two other stakeholders and to help too and to help to look for national best practices and it was so informative in fact that we decided to invite the lead author Kimberly Hodgson who is now a consultant with cultivating healthy places to a food systems planning

Workshop that we had here in the county last fall and these these six bullets are kind of the the planning pieces that came out for us in terms of what local food systems work do we need to do and i bolded the second one because this is

Something that if any of you have ideas for how to achieve I would love it if you emailed me because you know that one of the things that came out of the group that was very planning focused we had a lot of planners and elected officials

Was the establishment of a food plan a standalone food plan or potentially a food chapter of our comprehensive plan that would outline many of these initiatives and and how we can use planning tools to achieve them and so you know this is something we’re definitely actively still working on but

I did want to point out that there is a lot of planning wisdom that we we’ve tapped into to help us with kind of our broader goals as you can see they’re related to food systems development so I definitely want to get to your questions and I realize I probably talked longer

Than I plan to so um I’m happy to take questions and take ideas and continue the conversation great Thank You Eileen this was really great um we do have a lot of questions coming in so let’s go ahead and get started the first one is organic farming part of this effort and

If so how are you countering the cost of disincentives of going organic um so we did not we were not prescriptive about growing methods so when we lease the property we don’t tell the producers what growing methods to use we encourage them to follow our Parks and Recreation

Chemicals policies and so not to use the banned chemicals that our parks department doesn’t use but we don’t prescribe whether what types of growing methods people can use great and the Food Policy Council I noticed there was no food bank representative or anyone representing the low-income community but you said that equity of

Low-income access to local food was a pillar of the program how is low-income need being identified so in the past we have had representatives from from the food security community and we’ve had we have a really close connection with our director of our food bank but that’s that is actually a really important

Point to make is that I think sometimes food policy councils you know we’ve we forget to include members of the community that we’re designing so-called programs for so we worked with our health department to do focus groups in these neighborhoods related to access to healthy food so we actually sat in on

Focus groups and heard from citizens talking about their challenges with transportation to access healthy foods and and barriers to cost in terms of their concerns about cost of food at the farmers market etc so we piggybacked on a Health Department initiative to listen in on those conversations but that’s

That’s a really good point have you faced land use zoning related problems with implementation a few some of our sites were in floodplain areas and so when the community gardens wanted to build sheds or build some structures we had to go through you know planning review process for those we do have an

Ordinance that allows allows chickens but we haven’t had any of our gardeners or growers be interested in that yet so we haven’t had to utilize that ordinance so it was primarily what else did we discover oh yeah so we have an open space designation in our parks that’s

The zoning category and agriculture is actually a band used in those so we had to kind of make an exception for our parks because we didn’t realize it until the program had already initiated so understanding the land use and making sure that you are not proposing a community garden in a

Zone where agriculture is not allowed but we were able to make an argument that a community garden is more recreation which can occur in open space it’s that’s how we worked around it but that was that was an initial land use related challenge great do applicants for community gardens have to identify

Measures to secure the site to prevent theft or vandalism no we didn’t we didn’t ask them to outline a plan for that thus far we haven’t had any problems with it I think you know we encourage them all to never leave tools or equipment out and you know help them

Locate appropriate locations for for a locked shed but we didn’t really do anything security wise you know one of the things that helps most is this if the neighbors the adjacent homeowners are really aware of the program if they’re gardeners themselves and you know talk to them about keeping an eye

Out when selecting a vacant site for a garden use how concerned were you about the future plans that the city may or may not have for the site even though you have a lease end date once a community garden is established and doing well it would likely be very

Difficult politically to end the lease for some other use in the future absolutely we had several properties on our list on our first list the first draft that would have been fantastic for farming but we’re close to areas that are experiencing development pressure or you know close to business parks and so

Those were taken off the list we we focused on city parks that were already designated as such and you know tried to find vacant and underused portions of areas that were parks here in the city of Lawrence we have a lot of parks that we have park plans for that we haven’t

Quite developed yet and so we worked with Parks and Rec to find sections of parks that you know had no planned use on them yet and then a lot of the lots that are in the in the cities in the city neighborhoods are stormwater purchases and so those you know would not be

Resold to be developed and so we focused on that exactly because yeah if you have a beloved community garden that is bulldozed for a building you’re going to hear about it for sure with that will applicants get an early warning that the license will not be renewed in other

Words how early will the review process begin in the middle of year to or not until the final month or so so each year we we’ve been well we’ve done it two years now but we’ve met with them each time to check in and make sure that

Their plan is to still continue and that our plan is to still continue so at this point we’ve we’ve just managed it that way but we actually are so the attorney required a thread in the lease that either party can terminate with just 60 days notice so if if for some reason

That pump station you know we need to get into the site we we reserved the right to get into those properties one has a sewer line that runs down the middle of the property so we told the gardener’s don’t put anything on top of this give us a 10-foot easement on

Either side so they used it to build like a green way between their plots but because you know in recognition the fact that these are city-owned and if there’s a city infrastructure need we have to get into it we wrote int that into the license that if we need to get in you

Know we will do that to do work and in terms of severing the license thus far how we’ve managed it is just staying in good communication with them each year to make sure that they intend to continue and that we intend to continue great we have a few water questions okay

Any of the gardens use rain barrels yes several of them have utilized rain barrels one even signed a memorandum of understanding with the neighbor to collect off the neighbors roof and the neighbors gardener at the plot and was enthusiastic about it cool but how did you divide the water cost

Between users so we didn’t we asked you know the licensee is the one person that we have a relationship with and that makes the administration of this so much easier I know who my seven points of contact are for these seven sites and each of those seven people has an

Account with our water utility billing department and how when they get the water bill for that meter then they go back to their 15 community gardeners or their three farming partners and divvy it up that way but we we don’t we don’t manage that that part of the process and

I think that really is part of the simplicity for us and one of the benefits is that that we don’t have much oversight of that do you however reserve the right to shut off water in a drought for example yes so in our emergency water plan we do have a tiered number of

Uses that we go to first last year we’re in the third year of a three-year drought and we’re just coming out of it now and so at the peak of the drought we were having active conversations about that but we never got down to that point

Of the list we were still asking golf golf courses and larger water users first so yeah in a point of an extreme drought we would be asking all residents to curtail their their water use what we have a sustainability advisory board in the city that works with our city commission and they’re actually

Interested in revising that language to make vegetable gardens exempt so that in case of extreme drought you couldn’t water your lawn but you could keep your food growing and so they are they are looking at that amendment currently are there any other low-impact irrigation methods besides rain barrels um I

Believe the one of the incubator farms has drip tape in a drip tape irrigation system for I mean that’s active but at least better water usage I don’t I don’t believe so I don’t think I mean besides good like mulching I don’t know of any others okay um now a different bank of

Questions is there any outreach to low-income community specifically to participate in gardening not just to benefit from donated food or is that a plan for the future so the organizations that we partnered with so the gardens are all located in those food desert areas so we intentionally were looking

For and many of you will find this to that you know when you go to look for the vacant properties many of them our they’re vacant lots already in the older sections of of your city and potentially some of the areas of the city where lower-income residents live and so you

Know many of the in town vacant lots that we found were already located in in those food deserts so we invited them to participate by going to neighborhood association meetings and working with neighborhood groups one of the groups went and did canvass the the four blocks around the community garden to invite

People to sign up so they were invited to be participants one good example is the children’s garden that was at John Taylor park that I talked about that garden is located next to a head start preschool and food bank and so the preschoolers have one you know meter by

Meter gardening plots as part of their activity time and that the produce that they’re growing is going home with with families so yes we’re trying it as best we can to to be sure that it meets that goal of addressing the low income populations needs in terms of access great oh

We have some chicken questions the first one how how were you and or partners able to convince the city to allow chickens what zone districts permit this what is the limit so the I was this is actually before my time but I believe five years ago so before my time is

Sustainability coordinator about about five years ago the city did pass an ordinance to allow raising of chickens in residential areas we have a limit per lot and I believe it’s two per and there’s a there’s a size I’m sorry I don’t know very much about that particular ordinance so we we do allow

It I would say it’s utilized pretty sparingly in our community I don’t I don’t see a ton of people growing or raising raising chickens and utilizing eggs and we haven’t had any requests on our community garden plots yet although we told them technically that’s allowed because you’re in a residential district

But we didn’t have anyone propose that are there any requirements for sensing in of the chickens Christine can you say the question again you got cut off after fencing oh I’m sorry can you hear me now yeah oh great okay are there any requirements for sensing in of the

Chickens um yes we do have those written into the ordinance and but I’m uncertain on the specifics I apologize i can i can get back to you though if you email me and and want copies of our ordinance and in that language I’d be happy to okay

Great are there any problems with cats dogs wild animals raccoons things like that um one of the gardens actually has has a little bit closer to kind of the edge of town and so they’ve they’ve had more raccoons and animals enjoying the produce as well you know I think it’s

All of the gardens have set up their own rules and and most of them have said this is a dog free zone so that people are gardening they tie up their dog outside of the garden to make sure that that damage doesn’t happen but I haven’t heard any

Significant stories of you know any kind of large-scale damage from from animals that’s good what about beekeeping is that allowed um beekeeping is not prohibited so I believe that it’s allowed and I see it sparingly around town as well but we didn’t we didn’t address it within our rules and

Procedures and we haven’t had anybody ask about it so we haven’t really crossed that bridge yet okay and what about composting does anyone compost on any of the Lots yes they do I believe all of them have a communal compost pile and this was something that we worked

With them in in asking them to submit a design that was one of the things that we changed most frequently was you know they would they would propose putting a compost pile up against the adjacent neighbors wood fence and we said well that’s not really being a good neighbor

Because it’s going to smell and potentially rot their fence over time and so we that was one of the things that we worked with them is to try to locate your compost pile in the middle of the garden to make it accessible for everyone but also so that we might have

Fewer nuisance complaints so yes all of them are actively composting and thus far that has worked that’s great um did anyone ask the school system regarding farm space on existing school sites or are there any with that are there any school programs to integrate local farming education the first question

That is that is a great idea and it’s something that we would like to pursue with the school district because the school district is another large owner of properties and also you know school gardens run into that problem of the peak of production is when all the

Students are gone and so growing food on school property tends to be small and educational instead of actual production for the for the kitchen and first lunches so we would we would love to work with the school district to expand that program and they’re just now kind

Of warming up to school gardening as I said in my introduction all four of our middle schools actually have school gardens running at this point and they’re primarily educational gardens you know they’re about a quarter acre probably in size but the produce the good thing about produce grown on school

Property and this is true in Kansas and I assume it’s nationwide that that can be taken actually directly into a school cafeteria and doesn’t require many of the same food safety regulations that say food coming off the back of a truck does in terms of temperature and so our

Food service directors our community been really creative with getting as much of the garden produce that the kids are growing in but I think that’s a great opportunity for school and community to partner to use school property that’s sitting vacant all summer for community members to grow

Food on and potentially preserve for the school district great before we get too far away from it and composting is there a requirement to do it in bins or can you do open composting we haven’t we haven’t required any particular system so we’ve encouraged them just to be good

Neighbors but some of them are using open bin okay great um let’s see what’s next um there is a question it’s a little bit off-topic but it could be helpful for some what’s what’s cool is your masters of natural resources from and do you know of any other educational

Degree programs that have a focus on food systems food access etc yes so I went to the University of Vermont which I will throw shout out with an excellent experience for me to get my master’s degree but there there are many masters programs that are emerging in urban food

Systems local food system development and also a lot of environmental policy programs that look at that food one that I know of because it’s local to us is the Kansas State University is starting a new master’s program in urban food systems which is exciting to see from our lane

Grant and in agriculture university but there there are many across the country and a lot of them focus on on policy as well great um who paid for and provided the garden signs was it the individual organizations no we ended up doing that for for branding consistency we realized

Once the gardens got up and running that and they were all looking beautiful we wanted to be sure that citizens connected this as as an effort by the city and so we we came up with a logo and put the city logo on it but I don’t

Know if you noticed in any of the photos but the contact number is different on each one so you know we have the questions or comments line and then the contact is that the one point of contact garden coordinator so the city isn’t receiving complaint calls or concern

Calls and the the garden coordinators are dealing with those directly okay do you offer permits for gardening in public right of ways and if so what are some of the conditions we haven’t done that yet we’ve we’ve come it we’ve come across it a couple times and and mainly

Because a couple people have done it and it has you know raised concern but we currently don’t allow gardening in the right of way we have plant height restrictions in that area as well okay um let’s see here do you have you noticed any other benefits besides the

Benefit of food in the community I think one of the benefits I’ve noted is that there’s been a shift in the conversation where when you have when you don’t have a structure to support community gardens like we didn’t have a couple years ago and you get community members wanting to

Start community gardens and you get that one enthusiastic coordinator who starts you know has an extra side lot starts a community garden and then it kind of falls apart and turns into a weed patch or you have the one really excited pair and at the elementary school starts a

School garden and then overtime losses enthusiasm and it turns into a weed patch we had we heard that a lot like how are we going to keep these from turning into eyesores and and you know weedy areas and you know the way we part of it was just being really selective in

The beginning of being really clear with that first year the pilot group that we really need this to go well and we really you know need this to be well maintained and so in some cases we we helped them get started you know in some cases city staff would work in some

Additional mowing like right before garden tours to make sure things looked really good and that was just kind of as the relationships were built between the growers and the staff because they saw each other frequently that staff you know reached out to lend a hand to help

Keep them keep them looking good and so that that’s how we’ve been able to change the conversation as we have these gorgeous garden spaces now and unless skepticism from elected officials and school board members that that every community garden eventually kind of spirals toward we’d land great um do do

You allow any gardens that don’t produce a fruit or a vegetable just a regular flower garden no we haven’t yet and our goal of food production so we’ve been pretty clear about that okay this is a good question I’m heart allowed if it were part oh go ahead o is going to say

You know I think we would allow it if it were part of a garden like if there was some flower production alongside food production but we haven’t received any and answers than that good okay um this is a good question are you partnered with the USDA Master Gardener program

And are you an advocate of it not a formal partnership we have an extension agent and a Master Gardener volunteer here who works at the County Extension Office and many of those volunteers have been helpful in kind of an informal way of a posting our gardeners so I’ve you know

When they’ve had gardening questions we’ve connected them with master gardeners and that’s been a great source of knowledge for our community we don’t have a formal partnership like they they aren’t licensing and leasing any of our properties but they’re working with the entities that are great um could you

Talk more about how the various organizations make money sure so in the out of the seven locations five of them our nonprofit or citizen groups that are not making money just so if they’re subleasing plots in a community garden that is to cover water costs and fencing

Costs or a shed costs it’s not they’re not generating revenue in the two examples of the market farm the market farm that’s run by the community college and the incubator farm in both of those cases those are on larger acreage so like 12 2 acre plots and those entities

Are selling what they grow and they’re selling in some cases at the farmers market or to a CSA and what we ask of you know those entities we ask them just the same to submit a community benefit plan one of our growers that tells at the farmers market has been dropping off

Weekly bags of produce to our parks and recreation department as a thank-you so they do a good job of buttering them up as well but but those that are making money we don’t we don’t ask for any you know we ask for a business plan to make

Sure that they can pull it off but we don’t really ask for tax statements or anything related to it okay um we touched on this a little bit earlier as a site for the garden could be a potential site for infill development do you feel the pressure from developers

Group directly or indirectly now Christine you cut off again after developers oh I’m sorry can you hear me now yes okay uh we touched on this a little bit before a site for the garden could be a potential site for infill development do you feel the pressure from developers

Groups directly or indirectly thus far we have not I think in a lot of these cases I mean their city owns that we bought for stormwater reasons so we were never intending to sell them for development because they’re not cut out for it and we’ve actually done some some

Work with some landscape designers at K you to help design the garden so that they do increase infiltration and and serve a higher function for storm water mitigation so many of the gardens are actually helping to slow slow down stormwater and and get more to infiltrate into the soil so we’ve seen a

Benefit that way but these were properties that we didn’t intend to sell okay great um it looks like that’s it for the questions if anyone has anything else um go ahead and type it in right now um two points one someone did type in that Baltimore has an interesting new

Program the Chesapeake compost works which may be worth exploring for expansion of composting and Megan Griffith mentioned that so if anyone is interested in expanding composting or learning about that program and take a look maybe by googling the Baltimore Chesapeake compost works and then the other thing is before anyone else dives

Off there were a few questions people wanted to know where they could obtain a copy of PDF copy of Eileen’s presentation and you can email me at planning webcast yahoo com or even quicker if you if you visit the western central chapter website and go under their resources tab and then their

Essays tab and you can get ahold of the presentation right now and that’s WC see a PA dot org and I have a few final points that I’d like to make just for housekeeping items and I’m going to go ahead and just kind of take this back i

Want to thank you eileen for this presentation this was really great and there was everyone was really messed up about it there were so many questions coming in and there were a lot of compliments for you you did a really great job and wait before we go because

It is only 215 we just got a few more questions in do you mind answering just a few more no problem okay great okay um what is the rent that is paid to the city per acre is there a lease provision allowing for say a one-year advance

Notice if new development is coming so we don’t we don’t charge for that for the properties i apologize if i didn’t make that very clear in the presentation but we we do not we you know when we looked at if we were going to charge a

Market rate per acre in some you know for farm lands that we own out in the county if we charge you know if the city or county land do wheelies it we do 150 dollars per acre on those agricultural leases and we realized that when we scaled that down to a neighborhood scale

It was going to be like you know thirty or forty dollars and that it really wasn’t worth potentially the administrative paperwork of that and also the city wanted to support this so if it looks like you know we’re making money off of it we just felt like we

Could go ahead and just lease them for free so no we don’t we don’t charge and then what was the second part of that question Christine um I think I don’t recall a second part of the question okay it was ok and if there was whoever

Was um send it back in again oh there there’s a mime here in the Midwife it are there any private lands with public own development rights privately as it’s like Evan I’m assuming like a land trust or um I’m not sure it was from James if

You’re still on if you could type in what you mean by private lands while he is typing that in i’ll just ask another question we can come back to it is there a mechanism and vision to weed out farms that do not produce as well as others in terms of pro

Shin know in terms of performance yes so if there were you know farm a and B and they’re both complying with all of the rules and regulations and one is you know producing more per acre I don’t think we would kick the other one out as

Long as they’re meeting all of our goals and rules but this year they said you know I kind of hinted at the challenge of our incubator farm we have a couple farms that are struggling to get started honestly and struggling to get enough equipment and I think people

Underestimate how much work an acre of a vegetable production actually is and so in the case of performance you know we have worked with them to make sure that they’re meeting their end of the bargain and if they cannot then we would we would terminate the lease okay great um

Oh okay we have an answer from from James he is referring to so the question was any private lands with public own development rights and what he means by private lands is where the government has purchased the development rights so we we actually don’t have a transfer of development rights or purchase of

Development rights mechanisms we’ve we’ve been really interested in that because we like many communities are experiencing development pressure and on the edges of the city and are in many agricultural areas but have not initiated that currently we haven’t had commissioned interest in that okay um is there a lease provision allowing for say

A one-year advance notice that new development is coming and property needs to be vacated oh that was that other part of that question okay so no we don’t have that lease provision the city wanted to you know the city attorney really advocated for staying flexible in

Case we need to take a property back for whatever reasons sooner than that you know we haven’t run into any of those extenuating circumstances but our city attorney didn’t want to tie us to any you know one-year commitment so we have kind of a 60-day bailout clause

Okay and this is an interesting question did any existing farmers object to the city offering free land to for-profit farmers um the question was definitely raised it was raised by our commissioners not by other farmers and I think the reason that we didn’t get pushback from other farmers is that

Acreage you know was so small most of these are community gardens which aren’t competitive with farms and because we invited them to apply to you know we didn’t we didn’t say just because you already have a farm you can’t apply for additional acreage closer to town so you

Know thus far we haven’t gotten any blowback from the grower community I think most recognized that these are small plots for community garden type spaces but in the case of the incubator farm in the market farm that’s a legitimate concern and we haven’t we haven’t experienced that yet but I think

You know the the requiring the community benefit plan I think helps communicate why why we’re doing it this way but the other piece too is that producers that already have land even though we offered it to them there are logistical challenges with getting farm equipment into into city lots and I think it’s

Kind of unattractive to them so they’ve they’ve not pursued it okay um are there any kinds of fees that you impose on these organizations or farmers like any application fees or anything like that no we don’t have application fee okay um this is an interesting question is there

Any light or electricity on any of the sites either for the ability for the farmers to see or to use any electrical equipment or for safety reasons we don’t the only exception to that is one of our city parks as a shelter nearby that does have an outlet and some lighting and I

Believe they’ve used it to you know plug-in music for a work day but other than that okay and are these areas mostly urban suburban or rural two are slightly more rural door on the edge of the city limits but most are suburban kind of you know suburban neighborhoods it’s hard to

Say in Lawrence that anything is very urban because we’re you know only 90,000 people and not a very large community but yeah so majority are in neighborhoods okay great well it looks like um oh one more one more this will be the last one um it looks like oh this

Is another someone who has some more information on composting Gainesville compost at org is another local composting system um and I I don’t think I can pronounce the county it’s in Florida a la lucha I assume it’s in Gainesville Florida that’s what I’m assuming but it’s Gainesville compost

Org and it’s another local composting system ok so I think that will wrap up our Q&A again Eileen this was really great and super informative and this is a great system that you guys have going and hopefully this will inspire and help other community advocates around the

Country and again if Allison if you’re still hanging around there the the vice president of the western central chapter thanks for joining us and for introducing us to Eileen and I’m just gonna I’m gonna change over okay gainesville compost calm not work everybody I just gotta follow up and

Okay so I’m just going to do a few quick reminders and again I’m going to change my screen back to me just so that everyone can see it before they before they dive off and so just some quick reminders again the western central chapter so thank you and and a recording

Of today’s webcast you’re going to be able to find it at planning if you go to youtube just search planning webcasts and it’ll come up all of our presentations will come up so you can view them and don’t forget to log all your CMS and see our future

Webcasts and also let me see here we go and you can email me again at planning webcast yahoo com for a PDF copy of Eileen’s presentation or you can visit www CCAP a org and that’s on the western central chapter and they have a PDF presentation of it so again thanks

Everybody for joining us today thank you eileen and thank you allison and all of our sponsors have a great weekend everybody

ID: g_Za2r-Cnt4
Time: 1377747161
Date: 2013-08-29 08:02:41
Duration: 01:22:36

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