Protecting Sensitive Areas

Table of Contents

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Description

The protection of environmentally sensitive areas is a high priority for many communities in Colorado. These areas offer a variety of benefits including beautiful scenery, opportunities for outdoor recreation, and plant and animal habitat, to name a few. Preserving sensitive areas often provides an additional benefit of protecting citizens and property against natural hazards. For example, protection of floodplains and the wildland urban interface not only safeguard natural resources; they also help reduce vulnerability to flood and wildfire hazards. Additionally, protecting natural areas helps meet other community goals such as providing for open space, parks and recreation, and habitat conservation.

Protecting sensitive areas can be accomplished through mandatory tools (such as zoning and subdivision regulations) or through incentive-based approaches (such as optional cluster subdivisions). Generally, protecting sensitive areas can be accomplished at various stages of the planning and entitlement process, including:

  1. Comprehensive plan. The plan identifies sensitive areas, hazard areas, and other locations that may be unsuitable or less suitable for development, and offers a chance to prioritize protection of such areas alongside other important community goals.

  2. Zoning district designation (and subsequent rezonings). A property’s zoning district designation identifies the land use activities that may take place on the site. Placing an initial zoning district designation on a site, and also subsequent rezonings of the property, are important opportunities for the community to reflect on and implement the comprehensive plan and other supporting plans and policies. If sensitive areas are marked for preservation, then their zoning classifications should only allow appropriate densities and uses. This step is critical for establishing limitations on development of sensitive areas.

  3. Subdivision. Once an area has been zoned, subdivision and development can occur. Although the zoning of a property prescribes the density and intensity of development, subdivision regulations provide an additional opportunity to ensure appropriate layout of individual sites, including lot and block design, street layout, and connections to surrounding areas. Planners can apply special standards to subdivisions of sensitive areas (such as allowing cluster development to preserve sensitive areas, or requiring multiple points of egress for emergency vehicles).

  4. Building permits. Once a development has been approved, the building permitting process is another chance for communities to make sure that sensitive areas are protected. Permits must demonstrate how a proposed building complies with zoning and subdivision regulations and any other applicable health and safety codes (such as building and fire).

  5. Maintenance. After a property is developed, communities and landowners have to be diligent to ensure that sensitive areas are continually protected from risk to hazards. For example, maintaining defensible space for a home in the wildland-urban interface means continuing to prune trees and remove brush to prevent build-up of fuels. This requires attention by landowners, but also from the community through ongoing enforcement of maintenance requirements.

​This section identifies some of the planning tools that can be used to protect hazard areas while still allowing for a landowner to make economically beneficial use of their land. 

Tools and strategies

This section explores tools that communities can use to advance their goals of protecting sensitive areas. Tools profiled in this section include:

Manufactured Housing – Location, Location, Location!

Today’s manufactured homes are dramatically different in appearance from the "mobile homes" of yesteryear, with estimates that more than 90 percent of today’s manufactured homes never move from their original site. Manufactured homes, like stick-built homes, are now available in a variety of designs, floor plans, and amenities. In terms of hazard risk, the concern with manufactured homes is not their structural integrity, but rather their location. Like stick-built housing, if manufactured housing is located in the floodplain, they are at risk of being damaged by an event like the Front Range storm in 2013.

In the City of Evans, 203 manufactured (formerly “mobile”) homes were destroyed when the South Platte River flooded in 2013. The major flooding issues had nothing to do with the structural integrity of manufactured housing, but its location within the floodplain. Each of the manufactured homes destroyed were constructed to the HUD 3280 Construction Standard. Following the 2013 floods, the City revised its municipal code to address development in the floodplain. Under the new code, construction in special flood hazard areas requires both manufactured housing and stick-built housing to be elevated to 36 inches above base flood elevation.

Citations:

David Burns, Emergency Management Coordinator, City of Evans, Colorado, Personal Communication, August 2015.

References:

Manufactured Housing Institute

manufacturedhousing.org/default.asp

Colorado Department of Local Affairs, Division of Housing

https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/dola/division-housing

Evans Municipal Code, Chapter 16.04.200 Specific standards for construction in special flood hazard areas:

evanscolorado.gov/municipalcode/1604-flood-damage-prevention

Longmont Municipal Code, Chapter 20.20 Provisions for Flood Hazard Reduction:

municode.com/library/co/longmont/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=PTIICOOR_TIT20FLRE 

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