Copyright American Planning Association Apr 2004| [Headnote] |
| The farms, woodlands, and bucolic streams of nothing like popular images of America's most |
Nor does the historic township's gently rolling landscape look like a fertile place for planrung (as opposed, perhaps, to planting) innovations.
But this 22-square mile municipality in southern New Jersey's rapidly suburbanizing Burlington County has come up with an ambitious, aggressive, and comprehensive strategy to preserve an agricultural past while accommodating a less pastoral, more populous future. This puts Chesterfield, a community with 2,614 residents and an annual budget of $2.17 million, "at the cutting edge," says Philip Caton, AICP, whose firm, Clarke-Caton-Hintz, is the township's planning consultant.
Chesterfield's Transfer of Development Rights Program and Old York Village Plan wins the 2004 APA award for Outstanding Planning: A Project, Program, or Tool.
The program includes a number of notable features. It requires developments within the 560-acre Old York Village receiving area to be built using TDR credits from surrounding farmland. The Old York Village plan provides the framework for a new community of 1,300 housing units that will visually and otherwise complement not only the three existing hamlets in the still mostly rural township, but also its farms, woodlands, and streams.
In addition, the proposed street system, architectural and design standards, and public amenities (green space, bike paths, a central square) of Old York Village will reflect traditional neighborhood development, smart growth, and green strategies. Developments in Old York Village will collectively help the township meet state affordable housing requirements. And transportation and recreation improvement districts in the Village will enable the township and developers to share the costs of some recreational facilities and other public amenities.
Chesterfield is a place of two-lane roads and quaint vistas, interrupted by a handful of smallish, conventionally suburban subdivisions, about as rural as rural gets, at least in the midst of the East Coast megalopolis. "It's stunning," Caton observes.
But easy access to major highways including the NJ. Turnpike, 1-295,1-195, and U.S. 130, puts the township well within commuting distance of Manhattan, Philadelphia, and the sub-regional employment hubs of Princeton and Mount Laurel, New Jersey. No wonder development pressures like those transforming adjacent townships in Burlington and Mercer counties began to be felt in Chesterfield during the 1980s, when the population jumped by 14 percent.
In 1985, Chesterfield became the first municipality in New Jersey to use what was then the state's brand-new farmland preservation program. Despite that pioneering move, many residents had to be convinced that an aggressive strategy to link planning, preservation, and development was the way to go. Municipal meetings that had traditionally been sparsely attended became so crowded they were moved from the tiny town hall to a firehousc nearby.
There were skeptics
Laary Durr was among the initial skeptics. A lifelong resident and farmer, he and other landowners were concerned about equity. The changing economics of agriculture were eroding the traditional "one farmer, one farm" system in Chesterfield, where the same families had grown wheat, corn, vegetables, and orchard crops for generations. "It was a matter of fairness," Durr recalls. "For a lot of farmers, (the land) represented their retirement."
In the early 1990s, after New Jersey authorized the 40 municipalities that comprise Burlington County to use TDRs in a pilot effort, Chesterfield began focusing on them as a tool that could be linked with farmland preservation. Durr, now a member of the township committee (Chesterfield's governing body), ultimately became convinced the approach would protect landowners and the land, and would maintain the distinctive character of the place he and many other residents hold dear.
"I kind of think Chesterfield is special," says Durr, as he and Caton give a visitor a tour of the township in the fading pastel light of a late-autumn afternoon. Horse farms, majestic farmhouses, dramatic hedgerows, and a bright green field of winter wheat pass by the windows of his pickup truck. And in Crosswicks Village, adjacent to the receiving area, Colonial and Victorian homes and a village green look like postcard New England.
According to Caton and Durr, years of packed municipal meetings and hard work culminated in adoption of a new township master plan in 1997, adoption of new zoning, planning, and TDR ordinances in 1998, and updating the master plan last fall. Until Lumberton, in Burlington County's more densely settled southwestern portion, began setting up a TDR program, Chesterfield was the only municipality to take advantage of the state's pilot program.
The experiment seems to be working. State, county, and local farmland preservation programs have collectively protected 4,261 acres, and 90 percent of the land in the receiving area has been bought or optioned by developers. The township planning board has approved site plans for two Old York Village developments totaling 317 housing units, and proposals that would provide for another 726 units are in the pipeline.
"The receiving area," says Mayor Brian Kelly, "will hold all of the build-out we'd expect for the entire town."
Kelly, who grew up in quintessentially suburban Edison, New Jersey, and moved to Chesterfield from Northern Virginia in 1987, says the 
TDK-preservation link creates "a private mechanism for preserving farmland and open space (that) allows us to unlock landowners' equity without selling the land out from under them. It's a really elegant mechanism."
New Jersey's i'irsi
It is also unique in New Jersey, where Gov. James McGreevey famously declared war on sprawl last year (News, March 2003). More recently, McGreevey proposed authorizing all of New Jersey's 566 municipalities to use TDRs, which would make it the first such state in the nation, according to Susan Bass Levin, commissioner of the state community affairs department.
Even the New Jersey Builders Association, which has been sharply critical of McGreevey's anti-sprawl position (and especially of his administration's controversial Blueprint for Intelligent Growth, the so-called BIG map), has offered qualified support for some sort of statewide TDR program.
"We are wary of TDRs generally, but we thought the pilot program was a good opportunity," says Patrick J. O'Keefe, chief executive officer of the 2,000-member organization. "We shifted our position to (one of) support, and the final impetus was that Chesterfield put together a program that was viable." Commissioner Levin said chat she was "confident we will see a bill move through the legislature."
To be sure, Chesterfield's strategy has been facilitated by a confluence of factors, some of them unique. New Jersey authorized the township, which historically lacked a municipal sewerage system, to tap into the underutilized system serving the two state correctional facilities within its borders.
Besides enabling property owners in densely settled Crosswicks Village to give up their septic tanks (an improvement that surely helped generate support for the rest of the strategy), the availability of sewerage service makes thereceiving area all the more attractive to developers.
And Chesterfield has until recently been far enough from the leading edge of the suburban frontier, meaning it had time to make plans before the bulldozers arrived.
"We're trying to build something that creates community," says Mayor Kelly, whose wife, Deborah, is a historic preservation consultant. "There's real value in planning for how you want to grow."
For information, contact Philip Caton at 609-883-8383 or pcaton@cchnj.com.
Kevin Riordan
| [Author Affiliation] |
| Riordan is a columnist for the Courier-Post in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. |
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