The Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA) is a metropolitan planning organization focused primarily on transportation in a five-county region. New local road and highway projects seek NOACA approval before they can receive state and federal transportation funds.

As part of its goals and principles, NOACA "Encourages efficient, compact land use development that facilitates mobility, saves infrastructure costs, preserves environmentally sensitive and agricultural lands, and enhances the economic viability of existing communities within the region.

"To this end, the NOACA Board, in cooperation with ODOT and the planning commissions of the constituent communities and counties, will periodically review existing land use plans and zoning maps, highway and transit modeling methodologies, and economic and demographic trends to ensure that land use and transportation planning policies applied by NOACA are consistent with this objective.”

On March 16, 2007 NOACA sent out RFPs seeking a consultant to provide an economic development impact analysis for a proposed new interchange and associated development in the City of Avon, Lorain County, Ohio.

The study will look at the impact that industrial, retail, medical, residential or commercial development would have on three geographic levels: Avon; Lorain; and the entire NOACA coverage area of Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Lorain and Medina counties in Northeast Ohio. It will seek to answer how these communities’ employment and wages, tax base, and public services will be affected by Avon gaining more highway access. (This sort of transportation spending divorced from regional land-use planning is the very engine of sprawl development and population shifts. Transportation in the service of balanced growth is much more resource efficient.)

The following is the timeline for the regional economic impact study:

March 16, 2007—RFP mailed
April 10—Proposals due
April 11 to 27—Proposals reviewed/consultants selected
May 10—Contract executed
Sept. 7—Project completed

The full Avon regional impact RFP and supporting documents are available here. 

Updates
July 24—Local reaction to draft of economic development impact study