Plum Creek's vision for county land focuses on jobs, business ...

Plum Creek?s vision for county land focuses on jobs, business, residential use

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By Anthony Clark

Business editor

Published: Thursday, July 26, 2012 at 5:07 p.m.

A look now at Plum Creek?s 17,000 acres east of Newnan?s Lake shows mostly planted pines. After inviting the community to weigh in on what the timber company should do with the land, another vision has emerged.

It includes:

- Development that creates much-needed jobs for residents in and around east Gainesville and Hawthorne, areas that have missed out on westward business expansion.

- A place to host businesses in the growing tech and innovation economy in cooperation with the University of Florida as well as Fortune 1000 companies that want to be near UF and need a lot of land.

- Logistics businesses to take advantage of nearby U.S. 301, State Roads 20 and 26 and the CSX rail line that is expected to generate more traffic, especially as eastern ports benefit from the Panama Canal expansion.

- Conservation land that links wildlife corridors and helps restore Lake Lochloosa, into which the land drains.

- Agriculture, including research land for UF?s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, and local food for residents.

- Environmentally friendly residential development that is higher density than the one home per five acres now allowed through agricultural zoning ? development that incorporates green and agricultural space.

Plum Creek convened a nearly yearlong series of meetings and tours through a process it called Envision Alachua, with more than 700 people participating in community workshops, educational forums on conservation and development and task force meetings. The task force included about 30 people representing education, business, conservation, government and nearby communities.

That was just Phase I. Plum Creek plans to start another series of forums in the fall and convene another task force of technical advisers with staff from the county, water districts and Florida Department of Transportation to get into the planning details.

After that, the company plans to develop a 50-year master plan for the land, said Todd Powell, senior director of real estate. He said that likely would be done as a sector plan, a rare process for such large properties.

Florida?s Optional Sector Planning Program has included only four plans to date and is allowed on properties of at least 15,000 acres, according to the Department of Economic Opportunity. It includes a long-term master plan as an amendment to the county?s comprehensive plan and detailed specific area plans that would go through the county and the state.

?Part of the process is to figure out what we want to be, what density to put where,? Powell said.

Task force member Edwin Dix develops housing in east Gainesville for low-income residents.

He pointed out that the area lost a school when Prairie View closed and vocational jobs at distribution centers that opened in the city of Alachua are too far for many east Gainesville residents who don?t have cars.

?Southeast Gainesville and northeast Gainesville have been left out of a lot of planning,? Dix said.

He said the Envision Alachua process might be the only opportunity in the next 50 years to bring industry, jobs, research and conservation to the area on such a large piece of land.

Powell said the meetings were ?eye-opening? as he learned the disparity between east and west Gainesville.

?We will have known if we were successful 50 years from now if east Gainesville is just Gainesville,? he said.

Task force member Jack Payne is senior vice president of agriculture and natural resources for IFAS.

He said IFAS could conduct research on the land to develop local agricultural products as it did for blueberries and provide local food as food prices continue to rise.

Payne said he likes that the project would ?build around local agriculture, not around golf courses.?

Pierce Jones, director of the IFAS Program for Resource Efficient Communities, said conservation projects could be incorporated into the design. He worked with architecture professor Martin Gold on a student exercise about ?agricultural urbanism.?

Powell said that instead of building on five-acre lots, all on septic and a well, they could go in the other direction by designing a community that doesn?t include the ability for landowners to waste water on landscaping.

Plum Creek is the largest private landowner in the U.S., the state of Florida and Alachua County, with the vast majority of its lands in timber production. Of its 65,000 acres in Alachua County, 24,000 are in permanent conservation.

http://www.gainesville.com/article/20120726/articles/120729691?p=1&tc=pg

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2012 at 2:46 pm

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Source: http://www.frontstreet.net/2012/08/plum-creeks-vision-county-land-focuses-jobs-business-residential/

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