As Douglas County continues to grow, it’s important that it have a “well-equipped land policy tool box” at its disposal, an urban planning expert said Thursday.

Stacey Swearingen White, assistant professor of urban planning at Kansas University, told more than 40 members of the Jayhawk Audubon Society about two tools that could protect open space in Douglas County.

“Land protection seems to be an obvious choice,” White said. “Yet we see so many instances where the opposite is happening.”

One problem, she said, is that the traditional technique for land management, zoning, has limitations.

Two alternatives to zoning that have been successful in other parts of the country are the purchase and transfer of development rights.

Purchasing development rights involves permanently restricting development on a designated chunk of land but compensating the landowner at the price the land would bring if it were developed.

It’s an idea that’s been around for almost 30 years in other parts of the country and most commonly protects agricultural land, White said.

In Dunn, Wis., a small town near Madison, Wis., that wanted to avoid the urban sprawl its neighbor was experiencing, 1,700 acres have been protected since 1996, White said. The program has been successful, White said, because Dunn residents recognized its value and voted in favor of a property tax increase to fund it.

She noted that a plan being discussed by Lawrence’s ECO2 group that would grant conservation easements to land owners essentially amounts to a purchasing development rights program.

Transfer of development rights programs work a bit differently. They designate “sending areas,” areas of land chosen for protection, and “receiving areas,” where development is desirable. Again, land owners are compensated, and their land is restricted with a conservation easement, White said. The lure for developers who pay for development rights in the receiving area is that they can develop at a higher density than might otherwise be allowed.

A transfer program adopted in Montgomery County, Md., in the early 1980s had protected 38,250 acres as of 1998, White said.

“I’d like to think that either or both of these tools is possible here (in Douglas County),” White said. “But any innovative land-protection approach is going to meet with all sorts of criticisms and challenges.”

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