The Center for Watershed Protection's (CWP) Code and Ordinance Worksheet addresses one of the major recommended strategies of the Draft Upper Neuse Watershed Management Plan, "Development ordinance revisions for density limits and/or water quality performance, riparian buffers, and low impact development design".

Why review our local ordinances?
Sustainable development combines economic growth with protection of the natural environment. Communities have long struggled to achieve this goal. However, we often find that our own development codes and standards can actually work against our own efforts to achieve sustainable, "low-impact" development. For example, local codes and ordinances often require inflexible standards that result in overly wide residential streets, expansive parking lots, and mass clearing and grading of forested areas. At the same time, local codes often give developers little or no incentive to conserve natural areas.

What is the Code and Ordinance Worksheet?
The Code and Ordinance Worksheet (COW) allows an in-depth review of the standards, ordinances, and codes that shape how development occurs in our local communities. The COW guides the participant through a systematic comparison of a government's local development rules against a set of model development principles. Institutional frameworks, regulatory structures and incentive programs are included in this review. The worksheet consists of a series of questions that correspond to each of the model development principles. Points are assigned based on how well the existing development rules agree with the site planning benchmarks derived from the model development principles.

What are the Model Development Principles?
In 1996, the Maryland-based CWP convened a Site Planning Roundtable of diverse interests involved in planning, designing, and building new communities. This group worked for nearly two years to develop a set of 22 model development principles. Applied together, the model development principles can measurably reduce impervious cover, conserve natural areas and reduce stormwater pollution from new development. Application of these principles can enhance both the natural environment and improve the quality of life in local neighborhoods.

The model development principles generally fall into one of three categories: Residential Streets and Parking Lots; Lot Development; and Conservation of Natural Areas. Each principle represents a simplified design objective in site planning. To find more detail on these principles, refer to CWP's Better Site Design: A Handbook for Changing Development Rules in Your Community (August 1998).

Residential Streets and Parking Lots
These principles focus on those codes, ordinances, and standards that determine the size, shape, and construction of parking lots, roadways, and driveways in the suburban landscape.

1. Design residential streets for the minimum required pavement width needed to support travel lanes; on street parking; and emergency, maintenance, and service vehicle access. These widths should be based on traffic volume.
2. Reduce the total length of residential streets by examining alternative street layouts to determine the best option for increasing the number of homes per unit length.
3. Wherever possible, residential street right-of-way widths should reflect the minimum required to accommodate the travel-way, the sidewalk, and vegetated open channels. Utilities and storm drains should be located within the pavement section of the right-of-way wherever feasible.
4. Minimize the number of residential street cul-de-sacs and incorporate landscaped areas to reduce their impervious cover. The radius of cul-de-sacs should be the minimum required to accommodate emergency and maintenance vehicles. Alternative turnarounds should be considered.
5. Where density, topography, soils, and slope permit, vegetated open channels should be used in the street right-of-way to convey and treat stormwater runoff.
6. The required parking ratio governing a particular land use or activity should be enforced as both a maximum and a minimum in order to curb excess parking space construction. Existing parking ratios should be reviewed for conformance taking into account local and national experience to see if lower ratios are warranted and feasible.
7. Parking codes should be revised to lower parking requirements where mass transit is available or enforceable shared parking arrangements are made.
8. Reduce the overall imperviousness associated with parking lots by providing compact car spaces, minimizing stall dimensions, incorporating efficient parking lanes, and using pervious materials in spillover parking areas.
9. Provide meaningful incentives to encourage structured and shared parking to make it more economically viable.
10. Wherever possible, provide stormwater treatment for parking lot runoff using bioretention areas, filter strips, and/or other practices that can be integrated into required landscaping areas and traffic islands.

Lot Development
Principles 11 through 16 focus on the regulations which determine lot size, lot shape, housing density, and the overall design and appearance of our neighborhoods.

11. Advocate open space development that incorporates smaller lot sizes to minimize total impervious area, reduce total construction costs, conserve natural areas, provide community recreational space, and promote watershed protection.
12. Relax side yard setbacks and allow narrower frontages to reduce total road length in the community and overall site imperviousness. Relax front setback requirements to minimize driveway lengths and reduce overall lot imperviousness.
13. Promote more flexible design standards for residential subdivision sidewalks. Where practical, consider locating sidewalks on only one side of the street and providing common walkways linking pedestrian areas.
14. Reduce overall lot imperviousness by promoting alternative driveway surfaces and shared driveways that connect two or more homes together.
15. Clearly specify how community open space will be managed and designate a sustainable legal entity responsible for managing both natural and recreational open space.
16. Direct rooftop runoff to pervious areas such as yards, open channels, or vegetated areas and avoid routing rooftop runoff to the roadway and the stormwater conveyance system.

Conservation of Natural Areas
The remaining principles address codes and ordinances that promote (or impede) protection of existing natural areas and incorporation of open spaces into new development.

17. Create a variable width, naturally vegetated buffer system along all perennial streams that also encompasses critical environmental features such as the 100-year floodplain, steep slopes and freshwater wetlands.
18. The riparian stream buffer should be preserved or restored with native vegetation that can be maintained throughout the delineation, plan review, construction, and occupancy stages of development.
19. Clearing and grading of forests and native vegetation at a site should be limited to the minimum amount needed to build lots, allow access, and provide fire protection. A fixed portion of any community open space should be managed as protected green space in a consolidated manner.
20. Conserve trees and other vegetation at each site by planting additional vegetation, clustering tree areas, and promoting the use of native plants. Wherever practical, manage community open space, street rights-of-way, parking lot islands, and other landscaped areas to promote natural vegetation.
21. Incentives and flexibility in the form of density compensation, buffer averaging, property tax reduction, stormwater credits, and by-right open space development should be encouraged to promote conservation of stream buffers, forests, meadows, and other areas of environmental value. In addition, off-site mitigation consistent with locally adopted watershed plans should be encouraged.
22. New stormwater outfalls should not discharge unmanaged stormwater into jurisdictional wetlands, sole-source aquifers, or sensitive areas.