UVa green team takes on Lynchburg

Preserving a sliver of land along every major waterway in the city is one recommendation a group of University of Virginia students taking stock of Lynchburg’s environmental as-sets may include in their final proposal.

Students received plenty of public comments about their proposals during an open house Wednesday. Among the remarks included recommendations for additional trails and that while large trees can be an environ-mental and aesthetic asset, they also can be considered a liability to homeowners’ insurance com-panies.

The project is part of a Uni-versity of Virginia course on green infrastructure for urban and environmental planning students. The students will com-bine the comments received Wednesday into their work, which will be presented as a formal document to city officials in the next few months, said UVa professor Karen Firehock.

The project, which is provided to the city for free, also will in-clude recommendations on how to implement and pay for the suggestions in the plan.

The students are examining four key topics: streams, trees, parks and how everything links together with trails.

Jeff Herlitz and Bill McClain, the students assigned to look at the city’s streams, said among the ideas they will recommend is adopting an ordinance requiring buffers along major waterways in the city. The buffers would help reduce pollution and in-stream erosion.

While they won’t have final recommendations until the mid-dle of December, a plan they are considering recommending would create a three-tiered sys-tem that ultimately would require a 100-foot sliver of space along Fishing Creek, Blackwater Creek and Ivy Creek to act as buffers.

Herlitz and McClain also said they would suggest the city re-examine its erosion and sediment standards and allow landowners to create riparian conservation easements, which would pre-serve slivers of land directly abutting waterways in perpetuity.

A group of students also ex-amined how some of the city’s schools and parks could be en-hanced with trees and trails. In particular, the group said R.S. Payne Elementary School could be enhanced by creating a master landscape design plan to add trees and other environmental features for an outdoor learning space, student Fania Gordon said.

Maintenance could be com-bined between the parks depart-ment and school system, which would relieve the school’s burden on maintaining new trees, Gordon said. She also said the team would look at how to con-nect the school to nearby Miller Park.

Another team is examining the city’s existing trail system and how future additions could help residents travel throughout their neighborhood by foot. Several citizens told student R.R.S. Stew-art that they already used trails along Ivy Creek that weren’t officially in the city system.

“That was important to find out that people are already using those routes,” she said.