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This is the webcast moderator for this afternoon's webcast, and we'll get started in just under a minute. Thank you.

Good afternoon it's 1:00. Welcome to the first webcast in the 2007 series of webcasts, sponsored by EPAs watershed academy. The title of today's webcast is using NEMO, non-point source communication full-- to advance watershed management. I will be moderating today's session. We'll get started in a few minutes here, and while we wait for others to JOIRNGS I would like to cover a new housekeeping items. This is very important as our seminar is filled to capacity. The materials in this webcast have been reviewed by EPA staff for technical accuracy. HOUFSHGS the views of the speakers and the speakers organization are their own, and do not necessarily reflect those of the EPA. When a commercial enterprise, product is mentioned it does not mean EPA endorses them. When you registered you were directed to this specific web address the seminar's home page has a short abstract of today's session. If you have sessions for our speakers after today's present takes, sen them an email. You'll fine their email addresses on the home page. On the left-hand side bar of the home page, notice a linking button which we will direct you to at the end of the seminar. This has a series of extra inform TA resources on today's topic and it is archived indefinitely. The links page also a rebroadcast section where you can access and listen to the seminar after today's presentation. The sound track will also be available at a podcast, so in the near future, you'll be able to access the slides and listen to a recording of today's live webcast. Also on the left-hand side bar is a button for the online feedback form. If you have an opinion, please consider submitting it to us. For those of you joining us via the phone, we require that you mute your phones during the seminar. The webcast has several question announcer intermissions built in, at which point you are welcome to take your phone off mute and ask a question. We have a lot of people participating today online and on the FOERNGS so we may not get to all of your questions today. I will put the audience on mute while the speakers are talking, and then unmute everyone during the question and answer session if you are downloaded the presentation in advance of the webcast, thank you. We appreciate. It helps improve webcast performance. I now ask you to go to slide 1 of the presentation. If your are viewing today's slide online, by now you should have clicked on the go-to seminar button and be on slide No. 1 of the presentation if you are following the slides online, note the navigation buttons on the top of the page. To submit questions during the seminar click the button showing a question mark. You don't have to wait until the question and answer period to submit your questions. In fact we encourage you to submit them in advance of the question and answer session. You may also use the question mark button to alert of us technical difficulties you enKOUR TER with the audio stream. Please include a telephone number where you can be reach and we'll help you troubleshoot the button. If you would like to activate the closed captioning button, collies click the CC button. If you are going to use close captioning you must have internet expleaer version 5.5 or higher. The speakers will announce the number of the slides to which they are moving. If you are viewing the slides online advance to the next slide by clicking the advance slide button. Before I turn it over to our first speaker, I remind phone participants to monitor their own participation and noise levels. Please mute your phones at this time. I think we're ready to kick off this session. Today's webcast will give an overview of the NEMO PRACHL NEMO stands for non-point source education for municipal officials. Their mission is to provide education and assistance to local land use boards, municipal or county governments and other local officials on how to make good land use decisions that protect their communities natural resources and its character. NEMO offers a number of different educational opportunities and technology tools, which you'll hear about today. You'll also hear about the impact that their education and outreach efforts have had on some local communities. We have three speakers who will all be speaking to us from NEMO's offices in KRT KRLT, and they will cover how NEMO works, some cutting edge tools and planning strategies and how they can help you with your watershed or local community. Our first speaker will be Chet Arnold. Chet is the associate director of the center for land use education and research at the University of Connecticut. Next John Rosen will take the helm. John is the director of NEMO flaps the state of Connecticut, and finally, we will hear from Dave Dickson. Dave oversees 30 projects in 30 states. All three of them say they spend lots of time on the phone where their program constituents, so I think we near good audio hands today. Chet, are you online?

I believe so, can you hear me?

Yes, I can take it away.

Thank you. And thanks to the EPA, office of water and the watershed academy for hosting us on this all three of us are in one room together which will either make for a better or worse webcast. We'll have to see. Why don't we go on ahead to slide 2. It's going to be difficult for us-- we're all used to speaking and clicking at the same time so if we forget the number of the slide-- I guess none of you can shout out and let me know, but we'll try to keep with you. We thought we would introduce ourselves as well as the introduction. I'm the good-looking one on the upper left, not the pink one but the one in the white shirt, and I'm the associate director for the senator for land use research. John in the middle. John is wearing a long academic robe today because he'll be leaving the webcast at the very end to teach a course on urban planning, and then last Dave in the lower right-hand corner will get to the heart of this and talk about the national NEMO network, Dave is wearing Hawaiiian shirt and other paraphernalia. I'm going to cover the first two, a little bit about the basic workings of NEMO y we created it. Who we're targeting, what some of our techniques are. John is going to talk about hot it's working and some of the things he's doing in the Connecticut program. So if we advance to 4. Let's keep going to 5. Little introduction on the center for land use education research. NEMO has been around since 1991, but around 2002, we formed the stern for land use education research. NEMO, and a number of different projects that all basically had the same mission statement you are looking at. [ Indiscernible ]. We are multi-disciplinary, but we also like to think the real core of what we're doing is to integrate our research, tools, and training. The reason we focus on land use, this slide has screen captures of covers of a number of different reports and publications over the last five or six years. Each one pointing the finger at poorly planned growth or the way we develop the earth has a factor in everything from human health, to sprawl effect, et cetera, et cetera. [ Indiscernible ]. Next slide on No. 7. Again, with clear we try to connect your landscape research, we're going to talk a little bit about that today, but not a lot, through tools and actual training in some technologies, but really, the bottom line is our outreach education, that's where most of our people are. That's where we spend most of our time and we target decision making. Slide No. 8. The foundation for NEMO, that's really the topic of our webcast today, again, we're going to be focusing largely on Connecticut for the first part of the webcast and then have Dave talk about the national network. Slide 9. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about NEMO basics. We're through the brief and painless introduction. I hope it was painless for all of you out there let's go to slide 10. Here is kind of basic, basic fact about NEMO. We started in Yukon in about 1991 to '92, the Connecticut staff has between three or four people. Dave and [ indiscernible ] are our national people. That's almost an entirely separate project at this point. Just so that you of you know, those of you in struggling non-profit watershed groups out there or other AK deemia, we're sometimes-- because of the acronym we're treated like another governmental agency, but we are just a bunch of people that are mostly living on soft money. Only three of us are tenured faculty, the rest are all on grants. I just thought you ought to know that. A little bit about where we come from, about Connecticut, because I think it's relevant to how we developed the program and how it may or may not be relevant in your situation. We are there the communistic northeast, New England, and you can see that we have lost a lot of our agricultural lands here, but we still have a lot of for rests. New England was the only region of the country that had experienced an increase in forest last the last [ indiscernible ] years. We have hardly any federal LAN out there so when you hear me talk about local decision making being the only thing, those of you in those large states out in the west with large amounts of federal land know that we're talking about the land under local control, because that's all we have in Connecticut. And we do have a fairly dense population compare with many throughout. Slide 12. The history of NEMO. I think we were missing a slide here. There we go. I'm sorry. Slide 12. Something else about Connecticut, we don't have any regional government. It has been outlawed since 1952. So we go directly from the state control to local control with land use. Even though we are in the very wealthy and communistic northeast, if you have any sense of Connecticut you may think of us and the gold coast [ indiscernible ] where there's tremendous wealth. But we have 169 towns and about half of that have no professional staff whatsoever. We do not really have a state planning office, although there's been a lot of talk about that recently. We have a state plan and a small office that updates and maintains that plan, but not any state plan with a function, and we're only state in the northeast that doesn't have a state-recognized [ indiscernible ]. The last thing we have no legal connection between local plans and zoning. We have local plans and zoning regulations and [ indiscernible ] but there's no legal connection that makes the zoning regulations reflect what is in the plans or vice versa. So again, for those of you that are from states where you think local autonomy and rugged individualism is the case, even here in New England it really is the wild wild west. A little about where we came from this is a map of the long island sound area, including Connecticut and portions of New York and long land. [ Indiscernible ] is that shaped blue thing in the lower left -hand corner. We are experiencing low oxygen conditions. The main culprit has been identified with research as night TROE again. And the long island sound study program, wanted to know what the non--point source contribution might be. To estimate that way back in 1990, they commissioned our colleague [ indiscernible ] NAD to create the first-ever land use cover map for the region. And that's what really stimulated NEMO. Some of us working on the non-point work group saw this data and thought this is a unique data set that might be of and lot of used to [ indiscernible ]. Next slide, 14. I'm going to finish this portion of our program by going through the acronym. The NEMO stands for-- [ indiscernible ]. We would be remiss without mentioning all of the [ indiscernible ] reports extended by the state that it has been for many years been the [ indiscernible ] in the United States. Next SLOOID. [ Indiscernible ] you can see down here on the bottom, we think because land use is local that it needs to be really the next management practice to possibly used to change land use practices is education, not regulation or anything else, so we think of education as the absolutely important thing to do. It's not the flufy stuff left over after doing the really important enough. And the MO, the municipal officials. We already talked about this those squiggly lines for those out n those large states out west, all of those little swingly lines are our town boundaries. So now you're looking at the land cover map of the state of Connecticut with [ indiscernible ] municipalities in there sometimes not even collaborates or corroborates with the neighbors immediately to the side. Next slide is 17, which is a pretty important slide. Hold on a second, I got to get a drink of water. We're very tightly focussed in NEMO on the target audience of local land-use decision making. In Connecticut and in fact all of New England, that doesn't necessarily mean county people, but local people, volunteers serving on boards and commissions in Connecticut we have a number of different land use commissions, and these folks have an incredibly difficult job. They have obviously a lot of legal mandates, most of the time they have a full plate of consideration, a full plate of things to do every Tuesday night, second Tuesday of the week, they turn over, usually very rapidly, because it's not as much fun being on the planning board as they were first lead to believe. Long evenings, their neighborhoods get mad at them, et cetera, et cetera, so a lot of them tend to turn over. They obviously have the complexity of environmental issues that all of us are more familiar with, and lastly, and very importantly, the inability to [ indiscernible ] case by case, night by night decisions they make. Most of them when they are in their decision-making mode are blinders on. They are looking at a site plan, and trying to decide if it meets their regulations, and it's very difficult to take a step back and put that decision within the context of their town, for instance, or of a watershed for most of you who are working on watershed. My next slide, please, and that means 18. This is a verial slide, a lot of these are the ones I have been given by the crew are very old. But our goals have not changed in all of the years we have been working on NEMO, and that's to become a catalyst. We want them to ask the right questions when development is proposed before them. We want them to put development in a greater context. I just talked about that and we want to get them started on the road to natural resource-based planning, and I'm going to say a few things more about that as we go along. Slide 19. The essence of our message can really be boiled down to a couple of bullets. We just talked or are going to talk some more about the actual topical method which iss thattal resource placed planning. The more emotional message is I don't like to use west coast words like empowerment, but if I could use it I would. The subliminal message is you can do this. We know you're in a little town. We know you don't have much staff. You are tired. Your things are complex, but we don't want you to hand this over to a consultant or throw up your hands and say there's no way to do a better job of planning in the future. You can do it. We provide tools and other things for them, but we're also saying this is a hard job, but you have to do it. And the last one is-- is again, the kind of anti-communism bull slept that we really sell good land-use planning as self determination for town. If you don't want your town character to change too muff. If you see sprawl or other things are influencing the nature of your town and you don't like it, the worst thing you can do is stick your head in the sand. You really need planning as a way-- as our planner and my coNEMO developer Jim would say to put you in the driver seat. So you are dictating what happens in your community rather than just being in react mode. Let's see what slide 20 holds. A couple of ways about the way we work. We go to our audience, I would say 95% of the presentations and work shops we run are in the community, rather than have them up to the ivory tower. Typically our work shops are two hours long of which an hour is devoted to the actual presentation and a full hour is devoted to the question and answer. And it's really that give and take where all of the good things happen. The third bullet and is an interesting and complex one. We feel it's very important that the town wants to have us in. I'll talk a little bit more about how we get in there later, but I realize for a lot of you that that's increasingly difficult, especially in some way the way the money is fleeing from EPA water program to the state, there's an emphasis of money being spent on dirty water. So in some cases we're all told where we should be working, but in an ideal case, we would rather have people invite us and then try to break our way into a community or watershed by main stream, because our experience is that doesn't work very well. The fourth button is we try to bring all of the decision-making boards together. We know that's very difficult, but we try. From the very beginning of NEMO we take use of GIS imagery-- [ indiscernible ] back when we started the program in the mid-90s it was considered much more arcane. It's still a very powerful tool and we think an underutilized tool even to this day. Because sometimes it's overused instead of under used judiciously. Slide 21. This is where we worked in Connecticut and the orange towns were the ones where we worked. Some towns we have done a couple of work shops, other towns we have worked extensively for years and years. But I would say we worked in almost 3/4 of the 169 municipalities in Connecticut, and our Connecticut people, mostly John and Jim, and sometimes Mike our storm water guy are out there well over100 times a year giving evening work shops. It's a lot of work, but that's what we found to be a success. Slide 22. There's two we interact or connect with towns. The first one was is a very boring slide. Someone will call John as the head of the Connecticut program, and they may be from a wet land commission, here in New England the heads of our small towns we call them first elect rather than mayors. John or Jim will work with that person, not to just ROUNT and give a workshop to one group, but to make sure we have as many people around in room in the room as possible, and it may take quite a while, and we'll organize a number of different workshops, and if the line up our ducks, good things happen. [ Indiscernible ] basketball championship, maybe not this year-- definitely not this year. Slide 23, here is a slide I kept on waiting and waiting for, but here is a picture of John, and there's a couple of things unusual about this picture. One is that he's backed up into a corner without a screen anywhere near him. Here it looks like he's holding forth with just a couplement of fact sheets which is unusual and the other thing is he is wearing a tie, which is once in a blue moon. We're not going to get every one of these people together, it's not possible. Yet we want to get a SMAERT of these groups in the same room at the same time, and if that means waiting for the fourth Tuesday of the month and KWETing the first elect to write a very strong letter of recommendation, then that's what we do. I had something else to say, but I can't think of what it is now. Let's go on. The other way it works has been going on for about five or six years now this is a section 319, clean water act collaboration program. It's called the municipal initiative. And this is where we actually put out an RFP, and you can see it there on the left-hand side of the screen. It's all of one page they have to answer. There's no essay questions, but it hard wires in the kind of best practices that I just talked about that we learned the hard way over the last 15 years of working with towns, that is we ask for the endorsement of the town chief elected official. We ask that they create a multi-commission NEMO task force. We ask for a designation of a principal contact person. That could be a staff person or a commission chair, but we need someone we can talk to on a weekly basis. And then the key people the task force sits down with Jim and John and the rest of the Connecticut NEMO program and they agree to a two-year course of educational programs. So what are you wanting to do? Are you updating your comprehensive plan? Are you doing an open space plan? Et cetera. Et cetera. And we found that works incredibly well and the impacts John will talk about. Slide 25. We do a lot of things, we're increasingly doing some stuff on the web, both John and I will mention that a little bit. But the real heart of our program is good old fashioned work shops and presentation in town has, as I said. And there's just no substitute for that and so before we break for questions, on slide 26, what I'm going to do-- we're going to break for questions now briefly, and when I come back, I'll go through a very brief couple of slide version of what we call basic NEMO, which is the original presentation that we developed about 15 years ago. Now we give a whole host of other presentations, but I thought it might be useful for your folks throughout to hear something about the logic of the [ indiscernible ]. So if we go to slide 27, I think we're asking for questions at this point. So I don't know-- I'm at a loss to how you handle this.

This is our first question and answer session, Chet, yes. I think there's some confusion here about the slide numbering, but we have actually slide 26 being the question slide.

Oh.

For online participants, remember you can submit questions at any time by clicking on the question mark button at the top of the slides page. We actually did get a question, and it is from Don in Virginia. He says if I want help from NEMO, is there a fee involved in how is NEMO supported financially?

Let me see if I can answer that, that's going to be a question I suspect we'll get more of, and DAF is the best person to answer, but I won't throw the phone to Dave at the moment. There is not a fee involved, and it really is a matter of piecing together a project on your own. I mean, I would love to tell you, Don, that we have got a $10 million pool from EPA, Noah and U.S. D&A and NASA and we all work for and that's to fund NEMO programs and we have an RFD out to fund them. But unfortunately we're not there. It's a Darwinian existence out there for all of us including the Connecticut program. And yet, as Dave will say-- he'll tell you we have 30 programs throughout that are managing to survive. The way it works, and again, Dave is going to go through this, if you are interested in starting a NEMO program, you need to call Dave here. LE talk to you about what is required and also put you in contact with any other people in your state, if there's an existing program. And as far as the way we're funding, let me just say the Connecticut program getting funding from all different sources, and the national network is currently funded by grants from EPA and USDA, but that's for us to coordinate the program. So they are all kind of on their own.

Thank you. We'll go to the phone lines now. If anyone wants to ask a question over the phone, unmute yours and state your name and wait to be recognized. Any questions over the phone? We have-- we have another question from the online participants. This is Scott from Nevada, I believe. Has NEMO worked with conservation districts?

I can't speak-- again, I'm sorry, we're probably-- I don't want to step on Dave's presentation, but we here in Connecticut, I can say that we work with a couple of our conservation districts on various projects, and I believe that there's quite a few NEMO programs throughout on the network that also partner with conservation districts, although, again, I'm probably not the best person to ask, but if you go to the nationals we and click on information for each of the NEMO projects in your state, most of them have list of partners and you can see, certainly conservation districts are one of the organizations that makes a lot of sense for NEMO to partner with.

At this point, we'll go forward. I'm going to force mute everyone, so Chet you will have to unmute yourself when you start speaking. We'll go for another 15 minutes and shoot for another question and answer session at a quarter till 2:00.

I'm sorry-- I don't know where we got mixed up with the slide numbers, maybe we don't have the same version. I'll say let's go to the next slide after the question slide. 28 on our version. It is 27 on yours-- oh, you are muted now. Never mind. Okay. What I'm going to do now is a very dangerous thing to take an hour-long presentation and condense it into five minutes, and sometimes you tend to create more questions that would have obvious if you gave it, but I wanted to give you folks a feel for the logic of our very basic project this is kind of the mother ship in some ways of what we do. It's called [ indiscernible ] land used to water quality. Some version of this has been around since we created the program in 1991. And it has these four chapters. We go over the water cycle and watersheds and those types of things to get into the heart of the whole NEMO equation which is land and land use. Almost a subset of that is this idea of impervious surfaces, and lastly we get them started on recommendation on [ indiscernible ] plan. Let's go to the next slide.

Chet, that would be slide 28 for us.

Okay. I'll try to remember you are one less than me. I don't know how that happened.

Okay. Slide 28.

Okay. Thanks.

Slide 28, in your play book should be part 1. Water and watersheds, just to make sure we're all on the same slide. Again, we talk about the water quality and quantity impact of urbanization and how urbanization tends to disrupt the water cycle. In the begin, again, we made use of carefully drawn GIS maps. You can see a little 3-D thing on the left-hand side. This is still something we like to make use of. Slide 29, I guess, just as an example of how we treat some of these things, you won't see have many graphs in the NEMO world, not a whole lot of data this is a stylized graph, but this talks about urbanization and water quantity. With the flow rate on a stream on the vertical access during a STROEM. So if you can imagine it is starting to rain then all of a sudden the water level starts to lift and then it slowly decrease as the storm goes away. We contrast this with the next slide, which would be 30, and again, this is a classic urban graph, where you see the response of the water system is much flashier, the water rises much more quickly, to a higher peek, and there's a lot more volume in the system than there would be on the [ indiscernible ]. We talk about this with animation and slides and three dye dimensional things. Next slide 31. We get into part two which is land and land cover, and if we go to the next slide, 32, you'll just see one very small example of the way we have always treated it. Here is where we use our remotely sensed land cover day that is 30-meter data, so 100 feet on the side. So it's really good for statewide and regional and town summaries of what is going on, but it isn't good for a site level determination. But we have been very pleased-- we just think the land cover data is still the core of what we do and I'll talk a little more about that later this is the town of [ indiscernible ] Connecticut which is a coastal town on long island sound right before Rhode Island. And we found that land cover is really unique view of land that local officials never had before. Most of them had a land use map, which would be more like a zoning map. Land use is what is permitted practice in town this is land cover which is what the satellite senses is actually on the ground, and that correlates much Bert with the natural resources use that we're interested in, like the impact of development on water resources or the impact of roadways on resource-- meantation, et cetera, and of course this land cover is directly controlled by the land use decisions that our local officials make. So we make heavy use of our land cover today. Next slide, 33. When we go through the various types of land cover, and I showed you the entire map. We sometimes piece it out and talk about each one. It becomes clear as the intensity of land use increases from no development to say, highly industrial commercial development, that the water quantity and quality problems that we discussed earlier in the program tend to get greater and one [ indiscernible ] is impervious surface. Next slide, 34. I was just telling the guys I can't believe I didn't put in the classic [ indiscernible ] SHOOULer graph which is the impervious cover model graph. Most of you are very familiar with that about the rough and tumble levels of 10% of impervious cover of which the impact [ indiscernible ] screen were watershed and 25% were [ indiscernible ] urban granted, but we don't have that slide, but we do use that relationship and we really like impervious cover. We feels that sometimes we have been overidentified with the use of impervious surface indicator, and it's not close to everything we do. But woe love it as a indicator and fors the reasons on the slide. It simplifies all of the complex impact. For those of you that work with local commissions, imagine yourself talk about [ indiscernible ] of Nitro again and photo suspended solids and a their eyes are rolling up in the back of their heads in ABC 10 minutes. This simplifies it and it is tangible and measurable, and again, it's actually generated by the rules and regulations that they make that in their zoning subdivision pool. Next slide. This is a very simple graph, again. This is just showing the apportionment of impervious surfaces in a community between transportation, network and structures, both for urban and rural communities, just showing that the transportation network [ indiscernible ] budget. Back in the olden day inspection NEMO, we used, I think it was the city of Olympia, Washington, which was ground breaking back then in early to mid-90s, now we use our own data TA from [ indiscernible ] center for land use. Next slide, which would be 36. After we have gone through water and land and impact on land and ways to get a handle on that through impervious surface as a indicator, we end up talking about [ indiscernible ] and the font sizes on this slide are intentional. Now we talk about land use planning as a best management practice or as a strategy for watershed protection or reduced [ indiscernible ] solution is fairly common place. It's what you would expect, but back in the early '90s, this was totally her etic call for us to talk AVNLT when you talked about [ indiscernible ] you were talking about best management practice. And back then you remember BMSs just meant stuff in the ground that takes pollution out. The idea here is a three tiered approach where you use land use planning to decide where you are going to develop and where you are not. And where you are going to develop you look at site design issues, and then lastly, you can't get to where you want to go with those strategies so some of the mechanical things. Okay. Slide 37. Finally, after talking about it for 100 slides, we're just going to show you the great mysteries of natural resourced based planning. It's very simple and we didn't invent it obvious limit but the idea is to plan your community around natural resources rather than around necessarily the road pattern or where the mayor's brother owns land or what have you. You have to do an inventory of your resources and know what you want to protect before you protect it. And that information and analysis of what are the priority areas become the basis for half of what we have comprehensive planning here, so your open space plan and your economic development plan. And we feel very strongly that these two are two sides of the same coin and they have to be addressed upfront and together if you are going to be effective at the local level. Those are the two halves of what we call legally the plan of conservation and development. You may be calling it your comprehensive plan or something like that or just plan of development. And then after changes to the plan are made, then it's time to review and change the actual regulations, whether they be wet lands regulation or subdivision or zones, itself. And again, for those of you that think you caught me out, because you remember I said back in the beginning there's no legal connection in Connecticut between [ indiscernible ] you are quite right. But we still believe the plans are incredibly important documents that set the vision for the town and the regulations need toe flow from the plan and need to be supported by the plan and vice versa even though legally there's no connection. For those of you who may say we don't need this education and planning stuff, just give us the model, our experience it doesn't work. They may take a paragraph from you and that's the last anyone will ever see of it. It is educational process of the towning thinking about what it needs to do to protect it's natural resources and then putting it in the document where this stuff seems to work. Slide 38. We do a lot of follow-up work shops. This is not all of them by any means, and as you can read down through them, you can see kind of a progression of that natural resource-based planning slide from doing an inventory to doing open space and economic development planning, doing your whole plan and getting in to some of the design elements with LID and watershed planning. The low-impact development is incredibly-- where we are it's very popular follow-up. We have a lot of interest in our community about low-impact development. Also in some of our more technical and also some of our [ indiscernible ]. Next slide, we have follow-up other than just the educational workshop. We have a geospacial educational program, which is run by our buddy Sandy in the next room. One of the things he does is train local officials and local employees and others on the technology itself. This isn't something I thought would be feasible five or six years ago, but there's tremendous interest, and he's turning people away from his courses. And he trains them in GIS, a little bit in remote sensing, not everybody needs to know the technicalities in remote sensing, and increasingly a lot of interest in global positioning systems. Slide 40. Another follow-up that Sandy's program and some of our NEMO technical people provide are tools, and we're not going to go through this. I think when we talk to the EPA organizers we thought briefly we might try to do something more on our technical stuff, but it's kind of hard to show in this environment. These are a number of the GIS and remote sensing tools. The I-sat which is the impervious surface analysis tool is an watershed tool to look at impervious cover and our friends made it into a robust GIS tool that you can download from the [ indiscernible ] website. Down in the lower left-hand corner, these are just samples, of course, we're working with placeways Inc. which makes a GISplanning source called [ indiscernible ] this was developed from the [ indiscernible ] which is a non-profit for Vermont up near this New England. And a lot of people use this to do a build-out analysis. A best guess of what continued development may result in in your town, so we're doing some projects with that, and again, just providing-- we use a 30-meter resolution for land Corp., but we also access to high resolution imagery, which is an immediate use for towns to use as a base map for some of their mapping or just various [ indiscernible ] tasks. Slide 41, and we're almost done with the Arnold section of this for those of you who are checking your email and wondering when Rosen is going to get on. Another follow-up that we're doing, is web-enabled tools and information to back up our educational workshop. So once again we don't think any of the fancy technical tools will ever replace the face-to-face give and take of a workshop at 9:30 at night in town hall, but they can help your audience get to where they want to go a lot faster. We have a number of different websites that I encourage you to check out. The clear website is on your list of resources. The one I'm showing here is another town in Connecticut and it's a capture from Connecticut changing land-- by looks at increasing in development to 2002. It's going to be an ongoing look. Basically the light gray are undeveloped area, the dark gray were roads developed before 1985, and the swigments are development through 1985 and as they are mostly spinedly subdivisions that information has been incredibly valuable to John and Jim as they go out and talk. So we're doing a lot of interactive development and I'll shut up about that because I'll step on [ indiscernible ] talk. Slide 32, it isn't that we're continually chucking old Februarying knowledge for new technology, but as we move from left to right we're adding more softist indicated technology to add to the different choices of our target audiences for access to this information. Everything from static, hard printed out maps to animations, to tables and graphs, all the way to actual GIS data for the people who are make use of that technology. We're trying to maximize access of these very important target group of people who make land use decisions. Next slide, which is 43, as I said there's lots more at the clear website, the URL is on your information sheet. Feel free to go there and rollover those three big orange buttons and they will take you directly to various projects, some of which I have talked about like Connecticut's changing landscape. We don't presume to think what is going on in Connecticut will be an incredible fascination for you, but it may be interesting how we made use of the technology and how we have made it available to people. Next slide which is 44 on your slide. I think we're breaking one more time for questions.

That's right this is our second question and answer session. We actually have had some questions submitted online. I'm going to take the first one. Chet this is Donna from Maryland, she says who recommends the town or city for collaboration with NEMO? Would it be a mayor or town executive? Would you want the county government to be involved and to what degree?

Well, most of our life-- I love this Donna from Maryland thing, I really feel like I'm on the radio right now. I'm channelling my inner [ indiscernible ] but most of our life we have been reactive and that's been-- I didn't go over this, but once we began our pilot communities, word of mouth got out, and we never really lacked for business since then, and so the towns usually come to us. It could be anyone in the town, as I described. It could be any mayor, a commissioner, a land trust or watershed trust person, but we would used that person as a way to work with others and work with them to get others involved in the community to generate brood-based interest in the program. In other states it may be different, certainly we know Maryland has very strong county government with a lot of fantastic services, and in fact is leading the country in many things like low-impact development. I would expect-- we have just a very nascent Maryland NEMO that hasn't gotten off the ground yet. There they are not only trying to involve the county government but also other surrounding states. County government is always a good partner, and we have a number of NEMO programs that have good partnerships with their county commissions. I'm not sure if I answered that question.

We have a second question, Chet. This is Ellen from New Jersey who says where can I get information about NEMO's I-sat [ indiscernible ] tool.

There's two places. You go to the NEMO website on your list that's John website, and click on the button that says-- I think it's called technical-- what it is, guys? Technical tools, and there's an entire section on impervious sections and ways to measure it and it is in there. The other thing is if you goggle Noah for coastal services center and go to their website, they actually have the tool there for downloading, if you are a GIS [ indiscernible ].

We'll go to the phones now, if anyone wants to ask a question over the phone, please unmute yourself and state your name. I guess our next speaker is John Rosen; is that right?

That's correct.

And you'll take it away for the next slide.

Yep.

Do you have the slide number as well? 47, I think.

I'm going to do it from here. Can you hear me?

I can hear you fine.

Okay. So we'll go ahead. So just to double check on slide numbers, I have got the questions were on 44, so this should be slide 45; is that right.

We're on slide 45.

Okay. I'm John Rosen I'm the director of the Connecticut NEMO program, and I have charged to talk to you about what we're doing here in Connecticut as sort of the flagship program, the program that sort of started this all. It's probably has the most record on the ground, if you will. So I think that's probably where we're talking about Connecticut first before we go to some of the national projects. And I think-- certainly we're here to up the pet a little bit what we're doing, because we're proud of it, but I think mostly it's to try to give you some idea of the kind of impacts that we are sort of STROOIing for so click to slide 46. So I think the-- the question we're trying to ask here is you have heard Chet talk about all of the process, how we set it up, how all of this got started, all of the nifty technology we use, but I think we're really-- what most people want to know is does this work? And so that's what I hope to cover over the next few minutes here, and before we go to that, I just want to acknowledge-- Chet mentioned we had three or four people working in the Connecticut program and it [ indiscernible ] manage how we count. As far as people on the ground who are doing a lot of this work that I'm going to be slowing is certainly [ indiscernible ] Wilson who is our agree YOE spacial-- Dr. [ Indiscernible ] and Dr. Julie AUN that Barrett. These are the people who are doing a lot of this work. We also get a lot of back-up work from Chet certainly, Jim GIB Bonns who is our land use planner here, and of course [ indiscernible ] and Dave Dickson from the national program as well. So we have a real collaborative that gets a lot of this work done. So I don't want to leave you with the impression that I'm the one doing all of this work. Let's go to slide 47--

Before we do that there's a sound quality issue R. You on speaker?

I'm actually on a handset. Okay. I'm going mute everybody again, and you can resume with slide 47 in just two seconds here. Go ahead, John. John, you have to unmute yourself, so that we can here you. John?

All right. I'm on?

Yes, you are.

Okay. We're on slide-- the last we talked we were on slide 47, and we still are indeed. And I wanted-- there's a lot of talk about impacts and the impact of your program, and particularly when you are going for grant funding and trying to document those impacts, so this is really the way we look at it here in NEMO land. It's really the sort of six different levels of impact. And all of them are equally important, I would say. And you'll notice for an education program, one of the things not on that list is how many folks did you have listen to a program? Even though that's an important thing to report, we don't feel that that's really a-- you know, a real indicator of our success. What we really like to see is something occur, some change occur in the town where we developed the educational program. So I'll just go through these quickly. The first would be some sort of research or information gathering by the community. This would be doing resource inventory, some sort of way of trying to increase knowledge of natural resources, cultural resources in the town. The second would be changes to decision-making process. So this could be anything from forming a new commission, maybe a commission to look at-- at natural resources or conservation or an open space planning commission, perhaps, or even something as simple as just having a-- maybe a quarterly meeting of all of the decision-making bodies so they can talk about how things are going in the town, some sort of way that they have integrated their decision-making process in the town. That's really what we are looking for there three and four are some of the things that Chet talked about. These are fundamental changes to the plan or the regulations, based on some of our educational programs. No. 5 is obviously, sort of the holly grail to some degree. You want to see that these changes actually occur on the ground what we mean by on-the-ground changes is maybe a low-impact development put into place, a cluster subdivision, something that really represents some of the changes that they actually put into their plans and regulations. And what do we mean by No. 6? These are sort of-- these are really sort of the hail Mary of our impacts. And that's-- these are impacts that might have brood ranging, regional or statewide ramifications, and I'll talk about a few of those later, but one of those things would be the formation of the national network is certainly something that would fall into that category, but we have some that we'll talk about in a bit. Let go ahead to slide 48. I just wanted to show you, this is actually a screen capture of publication we have that's available from our website. It's called putting communities in charge. This really was a publication we did about two years ago to document some of these impacts that I'm going to be talking about today, so you could have saved yourself a lot of trouble and just ordered the book and be done with it, but instead I'll talk more about it. If there's something I I talk about today-- you can order this online and get it and read for yourself some of the impacts that we have achieved here. Let's go ahead to the next slide, slide 49. I'll talk about three communities here. The first is the town of wood stock, Connecticut. This is in the far northeastern corner of Connecticut. It's called the quiet corner of Connecticut. It's far away from New York City, I guess that's why they call it that and it is a very, very rural town. When we started working with wood stock five or so years ago there's really no full-time staff at that time, so everyone who was making land use decisions and everyone who was writing the plans, writing the regulations, all of those were volunteers from the community that we were working with. We did this shall was a municipal town, one of the people who were that option two so applied to work with us. And they accomplished the things on the left. They undertook a natural resource inventory. They had a person in town who was very handy with websites and web technology. So that they put that resource online. That resource inventory was folded in to their new open space plan, and that open space plan-- open space planning in the northeast in particular in Connecticut is a very, very popular thing that we do. There's a lot of folks out there who are looking at trying to acquire sensitive lands in their towns, and these are not only natural resource lands, lands that have sensitive natural resources, but also cultural resources and potential recreation lands as well so an open space plan is a very important document as ways that you can start to look at your town and how you can actually start to appropriate money to purchase those properties. So anyway, let's move on there. One other interesting thing they did in wood stock was with the new open space plan and the new resource inventory is they worked with the conservation commission who was heading this, actually worked with their planning and zoning commission to come up with a worksheet that would allow the conservation commission to comment on subdivision applications that came to town using this new natural resource inventory, so it gave them a very structured way to work through an application and give some information to the planning and zoning commission on the potential impacts of the application to natural resources. So we viewed this as being a very positive move forward. Again, demonstrates several of the types of impacts that we look for let's go ahead to the next slide, which would be slide 506789 the next town here is old saybrook, Connecticut this is right on the coast on land island sound. One side-- the Connecticut river comes down one side of it. It's also one of the towns that was one of the pilot towns for the NEMO project back in the early '90s. So this was-- we have been working with old saybrook for many, many years. I view it as being the NEMO laboratory. If we have any sort of new program or new materials that we worked up, we generally go down to old saybrook and run it by them. So they are sort of used to us, and can give us some pretty good feedback on it. So it's always nice to have a town that is a friendly place where you can try out new material. But they have done over the years, really, a number of things, and certainly this is a-- it is a coastal town sort of in the middle of the state. It's primarily a residential community. It's-- so it is really has addressed a lot of the elements tied to resident shun development. Such as having new resource inventory looking at zoning and their plans and coming up with new ways that residences can be put on the landscape without impacting water quality in particular, but other natural resource as well. But they are focused on the impact of these low-development type techniques. And you can see some of them on the right there. Let's move to the next slide that ways water ford, Connecticut on the top this is another coastal town actually moving away from New York City on the coast, so it's getting sort of over towards Rhode Island, and this town is actually more or less sort of the regional shopping district of the area. Is-- they really host a lot of-- it's big box stores, regional shopping malls, those sorts of things, so what their focus has been on, was really looking at specific kinds of storm water [ indiscernible ] that can deal with those heavy impacts that you get from large impervious surfaces. They have been pioneering the use of storm water wet lands, storm water ponds and those sorts of things. They have also looked a at their zoning and other ways to minimize their parking ratios to make sure they have got those finally tuned to what actually needs to be there. They have regular water quality monitoring of these storm water complexes and BMPs and-- but probably one of the more interesting things that happened in Waterford but other things as well, the picture on the lower right-hand, this was really a natural low-impact design monitoring and demonstration project that was begun in the middle '90s, it's an actual funded research project by EPA's non-point source branch, where they actually looked at though effectiveness of some of these low-impact development techniques in the real world. So sort of putting all of these things together and monitoring them over the long period. They monitored the site before construction, during, and then post construction. This was a 10-year project completed last year. It's really a fascinating research project that came out from this project. So let's go ahead and move to the next slide, should be slide 52. This is-- I just-- one thing I wanted to point out if it wasn't brutally obvious here, I talked about three towns, and there were many towns they worked with, I pulled these three out. Because I think they show the diversity of towns that we work for first, and second that any educational program that you develop for communities has to be flexible enough to address the concern of that community. In other words you can't really have an educational program for land-use decision makers that sort of a one size fits all. In the case of wood stock, you had a rural town, so we focused on open space issues and old saybrook was mostly residential, so we focused on low-development techniques. Water ford-- we focused on higher level BMPs so you have to have that flexibility to some degree and each town you work in is a little different. So just wanted to make that point. Let's move to the next slide, slide 53 this is sort of the ending up this section here, and that's just-- in general what we see going on around the state of Connecticut is a lot whole lot of people are doing a whole lot more planning than they have been at any other time in the past that we have witnessed, and we would like to take credit for all of that obviously, but could-- but we really can't. We certainly helped with many towns as they get started on this kind of work. Next slide. Slide 54 here, we talk about gaining momentum on low-impact development and we're really seeing lots and lots of work on this in the state. Back when NEMO started in the early '90s, this term of low-impact development wasn't even really in use, but we find today it actually is a fairly handy term, so we do use it now, and we see that there's lots and lots of interest in this around the state, so we try to address some of these things. Let's click to the next slide, slide 56. What I'll talk about now is some of the new projects that we're working on, which new and noteworthy at NEMO. So let's go ahead and click to the next slide-- this is slide 56, I believe. I'm going to divide this in to two parts, and that is what is new and noteworthy in SORMs of storm water and low-impact development and another section of more direct planning type of approaches. So let's first look at the storm water and LID practices. We have a number of specific projects that I'm going to talk about. Let's go ahead and click to the next slide, slide 57. In this one I was a little REZ sent to put this in, but it ties in to something else I talked about, and we actually had our Connecticut department of environmental protection put out a new storm water quality manual about a year ago, or year and a half ago, which we assisted with the training, and okay, that's not the most exciting thing to talk about a new manual, whooppy. Who cares? But it actually has an a tryly important development for our program. And it points out something else, and that is we have gotten funding from Connecticut [ indiscernible ] for many years, and when we were talking with some people at the [ indiscernible ] there was a lot of interest in there in getting a manual like this several years ago. So several of our staff sat on the advisory committee to actually help design-- help craft this manual, and then, of course, we helped do the training, what this manual actually does it actually for the first time in Connecticut, puts in a single manual how to do some of these LID practices and other storm water practices that we have been talking about for many years, and really focuses on the sort of natural-resource-based approach that we have been looking at. And particularly looking at site design issues upfront and first as a storm water quality practice. So this is very exciting for us. It does give the town to actually hang their hats on and it also helps the contractors and developers if they are struggle with the new paradigm of how to design for storm water infrastructure in their project. So this actually was a very exciting thing. So you have to be a little bit of a storm water nerd to get excited ago something like this, but so be it. We have done a lot of work on this and have been pushing our programs over the years. Let's go to the next slide this is slide 58. Telecontractor work shops, what we have been finding is that the towns and the decision-- local decision makers for the most part are fairly receptive to a lot of the new storm water techniques, and they are really pretty excited about it. They may not entirely know how to get them into their regulations, but they are pretty excited about the concepts. We are getting more and more towns where this is starting to become business as usual with projects. What we're finding now, however, is that even though this is in the regulations now when an application actually comes forward, the engineer might get it, but the people who are out there actually building it, putting it on the landscape, they are struggling a little bit more with it. So what we're finding is that there needs to be some education for the people who are actually out there putting these things in place, so the landscapers and contractors and folks out there actually out there digging up the ground and putting this stuff in. We did our first run at this last winter. We plan to be doing this more or less every winter here in Connecticut, that is just basic storm water and LID training for contractors. We do it in the winter, obviously because in our winter this is the best chance you have at getting at this audience. So that's why we sort of focused on that we had a very, very, very mild winter this winter, although that changed today. We're now down to like 18 degrees, so if you are in a warmer spot, feel lucky. Let's go to the next slide, slide 59. We also have found working with towns that basically nobody wants to be the first to do anything. It's the you first, no, you first, situation. So particularly with LID and a lot of these practices it sort of helped people get over that Mike our storm water specialist, put together this inventory of different practices in the town. This is actually a-- more or less a database that he maintains of different LID practices that we have been able to go out and document in the state, that-- and you can look up the different-- the different practices by town or by practice, so if you are really-- you know, want to know about the all of the green roofs, for example, in the state of Connecticut you can look up green roofs or sways, or any sort of these different practices, you can look up these things. This something something we just started. We're sort of building it now, it is up on our website, so you can go take a look. I'll let you know where these things are toward the end of the program, but another thing we're pretty excited about. Let's go to slide 60. Again, this is a manual that Mike actually put together with some of our extension educators. This is a-- a-- essentially a manual to help homeowners build rain gardens. Certainly a storm water practice that almost anyone could do and construct and maintain. So this really gives basic guidance on how to size a rain garden, the proper plants to put in these structures, and et cetera, so this is obviously designed for homeowners, but we're finding there's a lot of interest, in again, our contractors, and even town officials who are interested in hows the things are constructed and used. So again, we're hardly innovative project here. I mean, there's been other states who have done things that are similar, in fact we relied heavily on much of the work of several other states, but again, an important aspect for your citizens in your state. Let's go to the next slide, slide 61. Now I talked about Jordan cove when we were talking about Waterford. And this gives me a chance to yammer on a little more about it. This is really an exciting project. And we're putting-- again that-- this is that 10-year EPA research subdivision put in place in water ford Connecticut. This shows the subdivision during construction with the-- it's essentially is a subdivision that had two parts to it. The lower half, the half that's sort of towards the left of the-- of that picture is-- is pretty much a traditional subdivision, using traditional zoning techniques and all of the standard subdivision practices that were in place for the town at the time. The part that's in the upper right hand where the little loop is, is the LID section of the subdivision. What makes this an interesting project is that both the traditional part of that and the LID section of that subdivision is hydro logically separated from each other. So you are able to track both water quantity and quality off of each one of the parts of this subdivision. This was run for several years, as I said, before this ended about a year ago. We're now in the process of putting together a multi-media DVD of the 10 years of this project so this will be a video from the people who are involved in the project, testimonials, if you will, pictures, certainly, hard data, all sorts of information that will all be on sort of one handy DVD. We're in the process of putting this together now, and hope to have that done by this summer, and hopefully that will be up on our website when its completed. I would say this Jordan cove project, you could spend-- this would be another great EPA webcast honestly, because it is just such an fascinating project. It was a tremendous success. This really demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of many of these LID practices. Let's go to the next slide, slide 62. I said we were going to talk about some of the things we're doing in terms of planning, and I'm just going to talk about three things here that we're doing that's new and note worthy here in Connecticut, but that we're very excited about. Let's click to the next slide, slide 63. What we plan to have done by this summer-- and all of these things we have due this summer, makes me very nervous and makes me feel like I should be doing something else right now, but no, I'm not. Let's keep going. We were trying to address what we were getting in terms of questions from our target audience. Many folks have been talking about build-out analyses, and there have been several neighboring states that have done several state-wide build-out anal lease, our state Legislator started getting very interested in this technique as there were discussions on smart growth, and what we're calling responsible growth here in Connecticut, many discussions are well underway, but we felt there was not a lot of information. We felt there were some folks who really felt doing these build-out analyses was something of a panacea. And it seemed to be not a lot of information there, so what we were trying to do with this publication is really put out some basic information on what a build-out is, how it fits into the community planning process, what you can use it for, what you can't use it for, and then giver specific methods and examples this is a project funded through our Connecticut office of policy and management. They are really addressing a lot of concerns from the Legislator on this. We're working with one of our regional planning agencies to actually do a pilot of a build-out in their region, so we'll do a region-wide build-out which is about 11 or 14 towns, and then do specific different build-outs on each one of THOECHLS so again, we're looking at this being published summer of '07. So, look for that let's go to the next one. This is page--

John which slide are you on?

I'm on slide 64, I believe. Connecticut land use academy.

We just want to remind you we're coming up to our next question and answer session.

I have two more slides and I think I'm there.

Four or five more minutes.

Okay.

Thank you.

I'll blow through this pretty fast, actually. Since we're-- essentially this is another OPM funded project. We do basic land use education for folks as well. As well as many of the topics that we were talking about earlier, that Chet talked about what what not. We also do fundamental training for commissioners, so those are the new folks who get on a commission and wonder what the heck we're doing there this is three basic courses we give around the state this is a relatively new project. It [ indiscernible ] Connecticut land use academy, may not have application for folks around then country, but I would recommend if you are starting a program like this, that you see if there is any of the fundamental programming available for your land use decision makers, and usually your state chapter is a good place to start. So let's go to the next slide. Though last thing I wanted to talk about is the community resource inventory. There are a few slides on this, but they are a very fast slick-through slides. This is a brand new project. We actually put-- the press release for this just went out, probably today. What we're finding is when we are doing a lot of the natural-resource-based programming, the very first thing you do-- and let's click to the next slide-- the very first thing you really do is an inventory. Inventory your-- the cultural and natural recourses in your town and economic resores as well, and it's very much a fundamental part of planning, but what we found was that many towns really could not get over the hurdle of accessing geospacial information, so basic GIS information or basic mapping information and making use of it. That there's a real hold-up there. So what we tried to do with this community resource inventory online was to try to help towns get over that hurdle a little bit. Let's click to the next slide, slide 67. This is probably a little different than this now, but it's close enough, and again, after-- you can go over and take a look at this essentially what this does, all of the-- the sort of the meat of this website happens in the build your CRI, communeky resource inventory. Here you can select your town and get fundamental information. You can see there's a next button on there that allows towns to navigate through the website this allows towns to actually work through some specific map sets that we have set up. You can see on the left-hand side of that slide are a list of those map sets. We're looking at top ingfy there. Let's click on the next slide, SLIEK 69. Working down the map sets this is land cover at this point. You can see this is the land cover that Chet showed you earlier for the specific town. It has a legend you're able to get information about the data, so the metadata if you are a GIS type, that sort of tells you how the data was con figured and when it was done, and then some basic information text on the bottom. Let's click to the next slide, slide 70. This is the soils data. Let's click to the next slide this is surface water. Let's click to the next slide. We're on slide 72 now this is sort of the end point of that whole map where towns go through, and essentially you come to a page which allows you to download each of those maps, and you can see an example of what it might look like here on the left-hand side there they are able to download those. They are able to download a cover with all of the legends and other explanatory text. So by working through this, they are able to get a fundamental working inventory for their town. So even though this is somewhat brute force it's very helpful for towns that had no access to this information previously. Let's go ahead and click to the next slide, which is slide 72. There's also this expand and enhance-- I think it's called enlance now section, where they can actually add their own local data to some of this information. Let's click one more time. And this is slide 74, and this is the interactive mapping part of this website. Certainly having single map-- single data layers is important for resource inventory, but the most important thing in GIS is that you can actually combine these data layers, so by using this interactive mapping on the website you can actually do that you can zoom in on areas, turn layers on and off, we click we're going to zoom in to where that purple square is. Let's go ahead and slick to the next slide, slide 75, and you can see we zoomed in to that area. We have some different data layers turned on. And you can lick one more time, we'll go to slide 76, and this shows a zoomed in fairly far. So here you can look at some of the digital air reap also that we have available, which are fairly high resolution, so that is some way that a commissioner who is evaluating site, they can actually look at some of the resources on that area. Land trust can use this to evaluate a piece of property they may be considering for acquisition for open space, so there is a lot of ways this type of thing can be used. One of the exciting things here is they are can actually generate a PDF or portable document file and acrobat file to actually put in to-- insert in to their inventory as is. So let's go ahead and click on the next one. And that's my question slide. So it that's slide 77, I'm done.

Thank you, John. Great. We'll jump right in to some online questions, and actually Ron here in the room has pointed UT question from Pat in Pennsylvania about local resistance to change. She asks, how do you deal with concerns over legal challenges to more progressive zoning or subdivision regulation changes?

How do we deal with concerns about legal challenges to local regulations. You basically have to help them understand sort of the basic power they have as planning and zoning commissioners, and it's considerable. It-- it is-- it is not-- they can't dictate everything, but obviously there's limits it to, but there is quite a bit they can do, and certainly by working through-- that's the whole point of having them work through a planning process, by working through a planning process and showing sort of a rational basis for the-- for the regulations that may come out of that, really protects the community quite a bit in-- in any legal challenges that may come down the road so that's certainly one, is just helping them understand the basis of planning and planning and the power of planning. Certainly, this-- the second part of that would be-- is to sort of show there are other towns out there doing this. And this is why we that, you know, not one size fits all type approach. So that's certainly a key part of that too, is trying to make sure there are other towns throughout doing this, and you are not alone. And that's where we get a lot of fear of being the first. They don't want to be the first one because that means they are sort of hanging out there. So that's certainly part of it as well.

John, another question really quick here from Lewis in Virginia, do any of the speakers perceive that a home rule state versus a Dillon ruled state has any-- does that have any relation to the acceptance or rejection of NEMO in local government.

We didn't get-- the got home rule but not the second part of that.

The second part of that was a Dillon ruled state whether it makes any difference of whether they accept or reject NEMO at the local level.

We haven't had-- and this is probably a good opening for Dave to come in, but we haven't noticed that particularly. I think what we're-- we're seeing is certainly in the home ruled states there's a really almost a huge need for it, because they really are struggling with how to deal with all of the changes that are happening. We haven't seen that, and certainly when Dave addresses the national network we can talk about that as well. So we haven't noticed that.

I'm going to open the phone line now for any participants. If you are going to ask a question, remember to unmute yourself and state your name first.

I have a question this is Mary Joe in Atlanta. I was curious on that LID VINer to site that you have, how do you get the information there? Are people doing LID projects populating it themselves, or do they let you know, or how do you deal with that?

That's a great request, and back Wally Mike-- we're doing it here locally. It would be neat to have a Wiki LID project out there, but essentially have fairly good relationship with most of the civil engineering firms in town-- in the state rather so we actually just sort of talk to them and find out what is going on, and Mike will go out, photograph it, talk to the people who put it in and do that work, so we're sort of doing that locally.

I'm now going to put the phone back on mute, and we'll have Dave Dickson on next. Dave, remember to unmute yourself before you start speaking. Go ahead, Dave.

Can you hear me?

I can hear you.

Great. Okay. Well hello, everyone. We have made it to the last bullet on our presentation navigation slide. I'll talk about the national NEMO network which is slide 78. And moving on to slide 79, this is just sort of a subnavigation slide for what I'll be talking about. I'll give an overview of what the NEMO network is, and how it formed, talk a little bit about what we do here in Connecticut as the sort of the network hub to encourage communication between all of the different networks throughout and get into some of the results we're seeing from various NEMO programs around the country. Moving on to slide 80, one of the unintended impacts-- beyond local impacts-- of the NEMO program is the TRIT has received in other parts of the country once Chet and Jim started the program back in the early '90s, and started to make some traction here with it in Connecticut, other states started to sniff around and get interested in it. And so that sort of started a traveling period throughout the '90s, kind of a traveling road show where Jim and Chet and later John would be invited to come to a state to talk about what we were doing here in Connecticut and help them figure out whether or not it made sense for them to do it in their own state. And so other NEMO programs began to eventually crop up around the country. Moving on to slide 81, other programs started to form and around 2000 or so there were about 15 NEMO programs in existence around the country, and they came together at our first ever, sort of national NEMO conference. And decided to form this thing called the national-- that now call the national NEMO network. Which is a loosely affiliated group of educational project, who are all focused on-- modeled after the Connecticut program but adapted to local needs and issues in terms of land use decision making structure and stuff like that, but all focus on the same idea as far as water quality and natural resource protection. And the idea was to provide a framework for smooth and easy sharing of information, research materials, and educational approaches between all of those programs, a way to sort of make them all stronger by being a part of a national effort. And on the right of this slide, you sort of see how the network has grown over the years. You'll notice in 2000 there is sort of a jump, that was when John was hired. Before he took over the program we coordinated the national network [ indiscernible ] position. Once there was an official network in place and a coordinator, around 2004, programs started to pop up around the count TRIF. You can see whether there is a NEMO program in your state or No. you look at the map and see where we currently have existing NEMO programs. Those are the ones in the darker blue color. The states in orange are in various stages of possibly considering thinking about maybe some day starting a NEMO program, and some of those are pretty close to possibly joining that work, and I'll talk about that in MANT and other ones are are thinking about whether or not it makes sense for their state. Moving on to slide 82, I talked about joining the network, what does it mean to actually be a member of the network? A few years ago, back in the initial days of the network, any different programs out there, decided to create this charter of operations for the network, which is not like a legal document or anything like that, it's more of a common mission statements that lays out who we are, what we do, how we'll interact in terms of, you know, we'll all identify ourselves as part of this larger network, we'll acknowledge when we adopt each other's work, and we'll report back to the central hub and report back out to funding agencies, folks like that. So every program that you saw in blue on the previous slide has signed this charter, which basically just sort of lays out the foundation for how we'll all interact with each other. Moving on to slide 83, one of the questions in the previous-- and some of the other questions in the previous segments of questions were on would this work in this kind of state or that kind of state, and that's sort of one of the interesting things with the NEMO program is it does work in a variety of programs but it has to be adapted to those communities and states. But they all sort of hold true to the five key NEMO family values, and these come out in various places throughout our talks today, but I'll run through them quickly. The first is the issue we're talking about is the impact and the connection of land used to water quality as well as natural resource projection in general. Second, our target audience is our local land use decision makers. For us here in Connecticut, those are folks serving on planning boards, and for a variety of different land use committees and commissions within each town. And these are largely volunteers, and who that exact target audience is in other states may be slightly different, but stip still the point is these folks have a lot of say over land use in our communities and our watershed, so they are a key target audience, and they are also in a position as Chet mentioned of needing resources so they use the NEMO program, generally as a welcome addition to their state. Third, education is the method, we're not advocates, or bangs on the doors of the state capitol trying to get education passed, it's more we provide the education and what they do with it is really up to them. Fourth, as we mentioned a million times, natural resource based planning is the solution we offer, and finally, wherever possible our NEMO program use geospacial technology to enhance this educational message. We found that's a very powerful tool for showing folks how that individual development fits into the greater context of their community or watershed or their state. Moving on to slide 84, this is reiterating the idea that each of these NEMO programs, as they have developed has sort of morphed based on those original family values, but changes it a little bit to reflect local conditions. So for example, in states like Arizona and Nevada, where it's much different, even the water law is different, as well as Colorado as other western states and as an air rid landscape, it obviously has to be slightly different focus and the thing what you teach and ed indicate about are slightly different. In the Midwest there's a focus on farm land issues, so the point is it has just been adapted to meet local conditions. Moving on to slide 85, one of our NEMO coordinators Julie wester land from northwest land NEMO in Minnesota did a Google search on natural resourced-base planned. If you do a search for NEMO in Google we're usually like the eighth link. But if you do a search for natural resource based planning most of the things that come up with connections two different natural resource based planning and different things they have done around the country. Moving on to slide 86 in terms of who leads these projects, the vast majority of NEMO programs are lead by university-based either cooperative extension or [ indiscernible ] extension or a combination of the two. There are a few that are leadly non-profit groups or in a couple of case there is a state agency that is sort of the lead, and in 1 case there's a quasi regional government agency that is in charge. But the majority of them are university based and the benefit of that is it comes with that sort of unbiased education standpoint. Still a lot of the programs are found helpful. Moving on to slide 87. Where do these projects get their funding. I think this may be have been a question earlier. The majority of programs receive funding from the non-point source 319 program through their states, which come from EPA, butter than that it sort of catch as catch can, it's a variety of different sources that folks are tapping to get funding for the program. It's a bit hard to get funding for education programs, because people typically think of education as that fluff, going back to sort of one of our very first slides, it is sort of hard to get funding for programs, so if you looked at our national map over the years, they have linked on and off at different times and a lot of it is due to funding, because it's hard to show folks that this education is really [ indiscernible ] to get impact. And I'll talk about those impact in a bit. Moving on to slide 88, there's a lot of common myths out there about NEMO where people have heard it maybe in passing at a conference or somebody else talking about it at some time. So people think it's a variety of different things. And I hope this presentation is hoping to clear some of those things up. These are some of the more common myths we have heard. We're not like-- although we get support from the EPA and Noah and the USDA and they are great partners, and have helped guide us, we're really a grass roots formulation from folks who saw what was happening here in Connecticut and as it grew folked decided to form this network. So we're not the creation of any federal agency or anything like that second we're not trying to populate the country with NEMO programs. I think there's a natural compulsion when you see a map of the United States that you want to color in the thing, but that's not what we're trying to do. It's more about going to each state and we take the approach that, does this make sense for you? This has worked here in Connecticut, in 29 other states around the country, does it make sense for you? It may or may not. And we're happy to help you get up and running if that's what you want to do but if not no hard feelings. And third, we don't give any funding to NEMO programs. They are all sort of completely independent. We try to provide opportunities for training and things like that and provide technical assistance whenever we can, but by and large we don't provide funding for any program. Next slide 89, this is a repeat of some of the other things that were said. As Chet said there's really two main staff, myself and Kara Bonnsack our national communicate for, but also help and assistance from the original founders of NEMO, Chet and Jim. In terms of funning, this is another common myth, we don't have a huge budget. You be surprised when you see this slide, but that really is what funds the network. And I'll talk about what we do with this funding. Our roll here at the hub is really two-fold. One is to help those states who want to start a NEMO program get up and running, and two help those programs if they are up and running, communicate with each other and share materials and enhance their program. On the getting started program-- I'm on slide 90, by the way-- we do a variety of things. The first thing we do is a scoping workshop where we go into a state that is thinking about starting a program, and we'll give a series of presentation, similar to what we're giving here today and then turn it over to the local host to talk about with an assembled group of potential partners and collaborators and representative of the target audience and talk about would this work in Idaho or whatever the state may be. And then we provide a variety of our publications that we view here in Connecticut as well as that have before developed throughout the network, folk have access to that and we have a starter kit which had four basic NEMO presentations on it and a bunch of other stuff that people can use and adapt. Moving on to slide 91, in the area of connecting programs, we have a list-- everybody has list serves these days, but we use this basically as a way for programs to communicate with each other and to announce, you know, national things happening within the network. We also have a website that has sort of a public portion as well as a secure portion for network members only, which has sections that are sharing libraries where folks can upload PowerPoint presentations that they developed and other programs can download those and adapt them and use them for their own purposes. And the final thing we have a newsletter that comes out twice a year highlighting things going on in the network. I'll try to speed up a little bit here just to get to the impacts, which I know people want to hear more about. The really big thing we do is ever 18 months or so we put on a national conference. It used to be sort of focused on everyone talking about what they have been doing and we're moving more into integrating training opportunities into that so folks can enhance that gee geospacial component. Slide 93 now. We also provide various training opportunities, open space planning boot camp we did many years ago funded by EPA. We did a training for the network in use of the impervious surface analysis tool that we already covered, and we also had-- worked with Noah to pull together some funding to do a minigrants program for coastal NEMO programs. Moving on to slide 94, here we go getting into the network impact. Again, as John mentioned there's sort of six categories of impacts that we look at for NEMO programs both here in Connecticut as well as across the country, and if you look on the right, sort of that picture of a document, one of the links in your list of resources is a link to this document, which really compiles-- representative impacts from various NEMO programs all across country in each of these six categories. I'm going to quickly touch on a few examples of those just to give folks a flavor this is a little repetitive of John so I'm not going to go into too much detail. Slide 95, the first category where we're seeing impacts as a result of the NEMO ed situation in terms of research and information gathering. Improving the basic information that communities are using to base their land use decisions on. So this can be natural resource inventories, build-out analyses, a variety of things. Moving on to slide 96, couple of examples within this arena, one is the north land NEMO program, which is a two-state program based in Minnesota and Wisconsin, which brings together a variety of different partners including sea grant and extension and the state environmental agency, and they-- some of their folks attended our open space planning boot camp they talked about earlier. And they took some of those materials, mixed it with a lot of their own expertise and developed this natural resource planning guide which they released both in a brochure form and they posted it on their web. It walks local land use commissioners through how to go through the various steps. And this guide is now being distributed, I believe, by the net council which is a regional planning agent any the Minneapolis, St. Paul area, and they are distributing it within that large area and suggesting they use this as part of a guide as they go into their next round of comprehensive planning. Another one quickly, is the main NEMO program. They use that I-sat tool to do an imprevious surface analysis of the town of free port both under current conditions and under sort of full build-out under current regulation. And once they did that as a result of the town decided to change their comprehensive plan to put in more things like reducing impervious surfaces, things like that the second category of impacts, moving on to slide 97 is change the decision-making process, how are land-use decisions actually made. And moving on to slide 98, I'll give one of these two examples in the sake of time-- and I encourage folks to check out the impact because it has all of these as well as a slew of others that you can check out. The Nevada program, they put together this binder on sort of water quality and land use and non-point source pollution, and they give that out to all of the commissioners they go and talk to. And what they are finding out is these commissioners are using this as a resource in their meeting, as they are asked questions by developers or concerned citizens. It's really a huge improvement to the decision-making process for those communities in Nevada. Moving on the the third category, changes to plans, slide 99. There can be changes to a variety of different things to comprehensive plan to open space plan and on and on. Then moving on to 100, sorry for those folks on slow dial up trying to do this on the web, but got to hurry up. In terms of changes to plans, the one on the right on your screen, open space conservation plans, the example there is the town of wood stock, Connecticut where they did a natural resource inventory which lead to other changes within the town. That's really sort of a prime example. The town of [ indiscernible ] in South Carolina has done a similar thing as a result of working with the NEMO program. And they have a coastal community ramp initiative, where they give little tiny minigrants in the town to sort of improve their comprehensive plan as the result of working with that slide 101, changes to regulations, these can be all of the different sort of land-use related planning regulations and we're seeing changes all over the map in this area as well. Moving on to slide 102 for some specifics, one example comes from Indiana, where the NEMO program there calls itself planning with power. And they have done a lot of work on farm land protection, and this picture here is not actually from Indiana, but don't tell anybody. Anyway the planning with power program works with porter count think which was facing a lot of development pressure and rapidly losing farm land, so they instituted a conservation design subdivision regulation that required a 10% open space minimum requirement on new development and a 40% open space requirement for developments and what they identified as critical resource area. So really, again, trying to protect as they grow. Then I'm going skip the Rhode Island one. They basically created the town of Jamestown as a result of a lot of the education work of Rhode Island NEMO. A special overlay district in high water table areas to again, eliminate impervious surfaces. On to slide 103, on the ground changes. These are things that you can see, smell, taste, feel, whatever you want. Couple of examples here, one is the Georgia program, the coastal Georgia. They also participated in the open space boot camp I talked about. They worked with Ryan county to develop an open space plan for the county. Brian County is another quickly growing community, and once they had that open space plan in place, they were able to go to their state and say look at what we have in this plan, can we get some funding to help with that. And they got a decent grant to help buy properties. Moving into demonstration projects, a lot of different NEMO programs are involved in demonstration projects around the country. John mentioned the Jordan cove project here in Connecticut. URI, the University of Rhode Island has done a lot of work with impervious parking lot at their new event center on campus in the south in Alabama they are working on a similar thing to Jordan cove but adapted to the south. A lot of great demonstration projects that NEMO is also involved in. Moving on to slide 105, these are things we're not actually setting out to do but sort of happened. The biggest one being the creation of the network itself. Moving on to slide 106, just a couple of quick examples, one is the storm water quality manual that was created here in Connecticut and we're hearing more and more around the country. A lot of NEMO principals have been integrated in to those water quality manuals. Another is the U.S. commission on ocean policy report released I think two years about, maybe, now. Specifically highlights the approach that the NEMO organizations around the country are taking in working with local land use decision makers and providing support and education to them. That's basically it. The network-- I don't think I actually mentioned-- this is the first thing I usually say. There are now 31 programs in 30 states across the country. Again, going back to the map. I encourage all of you, especially those of you fortunate enough to have one in your state. To talk to them and find UT if there are ways to partner or work with them to expand your efforts as well. Moving on to slide 108, that's my question slide.

Thank you. Before we close up here at 3:00, I would like to ask everybody to advance to slide 109, with just a quick word about our next webcast. Our next webcast will be on Wednesday February 21st. It will focus on the intersection of two major clean water act programs, the national [ indiscernible ] program, which focuses on protecting the nation's significant [ indiscernible ] and the total maximum daily load program which establishes pollutant reduction targets to bring water qualities back up. The seminar will show case collaborative problem solving and trading initiatives that are reducing pollutant loads in to the long island sound in Connecticut. We will have three speakers to talk about how that is making waves for long island sound's water quality. Be sure to at ten this seminar on February 21st. Registration will open on February 14th at the watershed academy website. At usually visit our website to register at that time. And also before we wrap up, I want to draw everyone's attention to where you can ask the speakers further questions and obtain their contact information. If your are online simply click on the home icon button at the top of your screen. You will be turned to the seminar's home page which has the speakers email addresses and phone numbers on the left-hand side bar is the link button, and clicks on it will direct you to additional resources, several useful resources related to NEMO's work. Also on the left-hand side is the feedback button. We do consider your comments as we work to improve our webcasts. So, Chet, Dave, and John we actually have a few minutes left for a couple of questions. We have Brian from Massachusetts who says we have GIS data in Massachusetts but how do we integrate this in to land use planning? Can NEMO help to facilitate this?

Yes, definitely. We're happy to help you sort of develop a program that makes sense for your state. There currently is not a program in Massachusetts, and I think-- that's great if they have available GIS data that they can start using for education programs, because that tends to be a big stumbling program for a lot of people. A lot of NEMO programs around the country don't necessarily have that component very well developed yet. But it is a-- it is a very helpful component of NEMO programs, and that's great if they already have it there in Massachusetts, and we talked to other folks from the state who were also interested, so I would be happy to help you explore WLNT it makes to start a program there.

We have another question from Brian NAULS Massachusetts, and he says our area in cape cod is largely already close to build-out so is your BRAM designed to address redevelopment issues as opposed to new development?

This is Chet, can you hear me all right? Am I on?

Yes, you on.

Okay. The answer is yes. I think that we're just getting there as a network, and NEVEN Connecticut over just the last couple of years, because there's no doubt we developed NEMO in the early days as kind of a program that was focussed on developing areas, kind of rural and suburban areas, and yet we know there's all sorts of problems in more urbanized areas, cape cod is built out, you know, in a totally different way than a city would be, but I think the answer is yes, we're actually very excited that we're working in that municipal initiative with bridge port, which is the largest city in Connecticut and probably-- and it is, according to our clear data the most paved over city in Connecticut. They are interested in retro fits and urban redevelopment in trying to relieve the strain on their storm water system. Cape SKOD a totally different scenario, but I'm sure there are always ways that an educational program can work with people to rethink what their community looks like in terms of design and regulations.

At this time, I would like to conclude today's webcast, very special thanks to Chet, John, and Dave for presenting today. And from everyone here at the webcast team here at EPA headquarters, thanks to all of you who joined us. A reminder again about our next webcast we have scheduled that for February the 21st. Registration for that webcast opens on Valentine's Day, February 14th, on the watershed academy website, EPA.GOV watershed-- [ indiscernible ] all one word. That ends our webcast for today. Thank you.