The Vision Plan: Greenway Proposals by Others

The greenway planners for the six states investigated as many current relevant planning proposals as they could find within this semester long planning study. They found that public agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGO) are proposing to add over 3.5 million acres of greenways and green spaces in New England. This represents an additional 8% of New England's land area. Current proposals on board in the six states also make recommendations for more than 4,600 miles of new trails (see summaries in Table 1). All these proposed trails have at least statewide significance. A closer examination of these proposals reveals that, three of the states, namely Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont have insignificant proposals for new greenways or green spaces. The reason for this lack of new proposals may be one of the following. First, planners in these states may think, they have already sufficient greenway and green spaces. Second, they may be only implementing greenways rather than planning them or in the case of Massachusetts, their statewide greenway plans have not been completed at the time of this writing. Third, our planners were unable to find the right people, hence were unable to discover all proposals. Each of the three remaining states, however, has significant proposals. Connecticut proposes to add 9%, Maine 16% and New Hampshire 17% to their greenways and green spaces. One of the most significant proposals, 3.2 million acres of the 4.5 million acres of total proposals in New England, was done by a non-governmental organization (NGO). This NGO is called RESTORE: The North Woods. Their proposal is a vision plan that is fully supported by our team. This plan proposes to "establish a new 3.2 million acre Maine Woods National Park surrounding Baxter State Park in north central Maine (Engholm, 1999, Project Manager, "Restore: The North Woods", 7 North Chestnut St., Augusta, ME)". This is a truly unique landscape which was first recognized by Henry David Thoreau in 1853 and more recently by the National Park Service and its consultants during the 1960's as part of the North Atlantic Regional Water Resources Study (Appendix N, 1970, p. 115). This report was written by members of Research Planning and Design Associates (RPD), who proposed to "preserve (this) unique natural area". (Note: The principal author of this chapter was an RPD Principal, who was making this proposal close to three decades ago).