Our conservation district can help Fayette County but no one seems to care | Opinion
I recently resigned from my elected position as Fayette County Conservation District (FCCD) Board Supervisor. It’s taken me a couple of weeks to write this op-ed because I was very disheartened by my experience on the board. However, I believe it’s important to let Fayette County citizens, and especially the people who voted for me, know why I made the decision to leave the board.
I’ve worked for more than twenty years as an architectural designer, and conservation is not a new topic for me. American architect, William McDonough, infamously stated: “In the end, the question is not, how do we use nature to serve our interests? It’s how can we use humans to serve nature’s interest?”
When I was fresh out of college, back in the early 2000s, the companies I worked for were already designing with sustainable initiatives. My current practice, which includes projects across the country, is often governed by Title 24, a forward-thinking approach to sustainable requirements in the building industry. I am well versed in land use policy, conservations efforts required for urban initiatives, interpreting statutes and regulations, and engaging with government agencies.
When I was elected to the board, my approach was to understand where we were as a board, to discern the board’s responsibilities, guidelines, and practices. Key questions included: What is the board trying to do? What might we do better? How might we improve in our capacity as public servants? In my voluntary, unpaid position as a board supervisor, I clocked more than 300 hours of research and meeting attendance. I met with state senators, with Mayor Gorton and Urban County Council members, with representatives of the USDA, KACD, NRCS, and every single conservation entity that I could find within, and surrounding, our county. Two key findings emerged as I conducted this work:
The FCCD board lacks meaningful engagement with other conservation-oriented agencies, particularly at our municipal level.
There are many sustainability agencies in the county, but no cohesive conservation plan, and no overarching conservation entity to help guide a plan.
The FCCD staff shared many of their concerns: complaints regarding overwork, lack of funding, lack of legal representation, and a lack of public awareness. Personally, I found the board to be unresponsive and apparently uninterested in the whole dimension of urban conservation and the importance of public engagement. It has become an insular farm agency, with no real internal mechanisms for representing conservation in an urban environment. The majority on the board were also in a position of power to appoint, rather than elect, new members with similar interests, which is a way to ensure the focus stays primarily on farmland. Let me be clear that I am not advocating that rural conservation deserves less, I am advocating that urban conservation needs more.
According to statistics provided by FCCD, approximately 70% of land in Fayette County is farmland, where 7% of constituents live; 30% of the land is urban, where 93% of constituents live. While hundreds of thousands of dollars are directed toward agricultural conservation in Fayette County, urban conservation, which would affect a majority of our constituents, is largely underserved, and implementation is often misunderstood, leaving future sustainability efforts somehow interpreted as not within the scope of FCCD’s purview. As an urban resident, I experienced my own sense of constituency ignored.
Conservation really has no rural-urban divide. What affects us in the city affects us in the country, and vice versa. Until the FCCD recognizes that its mandate goes beyond the needs of farmland, and until there are statutes that regulate a conservation district with rural and urban responsibilities, we are best served as a county to find, or to create, another agency to realize urban conservation goals. In the meantime, I’ll be paying attention, but until changes are made, the efforts of a skilled, interested, and resourceful citizen like me are largely underutilized and ignored.
Jess Voigt is an architectural designer in Lexington and a former member of the Fayette County Conservation District.
