The Washington County Land Use Monitor

The Washington County landscape is changing rapidly as the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area expands into outlying regions. Regional populations are increasing, as is the demand for housing, causing more and more open spaces to be converted into residential developments and commercial centers. The Metropolitan Council has mandated that each city and town draw up plans for how they will accommodate their share of projected population growth through the year 2020. Do you know what these plans have in store for your neighborhood or other places of interest in Washington County?

This website was created to provide citizens such as yourself with the ability to see how Washington County may change if local governments follow the land use plans they have proposed. These plans are public information, but most people do not have the proper tools to view them or put them in a useful context with other information relevant to land use planning. This interactive mapping website allows anyone with Internet access to visually compare:

  • Planned land use by 2020, developed by Washington Co. cities & towns and approved by the Met. Council
  • Recent land use, based on 2000 aerial photo analyses
  • Aerial photography from 1991
  • Currently protected lands within the Regional Park System
  • Regionally Significant Ecological Areas, as designated by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources

By providing easy access to land use planning information over the Internet, we hope that citizens such as yourself will become better informed about the forces of change acting on the natural landscape around you, and that you will become more effective participants in the democratic process of developing local land use planning strategies.

Start the Interactive Map

Download Informative Maps of
Washington County

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