|
|
Keep Georgia Green Reports
Search
•
RSS Feed
Executive Summary
From the Appalachian Mountains to the coastal plains, Georgia is blessed with natural beauty. Georgia’s natural heritage is much more than scenery, however—it is the foundation of a strong economy, providing value for the state and its people in many ways.
For example, land conservation:
• Attracts tourist dollars. Tallulah Gorge State Park in Habersham and Rabun counties in Northeast Georgia draws over 300,000 visitors per year. Overall, tourists in the mountainous two-county area spent $69 million in 2004, supporting 930 jobs.
• Promotes a clean and plentiful supply of water. Buffers around waterways reduce pollution, preserve sources of clean drinking water and minimize water treatment costs. For these reasons, citizens in the upper Tallapoosa watershed in Carroll County, west of Atlanta, overwhelmingly passed a special use sales tax in 2003, providing $20 million to protect key watershed lands.
• Prevents flood damage. The towns of Albany and Newton in southwest Georgia spent $3 million relocating hundreds of homes, businesses and schools outside the floodplain after tropical storm Alberto caused severe flooding in 1994. The cities subsequently reaped the benefits—avoiding $5.1 million in damage that could have resulted from a severe storm that developed in 1998.
• Increases the value of nearby properties. University of Georgia researchers found that properties close to Sandy Creek Park in Athens-Clarke County sold for up to $8,500 more than properties farther away. Parks enhance the assets of homeowners and help contribute to the tax base for local government.
• Reduces service costs compared to residential development. Residential development demands public services that cost more than property tax income. In Oconee and Habersham counties, working farms or woodlands require $0.82 in expenditures for every dollar they bring in revenue. In contrast, residential lands require $1.16 in expenditures for every dollar of revenue—excluding the cost of schools.
• Provides agricultural products. Working landscapes, like those in the small-scale farms of Dooly and Jones counties near Macon, are a key part of the agricultural economy and a stabilizing influence for rural communities.
• Reduces air pollution. Tree canopies in the 10-county Atlanta metropolitan area remove 19 million pounds of pollutants from Atlanta’s air every year. Achieving the same emissions reduction with man-made technology would cost $47 million per year.
• Provides areas to hunt and fish. Kelly Ridge Roadless Area in the Chattahoochee National Forest is home to one of Georgia’s largest areas of old growth forest, several pristine trout streams, and a wide variety of wildlife. Across the state, areas like Kelly Ridge provide places for hundreds of thousands of Georgians to hunt and fish—in addition to offering critical habitat for thousands of different types of plants and animals, including 63 species endangered or threatened across the U.S.
• Supports Economic Redevelopment. The BeltLine plan for Atlanta envisions organizing the region’s future growth around an interconnected system of parks, transit and trails circling the core of the city. Over the next 20 to 25 years, planners expect the project to create 30,000 new jobs (50 percent more than in the absence of the project) and increase the regional tax base by an estimated $20 billion.
• Preserves history. Kennesaw Mountain National Park in Cobb County preserves over 2,800 acres where an important clash of the Civil War occurred in 1864. It is a valuable educational resource for the more than one million people that visit every year and a major draw for heritage tourism—the third most popular tourism activity in the state.
However, the state’s undeveloped land is quickly disappearing. In just five years, from 1992 to 1997, the state lost more than one million acres of farms and woodlands—triple the pace of development from the previous decade.
Governor Sonny Perdue recently set aside $100 million, including $45 million in grants and $55 million in loans, to protect land critical to our quality of life. He also helped establish the Georgia Conservation Tax Credit, which rewards landowners who choose to permanently protect their land from development. While these are good steps in the right direction, more needs to be done in order to protect all the land Georgians want conserved. In order to ensure that development does not outpace conservation efforts, Georgia needs more policy tools and funding sources for land conservation. To preserve Georgia’s natural heritage for future generations and fully realize its value, we should:
• Protect public lands from development, including roadless areas in Georgia’s National Forests and federal lands slated for sale in the federal budget.
• Develop an official land conservation roadmap and use it to prioritize preservation efforts in the most ecologically valuable areas—areas that provide drinking water, flood control, wildlife habitat, recreation and other benefits as described in this report.
• Create priority areas for growth that complement the land conservation roadmap; and implement landuse regulations at the local government level that encourage growth only in priority areas.
• Create a dedicated funding mechanism for land conservation. For example, the Florida Forever program has protected more than 1 million acres of critical lands across Florida in the last five years using bond funding. Maryland uses a real estate transfer tax to fund Program Open Space, expected to provide nearly $300 million in conservation funding in 2006. In Georgia, a redirection or increase of one-tenth of one percent sales tax would generate approximately $100 million annually for land conservation purposes.
|
