Table of Contents

New England Greenway and Trail Updates:

Introduction: Julius Gy. Fabos

Introduction:

Julius Gy. Fabos, Professor Emeritus and
Mark Lindhult & Robert Ryan co-directors of the New England
Greenway planning team at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

This is the first newsletter of the recently formed New England Greenway Consortium and you may wish to know the purpose and the origin of this letter. You may question why are you on our mailing list? Who is financing our effort? What are our future plans? And, finally who are the initial contributors? Here are my answers to these questions:

The Purpose of this Newsletter
We envision this newsletter first as a venue for sharing greenway activities of interest with one another including current projects, future projects and recently completed projects in New England and beyond. We hope to make connections among the greenway planners and decision makers of all kinds. Thus, this newsletter is for those interested in greenways and greenway related plans, implementation and financing greenways by governmental agencies (from local to the Federal government); non-governmental organizations (NGO's), the private and academic sectors. In short we wish to be as inclusive as possible.

We see a great opportunity to make this newsletter a broad based learning for all and a provider of the latest, up to date information through the rapidly growing e-mail environment.

The Origin of this Newsletter
The need for continuing interaction among interested greenway planners and activists of New England was recommended by the planners of the New England Vision Plan at the presentation on Friday, May 21, 1999. The participants were truly fascinated by the learning process throughout the study and they expressed great interest to continue our effort in the future. The most significant learning has been obtained through the public meetings and the exchange of reports and ideas.

E-mail provides us with an incredibly fast and inexpensive way to share with each other relevant information. The level of interaction can be as extensive or limited as all of us involved wish to have it. Initially, we anticipate e-mailing you quarterly or bi-yearly once the latest edition of the newsletter has been posted on our home page http://www.umass.edu/greenway. Due to the outstanding response by the contributors of our newsletter, we discovered that it was too large fax, too expensive to mail and too awkward to send as an email or an attachment. Thus, with the help of Neil Sullivan we have added a link to our home page where the newsletter can be accessed.

It was also suggested by the attendees to organize a day long symposium, workshop or conference yearly, to enable us to interact with each other and make stronger personal connections.

The initial Mailing List for this Newsletter
Our initial list is around 900 individuals and consists of three groups:

The FIRST GROUP includes around two hundred people, who participated in the vision planning process during 1999. These participants were made up of: faculty and students from the Universities of Massachusetts and Connecticut; professional landscape architects representing all New England states; and professionals who served as advisors and/or took part in one or more of the nine workshops we had during 1999. For more details visit our website at: http://www.umass.edu/greenway

The SECOND GROUP of another two hundred people are either planners or decision makers within major corridors of New England, such as the Connecticut Heritage River Corridor. We also added greenway or heritage people of New England, who either expressed interest or whose name was given by a member of the first group of participants.

The THIRD GROUP are people from the registrant directory of the Second International Trails and Greenway Conference held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA in June, 1999. This is the largest group of around five hundred individuals. We would like to open the door to the rest of our colleagues outside of New England and offer them information about our greenway issues and activities. By exchanging ideas and learning about their work, we hope to expand the horizons and knowledge of all our colleagues within the consortium.

We can inform more than 500 people on our mailing list (of the 900) via e-mail about the newsletter that will be posted on our home page http://www.umass.edu/greenway. For the rest of our members, a fax or letter will be sent informing them of the newsletter on our web site. If you received a fax or letter and wish to receive future issues of the New England Greenway Consortium Newsletter, please

SEND YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS NOW TO: Heidi Ernst at thehide@aol.com

Funding sources for this Newsletter
There are three sources currently available for creating this newsletter. First and most importantly we have a modest level of funding from the Massachusetts Agricultural Experiment Station's Hatch (Federal) Research Fund. This fund supports the assistantship of Heidi Ernst, our sole research assistant. Second, the Department of Landscape Architecture has supported us with mailing costs, the use of computer and office space.

Finally, around 15 people have made contributions to this first newsletter. The 3 co-directors, Julius Fabos, Mark Lindhult and Robert Ryan of our greenway planning group, together with Heidi Ernst planned the newsletter and recruited a dozen key people from public agencies and the private sector. Please see the table of contents for their contributions.

Our Recent, Current and Planned Activities for the Future
Since our presentation and discussion of our New England Greenway Vision Plan at the University of Massachusetts on Friday, May 21, 1999, there have been numerous activities. Here are those we know about:

Recent Activities

• Six of us attended the Second International Trails and Greenway Conference in Pittsburgh on June 23-26, 1999. Four of the six attendees made presentations of our New England greenway vision plan. Our presentations were well received.  
• Three co-chairs made presentations at the Centennial Conference of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). These presentations were very well received and were praised by several key leaders of the profession of landscape architects including Randy Hester and Ervin Zube.  
• A press conference was held on the banks of the Muddy River behind the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The one hour news conference was well attended by leaders of ASLA, news media, politicians, interested landscape architects and team members. Our vision plan received good coverage from TV's and newspapers.  
• State chair Theo Holtwijk of Maine made presentations to state officials in Maine.  
• Attempts were made to get on the agenda of the New England Council of Governors.  
• Heidi Ernst, Julius Gy. Fabos and Mark Lindhult met with two assistant Secretaries of the Massachusetts' Executive Office of Environmental Affairs.  
• Robert Ryan and Mark Lindhult published an article on our New England Greenway Vision Plan, entitled "Knitting New England together: A recent greenway plan represents landscape planning on a vast scale" in the November Issue of the Landscape Architecture Magazine (LAM), see pages 50-55.  
• The New England Greenway Vision Plan was presented to the Rhode Island Greenway Congress (October 1999) by Robert Ryan, Heidi Ernst and Pixie Aquino.

Current Activities
We are focusing our attention on three areas, including the dissemination of our vision plan, fund raising for further studies and implementation, and the creation of a viable consortium

On the dissemination of our vision plan

• We are working on publishing two additional journal articles in the Landscape Journal (Robert Ryan as principal author) and one for the Landscape and Urban Planning Journal (Julius Gy. Fabos as main author with Mark Lindhult & Robert Ryan).  
• We use our greenway plans as case studies in our classroom, Robert Ryan in his graduate planning studio, Mark Lindhult in his web class and Julius Gy. Fabos in a seminar on greenways.

   

  On fund raising

• We have started to meet with foundations and funding organizations. Currently the Kendall Foundation showed interest in our work.  
• We plan to apply for funds from the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development. The good news: the Center favors interaction among university faculties of various states. The bad news: they have only $80,000/year for 12 states within the North East of the USA.  
• We are searching for ideas and collaborations with all members of the New England Greenway Consortium. We would appreciate any ideas you may have in regards to plausible foundations for funding greenways and/or greenway related works.

On Creating a viable and successful Consortium

• We need to rekindle the enthusiasm demonstrated at the unveiling of the New England Greenway Vision Plan, May 21,1999. We propose a yearly symposium where all can gather to create action plans and much more for the upcoming years. The yearly symposium can serve as a place to assess, redirect and praise that which was suggested the prior year. Please let us know if you would be interested in attending and/or participating in yearly New England Greenway Symposiums. You can email our research assistant Heidi Ernst at thehide@aol.com if you would be interested in receiving an invitation.

Future Activities
What happens in the future depends on what the members of the CONSORTIUM decide upon, which is YOU. What would YOU like to see occur with the consortium? We would like to hear from you.

We envision that during coming decades thousands of greenway projects will be done in New England. Our vision plan identified Current Proposals for Greenspaces and Greenways proposed by New England (NE) State agencies and NGO's and if implemented they would add: an additional 3,583,000 acres to the existing greenspaces (or it represents another 8% of NE). It would also increase trails and greenway connections of all kinds by another 4,651 miles. Our vision plan proposes over 8 million acres to add to greenspaces and 12,781 miles to trail/greenway connections.

Given these plans we see future activities in these areas:

• The consortium members will do many of the thousands of projects individually or jointly on larger projects.  
• Our e-news will be a forum to inform every reader about your projects and to make connections. So PLEASE SEND US ANY NEWS ITEMS of interest. Also, call upon the contributors of this issue to get additional information and to make a personal connection.  
• We also need to work closer with planners and legislators in promoting river protection by designating generous buffers between water and urban or agriculture. Currently, Massachusetts has the most extensive river protection legislation (200 feet on either side of every flowing river or stream).  
• We need to develop working relationships with the tourist industry to find ways to use tourist dollars for the development of public recreation facilities.  
• We need to develop relationships with NGO's to assist each other in the protection of sensitive environments.

We are looking forward to hearing from you and what you think about the consortium, newsletter, etc. Please send us any NEWS ITEMS, COMMENTS and/or SUGGESTIONS for our next publication. We are interested in your present and future greenway projects.

Please send all your news items, comments and suggestions to Heidi Ernst at <thehide@aol.com>

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