Five Questions With: Scott Wolf

Scott Wolf is executive director of Grow Smart Rhode Island.
Scott Wolf is executive director of Grow Smart Rhode Island.

Grow Smart Rhode Island recently established a work space in Newport, at the offices of the Aquidneck Island Planning Commission, where Deputy Director John Flaherty is available to meet weekly with local officials and residents. Scott Wolf, executive director of the nonprofit planning organization, explains the need for an Aquidneck Island presence.

PBN: What is the development pressure on Newport?
WOLF:
We think Newport has an outstanding but somewhat precarious urban-rural balance right now. You’ve got relatively rural Portsmouth, fairly suburban Middletown and urban Newport. Those are three communities in a pretty small piece of geography.

PBN: How can Grow Smart help?
WOLF:
We have an award-winning training program for municipal officials that we want to have increasingly involved on the island. That’s a program that recruits experts on land use law and land use planning and, under our guidance, provides workshops on a variety of topics to planning boards, zoning boards, and city and town councils.

PBN: Is there any one conflict that seems to be the most prevalent? The conversion of farms to suburbs?
WOLF:
That’s certainly a big issue, trying to preserve the farmland that does exist on Aquidneck Island. There is, fortunately, still quite a bit of it. There is a lot of development pressure on those farms. They provide an amenity which is attractive to both residents of the state and visitors to the state. They help to sell Rhode Island as a place that has both urban sophistication and rural beauty, all in one little package. From a tourism standpoint, farms are important. From a nutritional standpoint, they’re important.

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PBN: What can municipalities do to ease development pressure on farms, or to create zoning that’s more favorable to farms?
WOLF:
Something we’re really emphasizing is designing zoning regulations, or redesigning them in some instances, to provide more economic or business flexibility for farmers in how they use their land. There are restrictions in some communities in Rhode Island on what kinds of businesses, even modest businesses that farmers can have on their land, even the size of a farm stand that you can have on your property. We think that a critical part of keeping farmers farming is eliminating unnecessary barriers to their making a decent living. In Aquidneck Island, and for that matter all of Rhode Island, most of our farming is what would be called urban edge farming, it’s farming in close proximity to a significant population. There’s a lot of potential conflicts between what farmers want and need to do to produce a decent living and what neighbors are willing to put up with.

PBN: Beyond farming, what other issues?
WOLF:
Transportation. All throughout the island, there’s efforts to enhance the bike path. That was part of the Aquidneck Island Transportation Study, to have a comprehensive bikeway and greenway system for the island. There’s definitely an issue of traffic congestion, in Newport and along the two major transportation corridors, 138 and 114. And looking at things like roundabouts and designing roadways so pedestrians and bicyclists have some opportunity to share the road with drivers. There’s also the question of how we get better, more extensive public transportation services. We’re big advocates, statewide, for more support for RIPTA.

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