ALBANY – It's common knowledge that planning ahead is a good idea — and New York State is prepared to offer grants to drive the point home. Last week, New York's Secretary of State's office announced the Lower Hudson Valley Smart Growth Grant, a program which will divide a total of $500,000 worth of grants among municipalities and not-for-profits in the mid- to lower-Hudson Valley. The aim of the grants is to fund planning projects that will encourage more centralized land-use and the revitalization of community centers.

"These are dollars that are used for planning and zoning. It's particularly important now because we're in a building downturn, so it's almost like we have time to plan for the economic recovery down the line. So these will be to put plans in place so that those plans can be advertised to developers to invest in our downtowns," said Paul Beyer, the director of the Smart Growth Program.

The areas the grants target span Dutchess, Rockland, Orange, Putnam, Sullivan, and Westchester Counties, while portions of Southern Ulster County have been included as well: Gardiner, Lloyd, Marlboro, Plattekill, Shawangunk, and Wawarsing.

Each grant application can win as much as $40,000, though smaller amounts will certainly be awarded as well. The applications will also be evaluated on a scoring system in order to determine which projects are most worthy of the funding.

Projects that seek to reduce residents' dependence on car travel and promote transit hubs and public transportation will achieve higher scores, said Beyer.

"These would be largely what are known as 'targeted overlay zones,'" he said. "You pick areas that are seen as centers of activity and centers of development, and then you plan them on a smart-growth matrix, and that would mean they would be more compact, they'd be more mixed-use — you'd have residential, business, recreational, and cultural all mixed together.

"These communities would be more walk-able and bike-able, because you want people on the streets to make it a more vibrant and economically viable downtown, and where possible, the planning would dovetail with transit use. You'd want to concentrate development closer to a train station, so that people can walk to the station and use the station regularly without getting into their car."

The environmental benefits of reducing the need for car transit are obvious, but Beyer stressed the economic benefits such planning will have on areas that have been hit hard by decades of planning based on sprawl.

"In the last 50 or 60 years, development patterns have sprawled outward, away from our centers, leaving them to kind of stagnate. We are trying to change the mindset away from planning further out into the hinterlands and towards working with our existing resources, like our centers. And in terms of revitalization, if we plan and redevelop our town centers, and repopulate them, we feel that more economic development interests will focus on centers rather than office parks out on farmland."

Mike Siegel, executive director of the Greater Wawarsing Local Development Corporation, expressed his interest in applying for the grant in the coming weeks.

"We're going to definitely try and get [a grant] for the town," he said. "I have to still go to my board and get them to approve the general parameters of what we're going to be asking for, but my sense is that we have a number of planning issues, and we have a real need in the town to have design work done so that we can put together plans for the next stimulus round for town development. This grant ought to help us over the hump to do that."

One of the ideas Siegel discussed was the possible creation of a network of the many different parkland owners within the town — parkland which comprises approximately 26,000 acres of Wawarsing. A project which could unify the land and highlight and promote a simplified way for visitors to access the parkland could do wonders for the town's economic development possibilities, said Siegel.

The applications are due on June 30, and Beyer estimated that it would take a month or two to review the applications. The projects successfully awarded grants will likely be announced in late summer or early fall of this year.

"It's a very exciting time to be planning economic development here," said Siegel. "I know that there are a lot of issues out there in the world, but we are really in the driver's seat to kind of create our future right now, and I'm very excited about that."

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