Hilliard committee hears proposed Big Darby Accord amendments stressing monitoring, clustered growth and new revenue tools

Chris Herman, principal at MKSK, told the Hilliard City Council Committee of the Whole on Feb. 9 that a draft amendment to the Big Darby Accord would add a comprehensive, rotating water-quality monitoring program, revise conservation-area tiers and change revenue mechanisms to better fund land protection and adaptive management.

Herman said the 2006 Accord helped preserve open space and spur restoration—he cited nearly 3,500 acres of new open space preserved and about 6,147 housing units built since 2007—but it never established the long-term, consistent water-quality monitoring the panel originally intended. "We must figure out how to fund it, and we must get it going," Herman said, urging jurisdictions to adopt a standardized approach and shared oversight.

Why it matters: the amendment aims to use current satellite and GIS mapping to protect the most sensitive lands, require stricter on-site protections and create a monitoring backbone that would allow data-driven, adaptive changes to Accord requirements. The draft keeps the 20,000 equivalent residential unit (ERU) cap from 2006 but seeks to reallocate the remaining roughly 13,000 units to locations where centralized sanitary sewer can be extended,…