Making plans to coordinate a green future

The Trust for Public Land partners with local groups, including the Deschutes Land Trust, to plan green spaces for the future.

Deschutes County is home to hundreds of square miles of green spaces — buttes, forests, fields, mountains, parks and trails designated for conservation and recreation.

The land is managed by a variety of federal, state and local groups, which means protecting, expanding and linking the area’s open spaces can be a complicated effort, requiring the coordination of a variety of rules and agendas.

But now, some local officials are looking into a plan that would allow all of the agencies to share information and develop a comprehensive map for all of the area’s natural and recreational spaces.

It’s still in the early planning stages, but organizers say the plan — a “greenprint” — could provide a map for future community planning, showing officials which areas should be protected from development and providing a guide for the community’s interests when it comes to open spaces. The project could even provide the basis for another major goal: connecting area trails to form a regional trail system.

“It’s a countywide community effort to identify critical lands that are worth protecting for habitat, recreation, trail connectivity, water quality — a broad spectrum of uses and benefits,” said Kristin Kovalik, the project manager for the Trust for Public Land, the nonprofit conservation group organizing the greenprint effort.

Kovalik said her group has completed or is currently working on similar plans in other communities, including Portland and a tri-county greenprint for Clatsop, Lincoln and Tillamook counties.

In Central Oregon, she said organizers have been tossing around the idea for the past year and have already signed three groups onto the project — the city of Bend, the Bend Metro Park and Recreation District, and the Deschutes Land Trust. The group also hopes to gain the support from La Pine, Redmond and Sisters.

Once the project’s planners have presented the idea to all of the local municipalities, Kovalik said work on the greenprint will begin with the help of a group of local planners, environmentalists and representatives from all of the organizations involved in the project.

From there, organizers will open up the discussion to the public in a series of community meetings and eventually create a comprehensive, Web-based map that would be used to guide future development.

Participants in the greenprint project, including Don Horton, executive director of the Bend Metro Park and Recreation District, said they hope the planning process will allow all of the groups to share information about projects already in the works and combine their efforts on shared goals.

“Looking at an area that’s greater than the (park) district is of real value to the planning process … there’s not a whole lot of opportunities for governmental agencies to work together on such a large project,” Horton said.

Kovalik said organizers have already secured a combined $95,000 from the city of Bend, the park district and other groups for the $130,000 project. She said the entire process will likely take at least another year, and said it’s not clear yet exactly what the final map will look like or who will be able to access it.

“Our end goal for the project is to have a Web-based system that does bring all these layers together,” she said. “It’s still in the works how it will be housed and accessible.”

Once a map is completed, it could be used as a reference when local cities or other groups look for funding for new projects, from park expansions to a possible creation of a regional trail system, said Bend City Manager Eric King.

“The intention is to get a map and start putting together a regional plan, and then you can start going after funding,” he said.

“You can say the communities have said this is important, this river trail or this open space is really important, and it gives you the leverage you need to go out and start putting a funding package together, whether that’s a bond or a grant.”

Though the greenprint concept is new to the area, King said it’s really not much different than the coordinated planning that goes on for other issues.

“It’s an effort to do more regional planning,” he said. “We do regional planning for transportation — we’re just putting it into the context of trails and open spaces.”

Erin Golden can be reached at 541-617-7837 or egolden@bendbulletin.com.