Lincoln — On Monday, March 22, 2021, the Lincoln city council approved the Lincoln Climate Action Plan with these commendable goals regarding prairies and the environment:
Continue to support prairie restoration and protection of natural resources.
Continue to support the Lincoln Parks Foundation and Parks and Recreation Department Land Trust initiative, working in partnership with landowners to preserve native prairie, wetland areas, and other natural resources.
Create a Carbon Sequestration Plan. This plan would involve an analysis of Lincoln's tree canopy, parks and greenways, open lands, composting activity, open water areas, impervious surfaces, grasslands, and native prairie.
A mayoral aide recommended the plan to the council: "We can’t just make things up as we go," she said. "We have to have a plan and a strategy and a vision. It’s already costing us."
But with the ink barely dry on the Climate Action Plan, city government promptly got back to making things up. The Urban Development Department devised a tax-increment-financing (TIF) proposal to destroy a broad swath of grasslands nearly a mile long, including two environmentally critical prairie parcels, claiming that the properties were extremely blighted and must yield to a developer's quickly-revealed plans for affordable housing.
The city council's initial response gave regrettable hints of losing interest in the Climate Action Plan. Some of the reactions were favorable to TIF development of the two aforementioned prairie parcels (one owned by the city, the other by the Lincoln airport authority) that had been zoned residential in 2007 but never developed. Their thinking: if we zoned them residential in 2007, we shouldn't reconsider, Climate Action Plan or not.
The city council's initial reaction was not surprising because the Urban Development Department, claiming ignorance, had not revealed to the council that the UNL Center for Grassland Studies had recommended in 2020, after a scientific review, that the two publicly owned parcels should be protected from development.
It is instructive to look back at what previous councils and mayors have done with regard to Lincoln's rare grassland prairies, when they have discovered that their actions would endanger them.
• In 1994, the council changed a native prairie's zoning from residential back to agricultural on a 27-acre property previously planned and platted by S.E. Copple's Commonwealth organization.
• In 2005, the city's Airport West Subarea Plan identified another native prairie for future residential use. Fortunately, the 7-acre parcel has now been reclassified as an Environmental Resource.
See: Shahan, J.L., Goodwin, B.J. & Rundquist, B.C. "Grassland songbird occurrence on remnant prairie patches is primarily determined by landscape characteristics." Landscape Ecol 32, 971–988 (2017).
It is instructive to look back at what previous councils and mayors have done with regard to Lincoln's rare grassland prairies, when they have discovered that their actions would endanger them.
• In 1994, the council changed a native prairie's zoning from residential back to agricultural on a 27-acre property previously planned and platted by S.E. Copple's Commonwealth organization.
• In 2005, the city's Airport West Subarea Plan identified another native prairie for future residential use. Fortunately, the 7-acre parcel has now been reclassified as an Environmental Resource.
• In 2011, the Comprehensive Plan was changed by the mayor and council to exclude several native and restored tallgrass prairies which had previously been identified for future residential housing.
• In 2018, the mayor and council declined to sell the very two same (now TIF-targeted) grassland and riparian parcels for purposes of residential housing, asking instead for the recommendation from the UNL Center for Grassland Studies as to the parcels' importance to the Nine Mile Prairie ecosystem. That resulted in the identification of these parcels as habitat-rich flora and fauna corridors.
• In 2018, the mayor and council declined to sell the very two same (now TIF-targeted) grassland and riparian parcels for purposes of residential housing, asking instead for the recommendation from the UNL Center for Grassland Studies as to the parcels' importance to the Nine Mile Prairie ecosystem. That resulted in the identification of these parcels as habitat-rich flora and fauna corridors.
In other words, previous councils knew, when it came to prairie protection, how to put the brakes on development, even before "carbon sequestration" was a part of our everyday vocabulary.
Some who would profit from the pending TIF proposal have been quick to cite a 2007 city agreement and called for the city to place the disputed parcels into the hands of developers yet this year, claiming a deadline for action.
The problem with relying on this obscure 2007 agreement is that when the unimplemented part of it is unearthed, it will be evident that it is out of date. The agreement specified in 2007 that "time is of the essence" but time has eroded away any sense of urgency and with it the foundation of some of the agreement's assumptions. When the 2018 council actually took up the agreement many years later, it was apparent that staff was unsure who even owned the properties ("Additional research regarding the ownership of both parcels may be needed"). The sponsor of the 2018 proposed action, the Lincoln airport authority (LAA), was not clear about the federal role in oversight, suggesting that the previous zoning and the newly revived sale proposals were "derived from" federal regulations, which do not, however, require residential zoning as highest and best use for appraisal, as the city may once have believed. In any case, federal law has changed since 2007. The obligations of the city in the 2007 agreement are to take actions that are "reasonably required." There is nothing in the agreement that precluded the city from reviewing its environmental impacts, as it chose to do in 2018 and can do in 2021 in light of the Lincoln Climate Action Plan. Nothing constrains the city from protecting the interests of its own citizens and taxpayers as conditions have changed over the many years. As old documents are exhumed, it may be determined that LAA ascribed to itself zoning jurisdiction it did not have over properties it did not own, all in an agreement that remains, wisely, unimplemented.
Yet to be mentioned is adequate public notice. The far-reaching TIF development proposal, which would short-circuit the 2050 Comprehensive Planning process for the area, was not well circulated before the city council's June 28 public hearing. Citizens and taxpayers are in the dark when it comes to knowing what this is all about: what agreement, what maps, what UNL report, what federal laws, what deadline? This is even before we get into what promises were made to whom, by whom, to try to salvage the TIF development deal, once some watchful city council members started asking questions.
Not to be forgotten is the testimony conspicuously made at the public TIF hearing that certain individuals and groups, meaning environmental interest groups, were "not authorized" to voice their opinions on TIF public policy issues. Surely the testifier knows that were it not for the Wachiska Audubon Society, many of the area prairies likely would not exist today. Among the first people I'd want to consult about prairies for his opinion is the legendary Ernie Rousek of Wachiska.*
The best thing for city government to do right now is to re-read what it just enacted in the Lincoln Climate Action Plan and act as if it matters, because it does. Bird and pollinator populations are collapsing, climate change is evident everywhere, and the time for climate action is now.
The way forward for the city council is simply to remove the contested areas from the TIF proposal and sort the issues out in the Comprehensive Planning process, which is already underway and has the advantage of actually involving the public in decision-making.
That will send a message that the Lincoln Climate Action Plan has met its first test, and that this city council of 2021 means to put the action into the plan.
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* Among other scientific articles Wachiska Audubon has brought to attention is one that concludes it is not distance but landscape context that is important in prairie preservation:
"Using a focal-patch study design we demonstrated the importance of the surrounding landscape, often out to 4 km from the fragment edge, on prairie occupancy by grassland birds. Effective management of grassland songbirds will require attention to the landscape context of prairie fragments." Note: one TIF parcel is less than 1 km away from Nine Mile Prairie, and if developed with 100 houses as proposed would be a point source introduction of bird-killing cats, pollinator-destroying pesticides, and nighttime street lighting into the heart of the prairie environs.
"Using a focal-patch study design we demonstrated the importance of the surrounding landscape, often out to 4 km from the fragment edge, on prairie occupancy by grassland birds. Effective management of grassland songbirds will require attention to the landscape context of prairie fragments." Note: one TIF parcel is less than 1 km away from Nine Mile Prairie, and if developed with 100 houses as proposed would be a point source introduction of bird-killing cats, pollinator-destroying pesticides, and nighttime street lighting into the heart of the prairie environs.
See: Shahan, J.L., Goodwin, B.J. & Rundquist, B.C. "Grassland songbird occurrence on remnant prairie patches is primarily determined by landscape characteristics." Landscape Ecol 32, 971–988 (2017).
