Newmarket Open Space Conservation Plan

Open spaces – forests, fields, wetlands, floodplains, salt marshes, rivers and streams – are integral to our community. These lands and waters that thread through our neighborhoods are a scenic reminder of our history, when people made their living by working the land. Yet we still depend on these open spaces for our health and our wellbeing. These places provide many “services” such as clean air, flood control, filtering pollutants and purifying drinking water, natural pest control, plant pollination, cooler summer temperatures, and areas for relaxing, exercising and recreating. Collectively these can be thought of as a “natural services network” – a minimum framework or backbone of open spaces that offer these services to all of us regardless of age, income, or points of view. New Hampshire is transforming from a largely rural state to a mostly urban and suburban one. This trend will continue at a rapid pace as the State is expected to grow by 358,000 people (or more than 28%) from 2000 to 2025. Most of this growth will occur in the four southeastern counties, with the Town of Newmarket in the heart of this growth area. The major land use trends include loss of unfragmented forestland, lack of protected lands around public water supplies and aquifers, and loss of intact wetlands and wildlife habitat (SPNHF 2005). Many communities, including the residents of Newmarket, have acknowledged these changes and the need to conserve special places and ecosystems by supporting land use planning tools, natural resource inventories, conservation funds, and stewardship of lands. Since 2001, 83 New Hampshire towns have passed open space bond issues or appropriated funds for land acquisition worth more than $135 million (NH Center for Land Conservation Assistance). In 2002, Newmarket residents overwhelmingly passed a$2 million land acquisition bond. Landowners in our community have generously donated interest in land or easements to ensure that conservation values are protected in perpetuity. This support for land and water conservation that benefits all of us is a tribute to the community land ethic in our region. The Town of Newmarket boasts a rich diversity of natural habitats and associated plants and animals. The Lamprey and Piscassic Rivers, Great Bay Estuary, and Tuttle Swamp, to name just a few, all contribute to the sense of place and allure of the town (Map 1). Balancing the preservation of open space with responsible development, long maintained as a priority by Newmarket citizens, business owners and town officials, is necessary, as growth and all its requisite accompaniments present increasing challenges. Recent concerns about the availability of drinking water for Newmarket residents and businesses as well as the floods of 2006 reflect these challenges. As Newmarket continues to grow, so will concern over loss of natural areas, recreational opportunities, and the quality of life that residents have long enjoyed. Maintaining a network of rivers and wetlands, forests and fields throughout Newmarket for the health of the land and people requires vision, support, and action. In 1991, the Town of Newmarket hired the Smart Associates to prepare a Natural Resource Inventory and Conservation Plan. This was the beginning of efforts by the Conservation Commission to conserve important lands identified in the “Smart Report.” In the fifteen years that have elapsed since the Smart Report, Newmarket has undergone many changes, highlighting the need to revisit the current state of natural resources within the community. The Open Space Commission and Conservation Commission have led recent efforts to identify and protect conservation and recreation areas. The Planning Board and staff have led in creating effective land use planning tools that conserve open spaces while allowing orderly and thoughtful development. Together, Newmarket Open Space Conservation Plan Page 7 of 94 these boards applied for a grant from the NH Estuaries Project (NHEP) Technical Assistance Program in 2006 to develop an Open Space Plan. The NHEP awarded the grant of $6,200 to Ibis Wildlife Consulting to work with the Town of Newmarket to prepare this Plan

Saving Special Places: Community Funding for Land Conservation

In New Hampshire communities, there is a groundswell of interest and activity in conserving land. New Hampshire currently has more than forty-five land trusts. There are conservation commissions in all but a handful of towns. Many of them are engaged in conserving their special natural lands. Over half of the towns in the state have conservation funds fueled by the Land Use Change Tax. There have been 62 applications for land conservation projects to the Land and Community Heritage Investment Program since its inception in 2000. New Hampshire voters are appropriating significant taxpayer funds to conserve undeveloped land. Twelve communities, mostly in the south central and southeastern tier of the state, including Amherst, Brookline, Newfields, and Stratham, approved bonds and appropriations totaling nearly $20.2 million in 2002 alone. New Hampshire is losing 12,000 to 15,000 acres of open space a year to development. That is equivalent to building houses, roads and shopping areas in an area half the size of an average New Hampshire town. It is open space that gives our towns their traditional character and appearance. Unless towns protect open space strategically and intentionally, it will be consumed by development. The goal of this guidebook is to help you, as a concerned citizen, elected official, or conservation commission member, achieve your town’s land conservation goals by securing local funding for land conservation in your community

Taxing Land Rent in an Open Economy

This paper analyzes the effects of a land rent tax on capital formation and foreign investment in a life-cycle small open economy with endogenous labor-leisure choices. Differently from the previous literature, the consequences of land taxation critically depend on how the tax proceeds are used by the government. A land tax depresses capital formation, crowds out foreign investment and pulls up national wealth and consumption when consumers are lump-sum compensated for the tax. If the proceeds from taxation were used for financing un-productive government expenditure, land taxation would be neutral in its effects on capital stock, nonhuman wealth and labor. When the tax proceeds are used to reduce labor taxes, the land tax exerts ambiguous effects on capital stock and manhours, and spurs nonhuman wealth accumulation.Land Taxation, Labor Supply, Capital Accumulation, Overlapping-generations

Open Space and Urban Sprawl: The Effects of Zoning and Forest Conservation Regulations in Maryland

Rapid urbanization enhances the desirability of policies for preserving open space but policies intended to preserve open space may extend the urban boundary and create leapfrog development. We investigate this potential conflict between open space preservation and urban sprawl conceptually and empirically using data from the Baltimore-Washington suburbs. In accord with previous theoretical and empirical results, the estimated econometric model indicates that both zoning and forest planting requirements contribute to sprawl by increasing the amount of land needed to accommodate the current number of households. These results point to a conflict between preserving open space incorporated into private building lots or internal to sub-divisions and public open space at the urban fringe.Maryland Forest Conservation Act, open space, sprawl, zoning, Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use,

Applying the Private Benefit Doctrine to Farmland Conservation Easements

Farmland or working-land conservation easements serve two purposes. One is charitable, to protect open space from development; the other is practical, to preserve the land in productive agricultural use. These purposes, however, create a tension in the easement itself that can force the land trust that holds the easement to choose between the two purposes when the easement, meant in part to protect the farm, threatens the farm\u27s continued viability. Neutral-impact amendments are amendments to working-land easements that allow farmers to improve farm production or viability without harming the conservation value of the easements. Such amendments seem beneficial: a land trust can advance one of its goals of keeping agricultural land productive–without sacrificing the other goal of preserving the conservation value of the land. By approving such an amendment, however, a land trust likely violates the private benefit doctrine and risks losing its tax-exempt status. This Note argues that the IRS should explicitly decide not to apply the private benefit doctrine to neutral-impact amendments of farmland and working-land conservation easements

Compilation of the data on the land withdrawals in Alaska

Major decisions an the use and disposition of land in Alaska are being made by the State and Federal governments. These decisions will affect the utilization of all our land resources including minerals. Since minerals are an essential component of our existance, the availability and access to minerals is an important issue. There are approximately 2600 land orders and acts classifying land in Alaska that restrict the utilization of our minerals resources. As of April 1977, approximately twenty-six percent of Alaska, or 100,875,391 acres was open to mineral entry and location under the Federal Mining Laws and the State Mining and Mineral leasing Laws

Remote sensing study of land use and sedimentation in the Ross Barnett Reservoir, Jackson, Mississippi area

This multi-year study is aimed at focusing on the recognition of sediment and other affluents in a selected area of the Ross Barnett Reservoir. The principle objectives are the determination of land use types, effect of land use on erosion, and the correlation of sediment with land use in the area. The I2S multi-band imagery was employed in conjunction with ground truth data for both water and land use studies. The selected test site contains approximately forty square miles including forest, open land, and water in addition to residential and recreational areas

The limits of Agrarian reform in Brazil = 巴西土地改革的局限

Brazil is probably the only country that experienced a deep and complex process of growth and promote economic development without substantial change on the issue of land ownership. Since the Portuguese colonization, through the Land Act of 1850 and throughout the process of industrialization experienced in the twentieth century and still in progress, the land question remained almost unchanged, despite the advances resulting from the growing social and economic contradictions and the related violence observed in the field. Western Europe and countries like the United States (Homestead Act of 1862), China (the Great Leap Forward of 1959) and USSR (after the Revolution of 1917) at some point, and in different ways, have promoted the massive access population to land, and even Latin American neighbors such as Argentina, have forged more open societies with regard to land ownership (see policies implemented colonization of the territory in the nineteenth century) than the Brazilian