Center for Economic Development And Resource Stewardship
“Linking Sustainable Growth Practices to Community Prosperity”

Current Projects:

Through diverse partnership we are helping to facilitate change in local development practices at 11 locations in 5 states. These projects are demonstrating how water resource needs can be incorporated into development designs to produce equal or higher yields to the investors. These demonstrations show how post-development storm water quantity and quality can meet or improve pre-development conditions. The projects include greenfield industrial sites, urban brownfield redevelopment, mixed-use lakefront resorts, golf course residential communities, and suburban in-fill developments.

We are testing storm water and Low Impact Development (LID) modeling tools that allow developers and regulators to reduce cost and increase effectiveness of on-site water quantity and quality treatment. We are demonstrating how these proven practices can change current and/or guide future codes and ordinances at the community level.

We are establishing two privately owned and managed Wetlands and Stream Mitigation Banks in North Mississippi. These will become models for establishing other needed banks in regions in the Southeast U.S.

We are facilitating use of dispersed wetlands treatment systems to replace septic field lines and/or the need to pipe sewage to conventional centralized systems in several Southeastern states.

We are facilitating a forest products utilization program to demonstrate value added opportunities for forest landowners, loggers and furniture manufacturers. One example is a potential facility that will provide process heat from small diameter logs and wood waste to replace natural gas at existing brick plants in Mississippi. Other examples include modular type log homes and flooring.

In North Alabama, we’re working on a pilot project that uses poultry litter for process heat to distill corn into ethanol. Poultry litter land application is currently impacting water quality in high phosphorous watersheds. This is of great concern in many of the concentrated poultry production areas in the Southeast.

In Huntsville, Alabama CEDARS is involved in the development of the North Huntsville Industrial Park Conservation Design Demonstration Project (NHIPCD). Following are links to PDF documents and web pages that provide information related to this project:

North Huntsville Industrial Park Conservation Design Demonstration Project Final Report (2 meg PDF)

Appendix A: TVA Economic Development (web site)

Appendix B: Detailed Stormwater Water Management Conservation (600KB PDF)

Appendix C: Soils Investigation (12.2MB PDF)

Appendix D: WinSLAMM and Low Impact Development (600KB PDF)

Appendix E: Runoff and Sediment Reductions at North Huntsville (171KB PDF)

Appendix F: Liner Stability in Grass Swales (40KB PDF)

View a 5 minute overview of the NHIPCD (10.5MB Windows Media File)

View a 5 minute overview of the NHIPCD (11.1MB QuickTime movie)

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