Protecting Glasspool Reservoir: A Colbeck Ordinance Project

Driving question. What rules should Colbeck place on land in the Glasspool Reservoir watershed, and what will the town have to give up to get them?

The client and the situation. Colbeck is a fictional town of about nine thousand residents that takes all of its drinking water from Glasspool Reservoir. The reservoir's watershed covers roughly eleven square miles of woodland, small farms, and scattered houses on septic systems. A developer has applied to divide the Fenwold tract, a 900-acre parcel that drains directly to the reservoir's northern arm, into 140 house lots, each with its own septic system and well. The planning commission has asked your committee to recommend a watershed overlay district: a set of extra rules that apply to land inside the watershed boundary on top of the town's ordinary zoning.

Constraints. Your recommendation must satisfy every one of these.

• The overlay may contain no more than eight numbered provisions. A ninth idea, however good, has to displace one of the first eight.
• State law in this scenario permits a town to regulate how land in a watershed is developed, and forbids a town from prohibiting all residential use of a private parcel. Your ordinance may not ban housing on the Fenwold tract.
• Every provision must name the town officer who enforces it and state what happens when it is violated.
• At least two provisions must apply to land that is already developed, not only to new subdivisions.
• The package may not raise the town's annual watershed budget by more than $60,000 a year in new staff, inspections, and monitoring. The provision menu lists an annual cost for each item so your team can total it.

Provision menu. Your team selects from this menu, and may write up to two provisions of its own if they meet the constraints; the teacher sets the annual cost of any provision a team writes. Each item's annual cost to the town is in parentheses: a stream buffer of a stated width ($7,000); a maximum share of a lot covered by roof and pavement ($5,000); a minimum lot size inside the watershed ($2,000); a septic inspection requirement at a stated interval ($24,000); a septic setback distance from streams ($3,000); a prohibition on new fuel storage tanks ($1,000); a manure and fertilizer storage rule for the small farms ($10,000); a construction erosion control permit ($14,000); a requirement that new roads drain to vegetated swales ($6,000); a conservation easement purchase fund ($30,000); an annual reservoir monitoring program ($18,000); and a public notice requirement for any application inside the overlay ($2,000).

Deliverables. Each team turns in four items to the planning commission, played by the teacher and two students from another team.

• A draft overlay ordinance of no more than two pages, with numbered provisions, the enforcing officer, and the consequence for each.
• A staff report of about three pages that argues for adoption, cites the map and the provision costs as evidence, and answers the strongest objection an existing landowner would raise.
• A watershed map produced with a free web mapping tool, showing the reservoir, the streams, the Fenwold tract, and the boundary your overlay would follow.
• A five-minute presentation with two minutes of questions from the commission.

1. Session 1, watershed inventory and first map. Because Colbeck is fictional, the teacher picks a real reservoir near the school to stand in for Glasspool. Teams find it in the web mapping tool, trace the streams that feed it, and mark a 900-acre Fenwold tract on land that drains to one arm of the reservoir. Output: a printed draft map with a proposed overlay boundary drawn on it and a one-paragraph note explaining why the boundary falls where it does.
2. Session 2, provision menu and cost total. Teams evaluate every item on the menu against the driving question, rank the items, and select no more than eight. Output: a ranked list with the annual cost of each selected item and a running total that stays within the budget constraint, plus a one-sentence reason for each item cut.
3. Session 3, ordinance drafting. Teams write the numbered provisions in ordinance language, each with its enforcing officer and its consequence. Output: a complete two-page draft ordinance, including at least two provisions that reach already-developed land.
4. Session 4, staff report and peer review. Teams draft the staff report, then exchange drafts with another team and score each other against the rubric below. Output: a full staff report draft plus a signed peer review sheet naming the two weakest points in the argument.
5. Session 5, presentation and revision memo. Teams present to the commission and take questions. Output: the final packet of all four deliverables and a one-page revision memo stating what the team changed after the questions and why.