RE: NANFA-L-- I'm blogging fish; really.

Crail, Todd (tcrail-in-UTNet.UToledo.Edu)
Fri, 28 Apr 2006 20:22:48 -0400

The first thing I would do is check with the county Soil and Water office, if
there is one. They can look and see which soils are hydric, which are
probably most of them on that plot. It's NEVER in the seller's interest to
admit they have hydric soils, so I would definately check with their office.
They'll also be able to tell you what is zoned for floodplain and so forth.
I'm not sure how all that works down there, because we're never going to get a
10" rainstorm up here. You could see the relict fluvial dynamics of those big
storms... The zoning *has* to be different than what I'm accustomed to.

Secondly, if you're not totally tresspassing (loosely, an interested buyer ;),
I would inventory as much biota as you see on that plot. I'd put it in
Bruce's dealio online, and then it's documented "somewhere". Name it
something like "Sailfin Acres" on the blog that works as a pseudonym for the
locality, that way you're not revealing it to would be Internet fish
worshipers, but will have a point of reference to a real geographic location.

I'd then look to your park district, conservation organizations, some kind of
financial wrapper and responsible maintainer for the tract. From there,
there's all sorts of grant programs to begin looking into, some that the
partners could already be aware of, maybe some that you can find on the
internet... But you're going to need someone who's gonna pay the taxes on the
plot before anyone considers a grant proposal.

You might also contact the Alabama DOT and see if they have mitigation money
for any projects they're doing. But this isn't anything to worry over right
now... You've got a bunch to do up front before you'd ever even get to
locating money, and I don't find it too tough, if you're willing to spend
hours writing proposals after all this pre-work.

Yes. It's a pain in the butt. This is why the developers win most all of the
time. And you may not ever win on this one, in particular, or ever... But you
never know who you're going to get to know by doing it. Having a friend(s)
with a common cause is probably the most dangerous thing to those yahoos (that
is if they're indeed violating some law) in the long run. One voice is a
stand... Two begins a movement.

Todd

________________________________

From: owner-nanfa-l-in-nanfa.org on behalf of Mysteryman
Sent: Fri 4/28/2006 2:39 PM
To: nanfa-l-in-nanfa.org
Subject: Re: NANFA-L-- I'm blogging fish; really.

Hey, Todd, I've been thinking about what you saids about getting a grant
to buy that land before some scumbag developer does. Do you or anyone
else have any real notion of how to do it? As you saw, it's a pretty
ritzy neighboorhood and probably not cheap, even for swampland.
Hey.... what if I could get it declared official wetlands? Would that help?
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