Partnership for Action Learning in Sustainability (PALS)
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/21474
The Partnership for Action Learning in Sustainability (PALS) is administered by the National Center for Smart Growth at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD). It is a campus-wide initiative that harnesses the expertise of UMD faculty and the energy and ingenuity of UMD students to help Maryland communities become more environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable. PALS is designed to provide innovative, low-cost assistance to local governments while creating real-world problem-solving experiences for University of Maryland graduate and undergraduate students.
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Item A Framework Plan for Preservation and Growth in Creswell, Harford County, Maryland(Partnership for Action Learning in Sustainability (PALS), 2019-06) Ali, Bilal; Latimer, Sarah; MacKereth, Nick; Nye, Kari; Ottalini, Russ; Smith, Jerah; Weller, AnnaLinden; Clites, Philip; Espinoza, Maria; Kerner, Bridget; Phelps, Brooks; Scott, Sacsheen; Goldsborough, Elena; Avin, Uri; Noonkester, MattHarfordNEXT, the county’s 2016 Masterplan, calls for a comprehensive analysis of facilities needed to serve Creswell and asserts that future development must be compatible with the preservation of Creswell’s rural character. This mandate is the basis for the present study, conducted under the auspices of the University of Maryland’s PALS program in the spring semester of 2019. The HarfordNEXT language about the Creswell study is also the basis for five of this report’s goals: Conserve Farming; Protect the Environment; Preserve Rural Character; Minimize Traffic Impacts; Maintain Adequate Infrastructure. In addition to these goals, the team added two others: Provide Additional Housing; Ensure Positive Fiscal Impact. This course examined TDR (transfer of development rights) using CommunityViz software, and also conducted scenario planning using transportation and fiscal models. The appendix document was a collaborative effort, with the following courses completing the background reports for sewer and water infrastructure, environmental impacts, and public services in the Creswell area: ENCE422 Project Cost Accounting and Economics, LARC642 Graduate Studio III, LAW577B Environmental Legal Clinic, and URSP640 Growth Management and Environmental Planning.Item Environmental Analysis and Development Potential in the Creswell Area of Harford County, MD(Partnership for Action Learning in Sustainability (PALS), 2018) Russell, Sherry; Turner, Sarah; Wallace, Sarah; Myers, David N.This project was undertaken as part of the UMD PALS program by graduate Landscape Architecture students in LARC 642 in the fall of 2018. It contributes to a series of courses addressing the development potential of the Creswell study area in Harford County. The objectives of this course were threefold: 1. Identify abiotic, biotic, and cultural characteristics that significantly influence development patterns of the Creswell area; 2. Undertake an assessment of developable potential of the Creswell area; and 3. Visually document patterns of land use of the built environment for the understanding of potential development patterns of the Creswell area. This document is organized along the basis of these three objectives.Item Sewer System Alternatives Evaluation for Potential Creswell Area Expansion in Harford County(Partnership for Action Learning in Sustainability (PALS), 2018) Alarcon, Julio; McAllister, Nicholas; Furlong, Brian; Benyarku, Eben; Carter, Alonzo; Hall, Courtney; Belay, Mengistu; Cho, Andrew (Seong); Kaur, Gurpreet; Islam, Sanjidul; Batista, Sabrina; Lucki, Alexandra; Bloemendaal, Kim; Gonzalez, Raul Castillo; McElhaney, Matthew; Diwani, Souhayl; Reister, Ben; Clark, Phillip; Tokar, Jayne; Schachter, Greg; Tyshing, Miguel; Berhane, Michael; McKenna, Eric; Krasnoff, Gregory; SyedNaveed, Mishaal; Siegel, Evan; Shuey, Joe; Milligan, Austin; Miranda, Mario; Moez, Yasmin; Queen, Michael; Tolnay, Sara; Wink, Pete; Schito, Gabriella; O'Neal, Jeff; Drumm, Lauren; Alvarez-Couceiro, Nico; Dougen, Graham; Radstake, Damiaen; Reisfeld, Daniel; Berger, Eli; Streett, Rebecca; Palumbo, Emily; Hoover, Madeline; Blout, Tim; Sage, Madison; Holtzman, William; Sultan, Robin; Mayer, Erik; Nachenberg, Koby; Lynch, Sadie; Cui, QingbinThis report summarizes the findings of the ENCE422 Fall 2018 class term project. Students were tasked with evaluating sewer system alternatives for the Creswell area expansion in Harford County. Student groups were to consider environmental impacts, community/social impacts, and perform financial analysis for the alternatives they chose to evaluate. This report extracts information from 14 separate team presentations and synthesizes it around the following structure; 1. Systems that Utilize Septic Tanks a. Traditional Septic System b. Orenco Effluent System c. Small Diameter Gravity Sewer System 2. System that Do Not Utilize Septic Tanks a. Traditional Gravity System b. Vacuum System c. Grinder Pump SystemItem Inspector District Management Process Flow Study, Harford County Department of Inspections, Licenses, and Permits(Partnership for Action Learning in Sustainability (PALS), 2018) Mishra, Ritwik; Parikh, Raj; Weaver, KathyThe Department of Inspections, Licenses, and Permits (ILP) in Harford County, Maryland works to create streamlined and efficient processes for inspections, licenses, and permits for the construction in the county. The inspections vary depending on the geo-location of the building, the type of construction, and its size. The ILP inspectors are certified experts, each specializing in a specific type of construction. Currently, assigning inspections to ILP inspectors is done manually, based on the location of the inspection request and the type of skill required. However, an increasing number of inspection requests, rapid development in the county, and the complexity of resources to be managed, the manual process of assigning inspections is becoming cumbersome and inefficient. Without a system to prioritize inspections, inspectors spend time traveling to different sites and allocating time toward inspections that may not be as important. This project’s objective is to redesign the process flow for administrators and ILP inspectors to help manage the inspections with minimal overhead. The project approach is to first study the existing process to understand the roles and responsibilities of each individual and the system, and how they collaborate. Based on that knowledge, a new process flow will be designed to optimize the process of inspection management.Item Harford County Tour Recommendation(Partnership for Action Learning in Sustainability (PALS), 2018) Gupta, Shriya; Weaver, KathyVisit Harford — Harford County, Maryland’s destination marketing organization — would like to improve its Visitor Tour Planning Application to enhance the touring experience for people visiting the county. The current application shows each point of interest individually and lacks an integrated way to show visitor’s a tour of all the points of interest (museums, breweries, and monuments). As a result, visitors have to find and map every point of interest one by one. To improve this experience, this project aims to attract tourists to the county and make them aware of the various activities happening in the county. The county envisions a web and mobile-based user application that will provide visitors with tour recommendations based on sites’ locations and business hours, and the visitor’s time preference. This tool will benefit visitors by providing intelligent tour recommendations for visiting points of interest based on location, time preferences, and selected categories (landmark, art, sports, lodging, etc.). The visitors will have the freedom to seamlessly plan personalized tours based on the categories they select and without switching back and forth between details of each point of interest. To achieve this, data from GIS class—points of interest (POI), address, category (landmark, art, sports, lodging, etc.), contact, business hours, descriptions, and geocoding details (mainly longitude and latitude information)—of the various attractions will be made available to the app development team, which will then use it to map tours using either Google Maps or other openly available mapping application programming interfaces (APIs).Item Visit Harford Trail Map(Partnership for Action Learning in Sustainability (PALS), 2018) Clites, Philip; Slawta, Patrick; Staton, Meagan; Peng, Binbin; Zhou, FrankThis project focused on creating an interactive and searchable map of the most popular trails in Harford County for the use on the Visit Harford website. This report provides background on previously available searchable and interactive trail mapping, describes in detail what the project’s goals, discusses the data collection process, including where the data was collected from and qualitative data sought out. A significant amount of data about Harford County Trails is available online, but it is not consolidated in one place. If a visitor to Harford County wants to find a trail for hiking or biking, there are numerous incomplete data sources and maps provided by jurisdictions and independent organizations. The purpose of this project is to consolidate information on Harford County’s most popular trails so that visitors and residents have easier access to the beauty of Harford County through its comprehensive network of state parks, county parks, and trails. This report also describes how data was gathered and manipulated to suit this project. It also discusses the methodology, analysis, and visualization of the data. The primary purpose of this report is to explain how the team used the data collected for mapping purposes, as well as the project’s results. It includes a tutorial of how to use the final product with an analysis of how it might be used on the Visit Harford site. This new interactive tool can benefit Harford County residents and tourists alike. Ultimately, the interactive map will be incorporated into an app that visitors to Harford County will be able to use to find not just trails, but other attractions, such as dining, lodging, and entertainment. Visit Harford is the destination marketing organization of Harford County, Maryland with the goal of driving more tourism activity in Harford County. Their website includes many attractions for both residents and tourists. Through the PALS program, our class was tasked with providing the County with improved spatial data for tourist attractions in Harford County, making the County more navigable for those seeking to get the most out of their visits in and around Harford County. Our group was assigned to Harford County’s trails. At the project’s outset, Harford County did not have any kind of trail map that visitors could use. Additionally, the Visit Harford County website only had a list of trails in the county, without any meaningful qualitative data about the trails. In fact, the list of trails was included in the list of parks as a combined list of parks and trails.1 Our group was tasked with creating an up-to-date trails inventory with qualitative data about each trail, and then represent that data in an interactive map. There is currently no interactive format nor a single place for visitors to research trails. The only option is the Parks & Trails website where trails are consolidated with the parks. But not all trails are included, and the site doesn’t include a map.Item Improving the “Visit Harford” Website Experience(Partnership for Action Learning in Sustainability (PALS), 2018) Bhatia, Anam; Kajla, Anavi; Khurana, Astha; Kalyani, Mahitha; Kules, BillItem Let’s Visit Harford County(Partnership for Action Learning in Sustainability (PALS), 2018) Desai, Janki; Jembu Rajkumar, Aravind; Simha, Shravya; Soni, Mishi; Kules, BillItem Improving the UX of the Visit Harford App & Website(Partnership for Action Learning in Sustainability (PALS), 2018) Keshavarz, Ghazaleh; Sharma, Aashry Kamal; Pimento, Simone; Amancherla, Sravya; Kules, BillItem Destination Harford County: Visualizing Tourism and Points of Interest in Harford County, Maryland(Partnership for Action Learning in Sustainability (PALS), 2018) Brinley, Anna; Ottalini, Russell; Wong, Brittany; Peng, Binbin; Zhou, FrankThis report details work conducted by urban studies and planning graduate students in the Planning Technologies course at the University of Maryland for Visit Harford, the destination marketing organization for Harford County. Using geographic information system (GIS) software to create visualizations of tourism points of interest, the team prepared maps for public dissemination in support of Visit Harford’s efforts to better promote its tourism sites. In response to Visit Harford’s request for a map that could be integrated into their mobile app, the team compiled contact information, descriptions, and social media rating data for points of interest, and created two interactive public-facing story maps using ESRI ArcGIS Online. The first product is a shortlist that gives comprehensive overview of destinations and activities in select categories on Visit Harford’s website and rack card marketing materials. The second product was created in response to Visit Harford’s request that we help them encourage tourists to explore destinations farther from the Interstate 95 (I-95) Corridor, a public-facing story map that provides a sample daylong itinerary incorporating destination information from the shortlist. Our analysis of available social media rating information for the destinations demonstrated that while there is little correlation between distance from I-95 and low ratings, analysis of drive-time from I-95 to destinations would be useful. The report concludes with some recommendations ways to use and incorporate the story maps and shortlist data into existing and soon-to-be created resources to expand tourist knowledge of the destinations.