The Kane County Regional Planning Commission is calling for a “recommitment” to preserve Kane’s farmland and open spaces as it prepares to update the county’s 2020 Land Resource Management Plan.
“We need to redouble our efforts to prevent premature conversion of farmland to other uses,” the regional planners suggest in a report delivered last month to the Kane County Board’s Development Committee by Mary Ochsenschlager, commission chairman.
The report is intended as the kickoff for a comprehensive planning process leading to adoption next year of a 2030 Land Resource Management Plan. The committee recommended the full County Board adopt the strategy.
Assuming adoption of the strategy by the County Board, the planning commission expects to deliver a draft plan by November for public review.
The strategy continues to be based on three distinct land-use areas within Kane. It includes several changes from the 1994 concept on which the 2020 plan is based, but “they’re actually not too big,” Ochsenschlager told the committee.
The report calls for land-use strategy to be “re-examined and fine-tuned to reflect changes that have occurred in Kane County,” she said.
The revised strategy reiterates the commission’s call for the “proper balance between natural resource protection and community development.”
Among other things, the strategy calls for:
Redevelopment, in-fill and adaptive reuse within the county’s historical urban corridor along the Fox River, and commends municipalities for planning efforts that the commission said “have been remarkable in advancing the land-use strategy” adopted in 1994.
Refinement of the county’s central corridor, or so-called critical growth area, to reflect more accurately population and land-use changes over the last nine years, including the growth experienced and planned in Hampshire, Sugar Grove and Elburn.
“The strategy for the area [where Kane makes the transition from suburban to rural] needs refinement, but it is working,” the report said.
A recommitment in the county’s agricultural and rural village area, generally in the western half of Kane, to pursue farmland preservation and protection aggressively “through land planning and zoning initiatives” and other programs. In the belief that farming as a way of life and important economic activity can be preserved in western Kane, the commission said a general goal of the plan “should be that by 2030 at least 50 percent of the land in Kane County should still be in farmland and open-space uses.”
Some encroachment of the critical growth area into the agricultural area is likely, according to the report.
