Final Land Use Plan

To develop the final land use plan for our study, we brought together the final plans from the Agriculture, Conservation and Urban groups. First we sought to combine the Agriculture and Conservation group's final plans. The Agriculture group had looked at existing agricultural practices and designated those areas where agriculture could be modified, or remain as status quo. We applied their recommendations for agricultural practices to the land use plan developed by the Conservation group. This map would maximize the key areas for conservation and agriculture. We came to realize that many of the areas that the conservation land use plan had slated for agricultural practices coincided with the areas that the agriculture group had sought to keep status quo or to intensify. We had only to make a few changes to the map when combining these two groups together to provide a satisfactory achievement of each group's plan. Bringing in the Urban group's plan was a little bit trickier. This would require us to modify more of the areas where the urban group had wanted development to occur. The urban group had gone into much greater detail within the city limits. It had established a high density mixed use which would have much higher development patterns in the city limit areas. These were relatively easy to incorporate into the final land use plan, essentially it would take a section of medium mixed use and increase it to a high mixed use land use type. The conflict areas were more prevalent in those areas outside the city limits. In particular, the areas west of Lake City and South of Alligator Lake. These areas they had desired for development resided on areas that were desired by the Agriculture and Conservation groups in their plans. A compromise was established to try to insure that equal representation of these groups in these areas. Through the use of specific urban design strategies we would incorporate urban use designs that also set to maintain some of the agriculture and conservation interests for those areas. The Urban group's specific design strategies they had developed (PUD - Planned Unit Development) were modified to be established in these areas of conflict. In an effort to limit urban sprawl to the west of Lake City, we would place several of the PUD type A & B (aka Transit Oriented Developments -TOD's), which would accommodate the growth of Lake City. These urban strategies, termed as "New Ruralism" would allow for a clustering of urban properties and seek to maximize the density of the development while still preserving the rich farmland in this part of the county. The PUD type C (rural by design) would be modified to provide a maximizing of development and conserve 60% of a developed parcel in conservation practices. This would work well with those areas along the conservation easement corridor. The easement corridor, proposed by the conservation group, would connect Osceola National Forest, in the northeast of Columbia county, with the Ichetucknee Springs State Park, in the southwest of the county. This design strategy would provide recreational and quality of life resources for the residents of the development, and also provide conservation set asides for the protection of the aquifer below these areas.

Final Land Use Map

Final Land Use Map - Zoom

Growth Pressure Analysis

Once we had a final land use plan established by the three groups, Agriculture, Conservation, and Urban, we then compared that plan to the Growth Modeling group results on areas that would face population pressures. This allowed us to see those areas of our Future land use plan that would face the most pressure to be developed by the year 2020. Several of the areas that were planned to be used for high impact agriculture or conservation acquisition would face population pressure. With the combination of these two maps,we were able to define those areas that would be considered critical to be acquired for conservation or maintained in agricultural practices. This analysis would also show us where the urban design strategies would be needed the most. If they were within these population pressure areas they would need to be planned for much sooner than if they were not. The results of our analysis would give the policy and site design segments of our study specific topics to address and sites to design to implement our study goal and objectives.

Site Specific Designs & Policy

The site design groups would look at several areas that would face population pressure by the year 2020. One group would set a specific design to plan for the westward expansion of Lake City (Site 1). Another would look at a design to develop an agricultural based urban development which would maintain the agricultural charisma of a prime farmland site that was facing population pressure (Site 3). Another would develop a plan for designing a urban residential development adjacent to conservation land to help to preserve the conservation and agricultural interests of the parcel (site 4) . The final group would look at the development of the conservation easement and plan a specific route, which would maximize connectivity issues and give greater detail to the planned conservation easement (Site 2). These studies can be found in the Site Specific portion of this web page.

The policy group would look at those agricultural areas threatened by population and devised strategies to minimize the impact to agricultural interests. They would also look into programs that would help in the acquisition of conservation areas and provide resources for attaining easement rights. Their specific strategies can be found in the policy section of this web page.