Open Space Prioritization Modeling

About the Program

Category: County Resiliency (Best in Category)

Year: 2012

Wake County is the second-most populous county in North Carolina, and contains the State's capital, Raleigh. Recent accolades including Businessweek's No. 1 Best City in America have led thousands to call Raleigh and Wake County home, with the County's population estimated to surpass one million by 2014. Past development pressure and future population trends caused concern about the County's natural environment and led to the establishment of the County's Public Open Space Preservation Program in 2000. Since 2000, Wake County voters approved over 90 million dollars in bonds to be spent on conserving open space. In order to maximize bond dollars, the Wake County Community Services Division of Parks, Recreation, and Open Space, established an Open Space Prioritization Committee to develop a model to evaluate open space priorities based on Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The model would prioritize parcels in the County by ranking and weighting each one that falls within a defined criterion. The criteria used for prioritization was derived from the Wake County Consolidated Open Space Plan completed in 2003 which calls for public and environmental protection.