On August 27, SACOG hosted a RUCS combined land use and transportation workshop. The workshop considered both challenges and benefits to innovations for rural land use, transportation, and goods movement that were developed by stakeholders at previous workshops and through Internet surveys.
Using spatial data on crops, rural housing, protected lands, small farms, and agritourism locations, SACOG crafted four themes in the rural landscape, which describe in more detail the functions of the rural lands in the Sacramento region for the land use exercise.
The four themes were: Commodity Agriculture, Small Farms/Agritourism, Large Lot Residential with Agriculture, and Open Space/Recreation. Participants were asked to think about innovative land use policies or strategies that would regionally support or foster each of these themes, no matter where in the region a particular theme was at work.
Participants were also asked to think about subareas of the region that might need to be supported by a unique set of land use innovations. With the information gathered at this event, SACOG staff hopes to better understand the similarities and differences in land use policy issues and needs across the region.
The transportation portion of the workshop looked at the same four land use themes and compared them with a goods movement map and discussed what transportation innovations would best facilitate the land use or subarea needs for goods movement. Participants looked at the rural transportation system and identified benefits and challenges to transportation innovations that had been identified through stakeholder input.
For information on the land use topic contact Kacey Lizon at (916) 340-6265 or klizon@sacog.org. For the transportation topic contact Robert McCrary at (916) 340-6228 or rmccrary@sacog.org.