OPEN SPACE, GREENWAYS, AND RECREATION         

"The Comprehensive Plan will make recommendations for the conservation, use, and protection of the County's vital natural resources (to include resource protection areas, open space, and greenways)."  From one of the Kent County Levy Court's Goals for the 1996 Comprehensive Plan Update, still valid in this 2002 Update.  

The Kent County Open Space, Greenways and Recreation Plan is an integrated approach to assuring a permanent supply of inexpensive and easily maintained active and passive recreational facilities through the protection of naturally occurring features of Kent County's landscape.  A consolidated, landscape-focused open space plan with multiple objectives for conserving cultural, recreational, and natural resources offers efficiency and economy: attributes equally attractive to land developers, consumers, and policy makers.  The plan will provide a sustainable quality of life for current and future Kent County citizens.  The costs to preserve and maintain these benefits for future generations and the impacts on natural resources will have been minimized in the design and site location process.             

Opportunities to create new recreational facilities, link existing ones, and preserve environmental resources specific to Kent County rests in recognizing that significant natural areas exist within the County which can achieve those purposes.  By assuring that strategically located rural areas remain rural forever, adjoining residential and business communities will remain preferred places to live and work.  By linking recreational facilities with these natural areas and human communities, we can enhance the protection of wildlife habitats, water quality, as well as cultural and scenic values concurrently.  The goal of open space and recreational planning is a sustainable, attractive County where people will continue to desire to live and prosper.           

Through the adoption and updating of the “Kent County Parks, Recreation and Open Space Master Plan”, (Urban Research and Development Corporation, August 1991) multiple fiscal and quality of life benefits will be protected throughout Kent County's landscape.  Recreational open space, in the form of conventional parklands developed for active recreation and undisturbed natural areas, will be preserved in all zoning districts, for everyone's benefit.   

Open Space is viewed as an interconnected network of various types of lands and waters to be used for leisure, athletics, environmental protection, education, study, socialization, and solitude.  Possible examples of open space are street rights-of-way, active and passive recreational areas, wetlands, woodlands, storm water management areas, and all types of water and beaches.  The diversity of society's recreational pursuits requires that we set aside from development equally diverse types of spaces.  Coastal plain natural areas are typified by meandering streams and manmade ditches with forested wetland buffers that have resisted cultivation. Kent County is rich with this particular feature.  These linear wetland and wooded corridors provide the opportunity for Kent County's open spaces to begin as greenways within or near residential and commercial development.               

Kent County has nine distinct subbasin watersheds within its borders.  Reducing the reach of development into the woodlands and wetlands areas within these defined watersheds can be achieved by consolidating utility rights-of-way, easements for community wastewater disposal and stormwater management, with bicycle and pedestrian pathways.  These consolidated amenity pathways should be located along riparian areas to allow bicycle and pedestrian linkages between existing and planned residential and commercial development.  Attractively arranged and more densely designed communities enable the setting aside of the naturally occurring linkages associated with these watersheds.   

Historically, many diverse and contradictory approaches to managing stream corridors, forest lands, and other natural open spaces have produced a loss of these areas for public recreation, flood protection, water quality, and wildlife habitat.  Unwise uses of floodplains, lands adjacent to stream corridors and wetlands have created increased flood hazards by degrading the watershed and increasing public demands for drainage infrastructure.  Emphasizing these areas as lands set aside from development can minimize the cumulative effect of the practice of streamside and wetland tree and vegetation removal.             

A combination of multiple open space protection objectives can be achieved by promoting a system of linear greenways utilizing these existing natural corridors.  Water resource protection can be achieved by the opportune placement of active and passive recreational areas adjacent to preserved riparian corridors.  Incorporating utility rights-of-way into lands adjacent and parallel to streams functionally expands the common areas that the public may use for active recreation.  This placement of easements for utilities combines conservation and recreation and reduces impervious development adjacent to sensitive lands.  Required stormwater detention basins for quantity and quality control may be designed, landscaped, and positioned to aesthetically enhance these greenways.            

Efficient residential and commercial site planning, emphasizing consolidation, efficiency, and reduction of land consumption, can create numerous small preserves on the neighborhood level.  The total assembly of these neighborhood parks and local natural resource protection areas serve to protect habitats for wildlife and people throughout entire watersheds.  The cumulative effect of residential village development will reduce the sprawl of public lighting, road and right-of-way maintenance through places suitable for passive recreation.             

Greenways are conduits for both people and natural resources. They restore fragmentation and diversity in natural spaces as well as reconnecting communities.  Greenways may be public or privately owned lands that are set aside from development because the lands that they comprise have natural values highly regarded by society.  Preservation of those values enhances the quality of life for those citizens who now or in the future will live close to greenways. Greenways areas tend to be linear land and water formations because more easily developed lands are more uniform in nature, drier, or are generally more accessible to development.  Greenways may be "retrofitted" onto previously developed landscapes where these residual, undeveloped lands, in public or private ownership, still possess natural or aesthetic values.             

The St. Jones Greenway Commission adopted the "St. Jones River Greenway Concept Plan" (Urban Research and Development Corporation, August 1996) in November 1998.  This Commission, sponsored by the Levy Court and the Kent County Community Services Department, Parks Division, has implemented land acquisition, riparian land protection strategies, transportation grants, and greenway construction projects pursuant to the objectives of that Master Plan.  By adopting the “St. Jones Greenway Concept Plan” (Urban Research and Development Corporation, August 1996), Kent County will emphasize greenway linkages between public and private open spaces throughout the County.  In addition, Kent County will emphasize land protection, strategic investment, and construction of projects that increase protection and recreational use of the resources of the watershed.  The process of identifying links between developed recreational facilities is an on going effort.   

Land protection for neighborhoods and greenways should be based on projections of local densities and natural opportunities for open space preservation.  The importance of these areas for preservation should be linked to the decreased ability of recreational and ecological systems to respond to new levels of development.   

The dedication of low-maintenance, non-impervious pathways and greenspaces will preserve the sustainable character of our communities and ecological systems.  Assuring a quality community network of low impact open spaces while offering livable established communities will reduce the tendency of residents to flee to rural areas.  This process would coerce home and commercial development into less intense areas of the County.  There are currently 91,594.42 acres of open space and protected areas in Kent County.  This figure includes open space found in subdivisions.     

 Table 11.1 Acres of Open Space in Recorded Subdivisions 

 Recommendations     

·        To create a network of open space and suitable recreational facilities to serve the existing and projected populations of Kent County. 

·        Protect and preserve key natural resources throughout the County from unwarranted development.