Green Omaha Public Input Session

At the end of Omaha By Design’s one-year project, we will create workable priorities for public and philanthropic investments, enforceable codes, and guidelines for the city’s Master Plan.

This vision will be built from three parts, Green Omaha, Civic Omaha and Neighborhood Omaha. Each is critical to the overall goal of creating a vibrant, functional and appealing community for both businesses and individuals.

Public Input Session attendees listen to Consultants presentation

On February 18, 2004, a community input meeting was held at the Scott Conference Center on the University of Nebraska at Omaha Campus to present issues for discussion regarding the Green Omaha part of the project.

Jonathon Barnett answers a question as Del Weber looks on

Green Omaha seeks to identify and map the critical natural systems that form the setting for development in Omaha, create a new public open-space framework of parks and boulevards and establish green guidelines for new development.

The Issues

Safe Floodways and Floodplains and a City-Wide Park System

Omaha’s waterways can create value for adjoining properties and become the centerpiece of a citywide park system that would create value for the entire community. In the long run, all the land in the flood plain could be part of the park system.

Kansas City’s Brush Creek

For example, along Brush Creek in Kansas City, flood-safety improvements have been accompanied by a park plan that raises the water in the waterways using break-away retention dams, so that water levels are not raised in a flood situation. The resulting series of watercourses are more attractive than drainage ways where water levels are far below the banks. This is just one example of design techniques that could transform the experience of the Papio waterways and cause investors and developers to site their buildings to take advantage of them.

A Complete Trail System

Omaha’s Trail System is one of its great successes. Today it has approximately 80 miles of paved trails with another 20 scheduled for the next six years.

Priorities for completing the system include:

• Extension of the Keystone Trail north to connect into the Sorensen Parkway Trail, which runs east-west
• Connecting Keystone east to the Field Club Trail, along an existing abandoned rail right-of-way
• Extension of the Big Papio Trail north and west connecting up into Bennington and west into the West Maple growth area.

Future development could include trails along Hell Creek and Cole Creek, plus a connection through Millard to the planned trail link to Lincoln and extensions northward along Big Papillion Creek into Bennington.

City Planning Director Bob Peters addresses an issue

Preservation of Landscape at the City’s Edges

Omaha’s master plan encompasses development extending to the Douglas County boundaries north and south and to the ridgeline at the edge of the Elkhorn preserve to the west and the Ponca Highlands preserve.

Current estimates are that Douglas County will be fully urbanized in less than 30 years. Among the natural features that Omaha’s Master Plan identifies as in need of preservation, in addition to floodplain areas, are farmland landscapes, bluffs, prairies, woodlands, and wetlands.

Freeway Landscaping

Omaha has an estimated 1,800 acres of land along freeways like embankments, verges, and land area within cloverleaves. All of this has been landscaped sufficiently to control erosion and much has some additional landscaping.

Rendering of freeway landscape concept

Long stretches of the freeway could be designed as landscapes. Separate species of wild flowers could be planted throughout the freeway lands, so that they would all bloom at the same time, with different colors at different seasons. A palate of native grasses could provide color and texture during cold months as well as during the spring, summer and fall.

Green Streets

Omaha has its traditional boulevard system in its eastern neighborhoods and a grid of wide streets that can be landscaped in the western part of the City, but the area in between has no existing boulevards and few wide streets. Omaha by Design can designate streets or corridors that can become the connecting links in the ultimate system of Green Streets. Dodge Street from I – 680 east is probably the most important link. Sorenson Parkway is another link where a green right of way is already present. Cuming Street to Saddle Creek is yet another because it connects to Abbott Drive and the airport. West Center, Saddle Creek and Military corridors could also serve as green links.

Public Open Space Framework

The combination of a Papio park system, the trail system, environmental preservation and neighborhood park set-asides, freeway landscaping and green streets should provide a green public open space framework for Omaha that will transform the perception of the city for both residents and visitors. We are redesigning Omaha so that it becomes widely known as a Green City.

Green Parking Lots

Parking lots are a big part of the image of the modern city. We need to consider the possibility of green parking lots. Existing city standards could be modified to provide for landscaping of parking lots to improve both appearance and microclimate effects and standards for perimeter landscaping requirements.

Papio Special District

A need exists for the City to exert influence over development within 500 or 1,000 feet of waterways in the Papio system. Design criteria could include not only obstruction of the floodway, but also standards and incentives for ways to take advantage of a park-front location, and avoid placing blank walls and loading docks on the park side of the building.

Learn more about the Omaha by Design process and get more detail on the issues and recommendations at www.omahabydesign.org