Michele Zone said:
I thought this would get more attention as a separate thread. I am starting the thread on behalf of Quijote, who signed a recent e-mail to me with "un-techno-wizard". :-D (She will eventually get the hang of it.
)
Thanks, MZ; I think I just sent a completely blank message in trying to respond. Anyway, I wanted to thank you and everybody on this thread for responding-- I will follow up with the suggested sites.
With regard to checking with people about whether they want to be protected or not, point taken-- in our case, fortunately, we've been going through a lengthy public input process and have tried hard to get some of the biggest (absentee, community-hostile) landowners to participate-- we know that our efforts won't be successful unless we are as inclusive as possible.
Another complicating factor for us, with regard to agriculture: our village farmland used to be irrigated. Several decades ago, the urban center hoarded the water behind a dam in the mountains, severely impairing this community's ability to continue using its land as before. This is one reason why urban planners see our relatively flat farmland's "best and highest use" as for relatively high-density ticky-tacky housing, whose main beneficiaries would not be the potential residents so much as the developers. We've already had a number of these things, and the usual story is that the buidlings are defective, the homeowners' associations can't afford to keep up the amenities (they aren't inside city limits, where such amenities would be provided publicly) and the costs to the residents are nothing like "affordable," notwithstanding the developers' insistance on the mantra "affordable" when they appear before elected officials begging for variances and other special favors. The losers are the residents and the existing neighborhood.
So anyway, we still have open land that can't be "farmed" in the traditional sense, but many of the residents, who have lived here for many, many generations, still maintain animals and a "rural outlook" about their living place. They want to keep their sense of space. There is even a chance that we'll get compensation for our lost water-- the rights are not all extinguished and a sympathetic state legislator is going to bat with the state engineer on our behalf, so there could be some future small scale agricultural uses restored, but we are now in the sixth year of a drought in an already dry place, so whatever happens agriculturally will necessarily be water-wise. I think we could do some stuff like small greenhouse operations producing specialty organic produce for Santa Fe's restaurants, for example. Our next door neighbor stables a couple of dozen horses and teaches riding-- this kind of use could expand, if linked to other tourism-related efforts. (Our village is surrounded on three sides by the city of Santa Fe, New Mexico, so tourism and art are big parts of our local economy). My husband and I are artists, so we benefit from the village's home-occupation zoning and its generally "live and let live" environment. It doesn't bother me a bit that just beyond the stables and the recently closed school of Oriental Medicine is a junk yard, for example, because this operation doesn't make noise or cause other nuisances.
Sorry for length, here, signing off, Quijote
