Small blue-collar Maryland hamlet innovates with stimulus help

The town of Edmonston in Prince George’s County, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C., is a small hamlet of under 2000 residents, most of them blue-collar workers. Like many other cities in America, times are tough in Edmonston, which has high rates of unemployment and foreclosure. What makes life particularly hard for Edmonston is that it is bisected by the Anacostia River. Due to poor environmental practices, the Anacostia periodically floods the town, wreaking devastation on a place already struggling to get by.

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Aligning land use policies and water protection programs

An announcement from the Smart Growth Leadership Institute (SGLI): SGLI, working with The Trust for Public Land (in partnership with the Association of State Drinking Water Administrators and the River Network) launched a new program to help state governments develop innovative ways to protect drinking water sources by improving the coordination between state land use … Continued

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An Action Plan to Protect North Carolina’s Drinking Water Sources

The Enabling Source Water Protection Project for North Carolina was initiated with a workshop in August 2009. Robin Smith, Assistant Secretary, NC Department of Environment and Natural Resources, addressed more than 40 national and state leaders in water protection, land conservation and local planning, pointing out that “North Carolina is expected to grow in population by as much as 30 percent by the year 2030.” She then presented a challenge to the group by stating that both water quantity and quality are “vitally important to the future of the state.”

Advocacy

An Action Plan to Protect Maine’s Drinking Water Sources

For more than a year, a national project team composed of land use, conservation and water quality experts engaged a diverse group of Maine state agencies, public water systems, and others interested in conserving land to protect water resources in a series of workshops that form the foundation of an action plan to provide guidance regarding steps the state can take to align land use and drinking water programs to better protect drinking water sources.

Advocacy

Building Ohio’s Balanced Growth Initiative: Incentives and State Agency Alignment

Our goal in working with staff of the Ohio Lake Erie Commission and the Ohio Water Resources Council was to develop ideas to improve uptake and effectiveness of the Enabling Source Water Protection program, in order to ensure that the program could deliver on its promise of improved water quality – including a cleaner source of drinking water for millions of people in Ohio and parts of several other states and Canadian provinces.

Advocacy