Planning Commission 07/10/2024 - Jul 10, 2024

meeting

Prince William County Planning Commission 1h 9m 4 speakers 7 agenda items transcribed 7 days ago official recording ↗

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What is the purpose of the environmental presentation at the Planning Commission meeting?

Unknown 0:11

Julie Flanagan is gonna be giving the presentation. Uh we also have uh Ben and Will. Um Clay's not here, he's attending another function, but uh I'll turn it over to Julie to uh give the presentation. Thank you. It's good to be with you. Um happy to be here and provide you with some information on what we in the environmental section of watershed management uh are involved in with regard to land use cases. Um I got a lot to cover so it's gonna go kind of quick, but I'm hopefully gonna finish with about fifteen minutes for Q and A at the end. And do I just oh there we go. Okay, so here's our topics for today. Um preservation of existing forest, natural open space, buffers, uh green space for higher density housing types, um, and then stormwater management um being put underground in residential districts, and then our QA at the end.

Unknown 1:09

So what we'd like to start with is just considering you know where do we live. We live in the eastern deciduous forest. And the reason that that is significant is because this is the ecosystem of our not just our area, but basically from the Mississippi River to the east, the vast majority of this area is in the e in the eastern deciduous forest. That's where we're getting our highest quality environmental benefits. Is from these forests. Our highest quality with regard to stream and water quality, with regard to habitat for wildlife, with regard to air pollution. That's all a product. of the eastern deciduous forest. And the more that we lose that, the more we degrade those benefits that we get from that those forests.

Unknown 1:51

Our comprehensive plan recognizes that the Eastern Deciduous Forest is a very valuable part of our community and so there are multiple and I've listed them out here um all these different in uh policies and action strategies that are in the comprehensive plan that speak specifically to favoring the protection and the preservation of natural resources, particularly forests, mature trees, over their removal and replacement. And that's going to be a focal point tonight. Um with the QA, just by the way, if you had you any questions, I'd I'd kinda prefer if you could wait till the end so that I can make sure I cover everything before we get into the Q and A. So forests are our principal solution for many of the sustainability issues that we have today.

Unknown 2:39

Um the forests are protecting the quality of our drinking water. and the quantity of our drinking water. Де протектing our local stream water quality and the Chesapeake Bay, so they have. very broad implications. They enable stormwater infiltration into the ground better than any other landform. So lawn obviously um obviously things like asphalt and impervious areas don't have any infiltration, but lawn, which is very common in our area, has actually much less infiltration than forests do. So forests are going to allow much higher level of infiltration of stormwater than lawn will d will do. And it also cleans it as it moves through the underground s soils to a stream. Арфорис асо секестер.

Unknown 3:28

Carbon at a um and uh enable climate change mitigation. So one of our strategies for climate change mitigation is to Prec preserve as much of our mature hardwood forests as possible. When we plant a lot of emphasis is being put on reforestation. We're very happy to have reforestation, it's a good thing, but Young forests are not sequestering nearly as much carbon as mature forests are. The sort of the sweet spot for carbon sequestration in a forest community is trees that are between seventy and a hundred and twenty-five years of age. So when we're planting new trees today, we're not gonna if we cut down, we clear out a forest and we say, But don't worry, we're planting trees back in. We're not going to get the benefits of that force that's been removed for at least seventy years.

Unknown 4:15

So something to keep in mind. Um the uh the uh trees are also scrubbing airborne particulate pollution. That's the kind of stuff you can see sometimes of the if you s keep your car parked around long enough and you don't take it to the car wash, you see all this little black stuff that begins to accumulate on your car, that's part of what