Infrastructure and Environmental Assessment Study

The “Infrastructure” Study produced by the firm Carter & Burgess, Inc. compiled an inventory of selected public and private infrastructure, as well as environmental features in the State, in order to establish baseline information and the “current situation” for the project. New research into the State’s infrastructure and environmental conditions would have required more time and resources than were available to the project. Instead, the Infrastructure study focused on gathering and assimilating information and reports that were already “on the shelf.”

The result was a report in ten volumes (a report and appendix volume for each county and a state summary and appendix) encompassing more than one thousand pages. The study collected information from hundreds of documents and produced perhaps the most comprehensive look at the State’s infrastructure and environmental features ever attempted. It illuminated many issues related to the infrastructure and our environmental resources down to the district level.

The study also highlighted many gaps in information and inconsistencies in the way information about the infrastructure and environment are processed. In particular, the study found information distinguishing the visitor impacts from resident impacts to be very scarce. This ultimately placed a higher burden on the project’s modeling effort to develop innovative ways to surmount the lack of hard data on visitor use of the State’s resources.