Review of Draft Current Zoning 2025 Land Use Forecast

Description

On November 8, the Land Use Workgroup agreed to exclude ultra-rural areas from near-term 2025 development. That change has been made to the attached resulting in slightly more development overall, less farmland, fewer septics, and more forest compared to the version distributed last week. The changes are generally very minimal- less than 1% at the LRSEG scale. Please review the attached “Current Zoning” future land use scenario for the year 2025. Please email comments directly to Peter Claggett (pclagget@chesapeakebay.net) and copy Lindsey Gordon (Gordon.Lindsey@epa.gov). We appreciate receiving comments as soon as is convenient.

Please note that these data are all products of the Chesapeake Bay Land Change Model’s (CBLCM v3a) forecasts and backcasts and therefore do not incorporate construction acres, the Census of Agriculture, nor the extrapolation of Census of Agriculture trends which are all incorporated into the Phase 6 land use data via a “true-up” process conducted by the CBP modeling team and which we’ve discussed during previous meetings. Therefore, the attached data are not the exact data informing the Phase 6 watershed model but they do dominantly influence the Phase 6 land uses and they are the exact data produced from the CBLCM for which the LUWG has technical oversight responsibility.

In addition to the data described below, USGS has posted a composite of a single urban land use iteration for the year 2025 (e.g., one of 101 Monte Carlo simulations depicting future residential, commercial, and mixed use development at 30m-resolution) on the Chesapeake Bay Phase 6 Land Use Viewer (https://chesapeake.usgs.gov/phase6/map/ ). All of the 101 simulations exhibit similar patterns of growth at the county level; only the exact locations of new development and the overall magnitude of new development differ among iterations. The Phase 6 Viewer is readable in Internet Explorer or Google Chrome (preferred). If you encounter difficulty accessing the site, refresh the webpage (<CTRL> F5). In the Viewer, you’ll see a “Phase 6 Future Land Use” menu (lower right) that includes maps of “Residential Suitability” and “Commercial Suitability”. These maps display undeveloped lands that are judged suitable for future development based on zoning, slope, and protection status. They also provide a quick means of evaluating which counties provided usable zoning information (e.g., those counties with limited land available for development). For jurisdictions within the Washington Metro COG region, Traffic Analysis Zones (TAZ) projected to accommodate <= 10 new housing units or jobs over the period 2015-2045 were excluded from near-term growth in 2025. Moreover, the proportion of future development accommodated via infill/redevelopment within COG jurisdictions was calculated as the maximum of either the CBLCM infill estimates or an infill estimate based on the proportion of TAZ-level forecasted growth which cannot be accommodated as greenfield development because it exceeds current development capacities at the TAZ scale.