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Ecology Center Land Preservation Work Showing Ripple Effect

March/April Issue, 2004

Come November, residents in Scio Township will have the opportunity to vote whether to tax themselves for the preservation of farmland and open space. Scio Township’s Board of Trustees in February decided to put a 10-year, 0.5 mill tax on the fall ballot. Revenues raised by the initiative would be used to buy land or purchase development rights.

“With the success of the recent ballot initiatives in the City of Ann Arbor and Ann Arbor Township, the Board felt that township voters should have their chance to express their interest in the subject” (Scio Info, the official newsletter of Scio Township, Winter 2004). The Board moved the election from the August ballot to November’s at the urging of the Ecology Center, Sierra Club, and other environmentalists.

Last November voters in the City of Ann Arbor by a 2 to 1 margin approved a parks and greenbelt proposal – a 30-year, 0.5 mill tax to purchase land for parks and property development rights on an estimated 7,000 acres of open space near the city. At the same time Ann Arbor Township voters by a 3 to 1 margin approved a 20-year, 0.7 mill tax to preserve about 2,000 acres of farmland in their community.

The simultaneous passage of land preservation proposals in the city and one of its neighboring townships is significant because each plan calls for the use of matching funds from other sources, in this case perhaps each other, in order to make any land transaction.

In the same way, Scio Township’s farmland and open space preservation program “would be complementary to, but not tied to, the Ann Arbor greenbelt initiative,” according to Scio Info. “That is, while the receipts from the proposed millage could be used in conjunction with and to assist Ann Arbor’s greenbelt program, it would be entirely independent of Ann Arbor’s program and any other state and local program.” The Ecology Center and other supporters designed Ann Arbor’s greenbelt program, in part, to encourage creation of matching local funds, and the Scio proposal would mark the first local program started since the greenbelt’s passage.

The Nov. 2004 proposal has many people in the environmental community wondering if proponents of land preservation in Scio Township will face the kind of stiff opposition the Home Builders Association of Washtenaw County mounted in 2003 when they raised $222,622 trying to defeat the same kind of ballot initiatives in Ann Arbor and Ann Arbor Township. The successful campaign waged by Friends of Ann Arbor Open Space (www.a2openspace.org/), co-directed by Ecology Center Director Mike Garfield, marked the first defeat of big-money opposition to land preservation in the country (see Grassroots Victory Sets National Precedent, From the Ground Up, Jan./Feb. 2004).

 

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