Finding a balance between farming and tourism, and conservation and development is a challenge for the three municipalities that call Aquidneck Island home.
It’s a challenge the towns of Portsmouth, Newport and Middletown have not only embraced, but one they spent the month of October celebrating.
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The Aquidneck Island Partnership (AIP), a collaborative of 19 area organizations committed to fostering economic development on the island, organized a variety of events during the month of October to highlight the progress that islanders have made in the four critical areas: land use, public services, economic diversity and transportation.
“We are working on an island with a finite amount of property available to us,” said Karen Menezes, director of the Rhode Island Center for Commercial Agriculture, a group that is included in the Aquidneck Island Partnership. “I think that the three towns have worked well together and the partnership has been a part of creating that relationship.”
The group has a lot to be proud of, as they have made progress in each of their four key areas. For example, the land trust has preserved 688 acres of land since 1990; the police departments have created or enhanced their Community Oriented Policing Program; the Newport Chamber of Commerce has lobbied for legislation that would exempt research and development businesses from paying sales tax on certain goods; and the City of Newport has been successful in convincing the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority to start a trolley program in their area.
“These are dramatic changes for the island,” said Kelly Woodward, coordinator of the Aquidneck Island Planning Commission. “As the island has received funding from both the state and local municipalities we are now being held accountable for getting the three communities to work together. The result has been the incentive and the capacity to cooperate with one another.”
And while it may not seem likely that new trolleys on the streets of Newport would affect the residents of Portsmouth, Woodward said they most definitely do.
“Understanding the impact that each community has on the other is very important,” she said. “For example, Newport may be promoting tourism, but we as an island need to look at how that affects the road development in Portsmouth.”
The key, Woodward said, in successfully planning for the island’s future is collaboration.
“I think that these municipalities are really starting to feel the growth pressure,” she said in a recent interview. “I think for a long time these municipalities weren’t able to think island-wide. There had always been ‘my turf’ types of issues. But we are starting to see dramatic changes in the community.”
But it has taken some time. The idea of the three towns working together as one began in 1997 when the AIP, assisted by the Rhode Island Sea Grant and the University of Rhode Island Coastal Resources Center, conducted public workshops and interviews with islanders to establish potential improvements in the four key areas. Two years later the ideas were recorded and published in, “Aquidneck Island: Our Shared Vision.”
The goal is to sustain and foster the quality of life on the island.
“It’s about finding a balance,” Menezes said. “We need to look at it not as one industry against the other, but as a symbiotic relationship.”
According to Menezes establishing that kind of relationship takes time and an open mind.
“The most important thing that residents of this island can do is educate themselves,” she said. “It’s a way of learning how we can all live and work together.”
Many agree that establishing these kinds of relationships is a necessity, not a choice.
“When you think about the amount of building that could have occurred on this island, you realize just how important it is,” Woodward said. “It’s very important for the long term, for survival, and for maintaining the quality of life that everybody has become accustomed to.”
