Chapter 1: Introduction

1.6 What This Plan is For

We can require ourselves to be accountable to our grandchildren and to their great-grandchildren. By making the right choices now, we can promise them bright streams and lasting forests and rewarding employment and welcoming communities.

—Charles Wilkinson

This Plan is intended to facilitate positive change. As we undertake to redevelop our region and adapt to change, it can help us shift our planning framework to a more holistic perspective, one that uses the watershed as a basis for decision making.

Shifting existing patterns of development and employing an integrated management context can help us to: increase local water supplies; improve water quality; restore habitat; better manage open-space; make more parks; create new recreational opportunities; and design viable multi-modal transit.

Shifting from the current “silo system” of management to a more cooperative “systems approach” can help us to: partner more effectively; identify necessary funding sources; increase our quality of life; and develop a monitoring plan that will alert us to things that need our attention and tell us what strategies work.

In short, this Plan can show us how to rebuild and sustain a great place.

This plan is intended as a resource for anyone interested in working towards a sustainable future in this region. It aims to educate and inspire and to provide local advocates, urban planners, agencies, elected officials, policy-makers, individual property owners, residents, and youth a road map and a toolkit to do the following:

• Develop a more holistic understanding of the our local environment
• Facilitate widespread watershed awareness and education
• Empower the community to be directly engaged in the decision making process
• Catalyze actions to sustain support and implementation of the Plan over the long term
• Improve coordination and integration among agencies
• Enhance communication and collaboration between agencies and other stakeholders
• Bring together key agencies with other stakeholders to plan the financing and
  implementation of large-scale watershed retrofitting

This is intended to be a LIVING Plan that will adapt over time through continued participation from and collaboration between all stakeholders. It provides a sound foundation to support consensus decisions and actions now and in the future.

There can be no purpose more inspiriting than to begin the age of restoration, reweaving the wondrous diversity of life that still surrounds us.

—E.O. Wilson