On Thursday, April 17, Advocates for a Sustainable Albemarle Population (ASAP) will hold a panel discussion on the topic: "What is the state doing—and not doing—to help Virginia localities deal with growth?" The panel, moderated by Rich Collins, will include:

*Sally Thomas, Albemarle County Supervisor
*David Blount, Legislative Liaison for the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission
*Waldo Jaquith, creator and keeper of the blog Richmond Sunlight, which tracks legislation and votes in the General Assembly.

All are welcome to participate in this free session. Thursday, April 17, 7:30 to 9:00 PM, in the library of Westminster Presbyterian Church, 190 Rugby Rd. Parking is available in the lot behind the church. Questions? Contact Elizabeth at 434-974-4582.

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ASAP Awarded $50,000 Grant by Colcom Foundation

The Colcom Foundation has awarded Advocates for a Sustainable Population (ASAP) a $50,000 grant to help fund the first phase of ASAP’s Optimal Sustainable Population Size (OSPS) research initiative. John Rohe, Colcom Program Director, said, “The [Colcom] Board recognized this as a vital project, and it was highly impressed with the caliber of the participants.” The study will examine a number of approaches – including both socio-economic indicators and measures of environmental carrying capacity – to help estimate a “right size” as a planning tool for the Charlottesville-Albemarle County community.

Announcing the grant, ASAP President Jack Marshall stated, “Colcom awarded the funds not only because the OSPS project is a well-conceived, common-sense, and cutting-edge initiative, but also because of the support displayed by challenge grants from the City of Charlottesville ($11,000) and Albemarle County ($25,000), and because of the generous contributions for the project from over 75 ASAP members and friends (about $25,000 so far).”

ASAP was founded in 2002 by a group of local citizens concerned about the effects of growth and development on the Charlottesville-Albemarle community and surrounding areas. ASAP’s mission is to increase knowledge and awareness about the effects of population growth on our natural environment and on our quality of life, and to encourage policies and mechanisms that will enable our region to identify and maintain a sustainable population size. The OSPS project will help provide informed discussion about how big our community can grow while still maintaining its character, ensuring a quality of life current citizens expect and deserve, and protecting the environment.

The Colcom Foundation, headquartered in Pittsburgh, was created in 1996 to provide a forum for the examination and discussion of the major causes and consequences of overpopulation and its impact on environmental sustainability. Its mission is to “foster a sustainable environment to ensure quality of life for all Americans by encouraging reasonable U.S. population levels.” The Foundation makes grants in four areas: environmental sustainability, natural resource preservation, land and water conservation, and efforts to establish a sustainable population.

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PROPOSED STRATEGY:

ASAP Research to Estimate Our Community’s ‘Right Size’

The Project’s Objectives: This study aims to identify an optimal sustainable population size (or range) for the community of Charlottesville (Virginia) and surrounding Albemarle County, now with a combined total of 130,000 residents. The specific public policy question is: How big can we grow and still ensure a quality of life current citizens expect and deserve, protect our environment, and maintain the character of our community? Would a population size of 200,000 be optimal and sustainable? Half a million?

A second objective of the initiative, if a new methodology can be successfully developed, is to provide a model for other communities.

[It should be noted that any calculation of a community’s optimal sustainable population size is not immutable; it will evolve as community values change (e.g., regarding the desirability of various levels of residential density), as technology improves (e.g., regarding recycling of water), as environmental conditions change (e.g., climatic warming occurs), and as better data and analytical methods become available. Thus estimates of a “right size” should be revisited periodically, possibly in conjunction with updates of local Comprehensive Plans.]

The Proposed Research:  Because no community (as far as we can determine) has undertaken research to define its optimal sustainable population size, there is no clearly established methodology for us to follow.

But a number of approaches have been developed in an attempt to better understand the fit of a human population size to a finite area. Some tap residents’ values and preferences, others attempt to measure environmental carrying capacity. Some concentrate on ecological impacts of human population growth, others examine the economic costs of growth. Some of these efforts have been developed primarily for use at a global or national, rather than a local, level.

Though none was designed explicitly to define a local area’s “right size,” it is our premise that one or more of these approaches can contribute toward an answer to our policy question: How big can we grow and still ensure a quality of life current citizens expect and deserve, protect our environment, and maintain the character of our community?

Thus the strategy for the first phase of this project is to simultaneously explore the feasibility and usefulness of as many plausible leads as we can realistically investigate.Various items on this buffet of approaches may appeal to a different part of our audience: policy makers, average voters, legal specialists, scientists, etc. This is good, for we do not yet know which approaches will be fruitful in terms of yielding reliable results.It should be emphasized that at this point we have no preferences among the various approaches in terms of their importance.

1. Residents’ opinions about optimal population size as gleaned from recent local surveys. For the past six years Albemarle County has commissioned UVA’s Center for Survey Research to measure community views on growth-related issues, and Charlottesville Tomorrow’s survey in July 2007 provides similar relevant data; other results may be available from surveys by political candidates in city and county races, and by local advocacy organizations (Chamber of Commerce, Blue Ridge Home Builders, Piedmont Environmental Council, etc.).

2. Character of a community as a function of size and scale: Qualitative changes in what one foundation calls the “heart and soul” of a community occur as its population grows. A review of current literature on this topic may reveal the thresholds in size at which predictable changes result, and help define our optimal size.

3. ‘Best Place to Live’ methodology:  In their 2004 book Cities Ranked and Rated, Sander and Sperling named the Charlottesville Metropolitan Area "the Best Place to Live in the United States" based on specific criteria:  great medical care, the presence of a major university, low unemployment, the small college town atmosphere, the beautiful countryside, etc.  Using several hypothetical population size scenarios, perhaps the attractiveness of our area could be predictedusing those same criteria.

4. Fiscal costs of growth: Growth beyond the current 130,000 in this community will broaden the tax base, but will require new schools, roads, water and wastewater treatment, police and fire protection, and other infrastructure. What will be the net economic impact of each additional 50,000 residents? Is there a point at which continued growth simply costs too much for taxpayers to bear?

5. Environmental footprint analysis:  This calculation assesses the biologically productive land and marine area required to produce the resources a population consumes and absorb the corresponding waste, using prevailing technology. Though used primarily to inform policy by examining to what extent a nation uses more (or less) than is available within its territory, it is our hope that the approach can be adjusted to indicate the population size that can be sustained, at our current level of consumption, on the community’s 750 square miles.

6. Ecosystem services:  The wide range of resources and processes supplied by natural ecosystems include benefits of immense value to human populations, from erosion and flood control to crop pollination. Population growth imposes a major threat to local ecosystems and their services. We will select a number of locally-important ecosystem services, and for each try to identify thresholds of population size (or density) in our community at which such services are no longer sustainable – or at which point the costs of mitigation (if possible) are unacceptable

7. Population impacts on single environmental variables:  In addition to examinations of population’s impact on the systemic health of the environment, we can also try to determine whether there are thresholds of our community’s expanding population at which selected individual components of our environment are threatened, impaired, or extinguished. Stream health and air quality are possible variables for examination.

For more information contact ASAP’s Executive Director Jack Marshall at jackasap@earthlink.net or call 434-974-6390.

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