Developing in Legacy Crossing

Last spring I posted some thoughts on alternative ways to develop in Moscow's Legacy Crossing area. I continue to mull those ideas over and have taken a few minutes to explore with my banker and Moscow Community Development the south-western parcel. The image (click to enlarge) has two colors of site boundaries, red the recorded property lines and yellow the ideas of Moscow Community Development for street alignments.

The parcel has a long creek frontage (actual creek ROW is owned by University of Idaho. Its access is on the skinny end (NW) along College street. The proposed street would provide access along most of the long north-eastern side. The FEMA flood plain map 1600900002 shows this parcel is above the 100 year flood, were areas just to the North and NW are in the flood plain.

Moscow is in the process of updating its Comprehensive Plan and Chapter 5, Public Utilities, has two maps of interest. The first shows storm water constraints along 6th st, but not in the area of the parcel.

The second shows sanitary sewer constraints


The question arising in the sewer map is what route might the City choose for improving the sanitary sewer capacity? I need to learn the current alignment of the sewers in this area, but given that the site has historically (100 years) been railroad and grain elevators its unlikely that the current alignment lies in this area. However, a future alignment down the proposed street is a possibility.

Moscow Valley Transit provides fixed route service passing the site on 8th and south of the site in Sweet Ave.

"The city earned an Idaho Rural Community Development Block Grant to extend fiber optic connectivity into Alturas Technology Park. The Moscow Fiber Project creates a citywide fiber optic network, using as a nucleus the existing Avista fiber network, which serves many public entities including the city, Moscow School District, Gritman Medical Center, Alturas Technology Park, University of Idaho, Latah County, State of Idaho and potentially many other entities both public and private." http://www.matr.net/article-26796.html This network must pass close to the site as Gritman is to the north and the new fiber was laid along the bike path beginning to the east of Main St on the south side of the creek. The Business Incubator south of the site on Sweet Ave also has high speed network access, probably provided from University of Idaho.

Reducing my carbon footprint

By way of developing a New Year's resolution, I have been thinking about how I might reduce my carbon footprint by 25%. That's an arbitrary figure, below what is being said the world needs to accomplish in the near future, and high enough to be challenging and thought provoking. Broadly, there are a couple strategies: invest in conservation or change lifestyle.

Option #1, Invest. Buy a Prius and continue driving. The invest option either needs to produce a big impact in one area of my carbon footprint, or I need to invest in multiple areas of my life with modest gains in each. Since my family does considerable driving in town, we might do better to add Zap electric car at lower cost than a Prius.

Option #2, Lifestyle. Use 25% less of everything. Drive less, heat less, eat less. Or, substitute smaller footprint options (eat local food with less embodied carbon from transportation). Doing with less is cheaper and faster than investing, but may be harder to implement (or harder to keep implementing). Substituting might be more expensive (in time or money) but easier to choose. The problem is, finding enough substitutions to make the desired level of savings. Some substitutions (using a clothes line rather than a clothes dryer, walking vs driving) are going to take considerable change in how I organize my life and have impacts on (require consent of) how my family organizes its life.

Last summer's high gas prices and current talk of carbon taxes could make some of these choices clearer, and they also point out that the two types of strategies may be chosen differently by people of different economic means.

I looked at the payback on an electric car. If it replaced 5000 miles driven by a gas car getting 25 mpg and gas is $1.60, that is $320/year, not much of a payment on a loan. At $4/gallon its $800/year.

Resolutions
(Small) Investment. If big investment is out, because the payback is long and/or going into more debt seems imprudent right now, there is another option -- small investment. Small investment can feel to the psyche and wallet more like an operating expense (and payback time may be less important). An example in this category could be replacing incandescent light bulbs with CFLs even though the old bulbs are still good (Better yet would be to start into LED lights that promise to have lower power consumption per lumen.) Another example is to get a home energy audit and spend some time with a caulk gun.

Cut Back. I'm looking into putting a timer on my hot water tank. If it could be off 6 hrs/day, that should save something. Shorter showers, low flow shower heads are some other moves, but they require life style consent from others in the family. Changing lifestyle is probably better done slowly or it will likely feel like deprivation.

So, while I don't see making the 25% reduction this year, I'm making a New Years resolution to start some small investments and explore learning some new lifestyle habits.

Purpose of this blog

I'm starting this as a forum and workspace for Moscow ID residents (and friends) interested in the intertwined issues of water supply/conservation, Cool Cities, Comprehensive Plan revision, Smart Growth, and Urban Renewal Agency/ Legacy Crossing and probably more.

The problem we are addressing here is making Moscow more sustainable: environmentally and economically, both as a local concern and as our way of thinking globally and acting locally.

I intend to recruit co-authors to the blog on these topics and we invite your comments and trackbacks.

The rationale for a blog comes from the work I'm doing at Washington State University on the use of electronic portfolios for learning. We are exploring what we've come to call "learning portfolios" which are problem-solving workspaces that invite a community to join with the learner in working on a problem. Unlike a showcase portfolio, which might be more like a resume, a learning portfolio is really the portfolio of the solution of a problem rather than the portfolio of a person. This blog will attempt to learn from that work and apply it to this problem in Moscow.