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Case Studies

Community Planning Collaborative

• Place: Orange County, Florida
• Project Area: ~ 35,000 acres (~ 14,000 hectares)
• Client: Orange County, Florida
• Partner Organizations: Florida Natural Area Inventory (FNAI), Placematters
• Time Frame: September 2006 — December 2006

Project Purpose

This project brought together several decision support systems and their developers to run a public charette and visioning process for a 35,000 acre development site in the county. The primary purpose was to inform the county government and stakeholders of the potential for applying these tools for the planning of the site.

Project Summary

“The Community Planning Collaborative (CPC) initiative was designed to apply tools for community design and decision making to a real planning problem in Orange County Florida and demonstrate how decision support systems can improve the quality of results and overall democratic nature of land use planning and community development.” (from Community Planning Collaborative report?see under Products Available). NatureServe, in collaboration with the Florida Natural Area Inventory (a NatureServe member program) developed a NatureServe Vista database that formed the basis our work in the charette. We imported development scenarios produced by other tools, evaluated those scenarios for implications to biodiversity, and worked with stakeholders to develop a mitigation scenario.

Outcomes / Conservation Impact

?Through an unprecedented collaborative effort between decision support tool providers, national experts in democracy and planning, and community members (local planners, stakeholders, general public, and educational institutions), Orange County gained a clearer understanding of their current decision support capacity and identified new decision support tools to ensure the integration of good information, comprehensive analysis, and strong civic engagement for current and future.? (from Community Planning Collaborative report?see under Products Available). For the NatureServe portion, the results of the mitigation planning suggested that the core development be relocated to protect previously unrecognized biodiversity values. FNAI has since been contracted to do further surveys and Vista analyses by the county.