Falmouth Town Meeting approved two transfers of town-owned land in the watershed of its drinking water reservoir to the care and custody of conservation commission. The two articles were the first supported by APCC under The Cape We Shape campaign and serve as an excellent model for the kind of initial actions we hope the campaign inspires residents to take in towns across the Cape.
Citizen awareness and grassroots activism spurred the Falmouth Town Meeting to ensure that land most people thought was already protected actually gained protected status. What was true in Falmouth is true in every Cape town. There is a general assumption that undeveloped town-owned property is inherently protected from development. But in reality, only land encumbered by a conservation restriction or held under the care and custody of a conservation commission is truly protected from development. The rest is generally not.
For municipal land to be protected from development, including land that falls within critical natural landscape areas, town meeting must approve that designation. An early objective of The Cape We Shape campaign is to work locally to encourage and support citizen efforts to identify environmentally important municipal land that should be protected from development and shepherd it through the local approval process to accomplish that objective. Protecting town-owned land from development is a low/no cost and high reward first step toward increasing the protection of important and sensitive resources.
A year from now, we hope to look back at the Falmouth Town Meeting as the one that helped get the ball rolling. We plan to engage citizens in all Cape towns with The Cape We Shape campaign to advance similar initiatives.
This is how a regional political force is developed; one local action at a time.
