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| Award Winning Ordinances |
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By the late 1980’s Wallace Township was like many others in northern Chester County, where rapid growth had traditionally followed conventional two acre "cookie cutter" layouts, chopping up the rural landscape and fragmenting ecological resources. During the development lull of the early '90s, the Supervisors, together with the Planning Commission and other concerned citizens, formed a task force to study and weigh options for alternatives to conventional development that would allow for growth without sacrificing the beauty and natural resources of the township. Wallace Township officials recognized that development patterns in Chester County during the previous decade had generally been wasteful and inefficient, consuming vast acreages of open space, valuable farmland, and natural areas to create a sprawling hodgepodge of subdivisions, commercial strips, and office parks. Therefore, Natural Lands Trust was asked to help draft an innovative set of land-use tools, including an updated element of the Comprehensive Plan together with subdivision and zoning ordinance improvements that tie all three documents together into an integrated approach for designing new developments around the central organizing principles of protecting the community's open space network. The result of that work became the basis for the Commonwealth's new Growing Greener conservation planning education initiative. In fact, the Governor's Center for Local Government Services in the Department of Community and Economic Development selected Wallace Township to receive the 1999 Governor's Award for Local Government Excellence for its efforts in Innovative Community/Governmental Initiatives.
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WALLACE TOWNSHIP, Chester County, received the first-ever Dallas A. Dollase Excellence in Planning Award for adopting and implementing an integrated set of land use tools to tie together its comprehensive plan and its subdivision and land development and zoning ordinances. The set provides for new development designs while protecting open space and using "growing greener" concepts. From left: Randall Arendt, vice president of the Natural Lands Trust; Lou Schneider, township planning commission; Bitten Krentel, township open space task force; Phil Wallis, president of the Natural Lands Trust; Alice Halsema, chairman of the township board of supervisors; Robert Bock, chairman of the township planning commission; Jane Shields, vice chairman of the township board of supervisors; Albert Greenfield, township supervisor; Lt. Gov. Mark Schweiker; and Jan Bednarchik, township secretary-treasurer.
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