Best Practices

8 page paper

Pick one of the top 5-10 major planning challenges that your community is facing, from Assignment #1. Your city council (or county Board of Supervisors) has asked you to develop a best practices report to identify all of the land use tools your community can possibly use to address that issue.

Conduct research (both Internet and in peer-reviewed journals) to identify possible best practices from other cities and counties. These tools should be land use tools, such as those you are learning about in class (e.g., comprehensive plans, zoning and overlay zones, etc.).

You are searching for best practices from around the country, not the best practices in your own community. Potential search terms include combining the issue with various tool terms. For example, if your community is struggling with wetlands protection, you would search for the term “wetlands” in combination with terms such as terms such as “model ordinance”, “land use tools”, “zoning for riparian buffers”, etc. (in other words, searching for specific types of tools helps, along with searching for general protection mechanisms for that resource or problem).

Develop a comprehensive report to discuss and identify those land use strategies. This paper generally includes at least 20 references (make sure a minimum are 5 solid peer-reviewed journal articles). The paper should be well-organized and contain tables or graphics that summarize the protection strategies.

*Remember this is a policy briefing–your City Council (or County Board of Supervisors) wants to know all the tools they could use to improve on that issue, particularly all the land use tools.

The Councilmembers will want something comprehensive (don’t leave any major land use tools out), and something well-organized and to the point.

Your best bet is searching in Google–you won’t find quite as much in the peer-reviewed journal databases.

Your biggest challenge will be narrowing your searches down, for most of you. Here are some great searches we did: (just swap out the term with your issue term, as we were focusing on what the folks at the webinar were actually looking for):
– local government techniques stormwater
– handbook local governments parks recreation
– local government open space manual
– how cities can get more parks
– how cities can promote environmenal justice
– strategies local government environmental justice
– examples counties environmental justice
– examples cities environmental justice
– literature review local government stormwater
– best practices stormwater local government
– best practices cities stormwater
– land use cities stormwater
– literature review economic development local government
– what cities can do to attract growth land use
– effective local government stormwater
– local government environmental justice techniques
– land use measures environmental justice