Texas Coastal Zone Scenic Guidelines

The goal of The Texas Coastal Zone Scenic Guidelines Handbook is to identify means to apply land use guidelines in the protection and management of coastal scenic resources for the Texas Coastal Zone. Its purpose is to develop and recommend land use and zoning procedures for protecting the scenic beauty of the coast and increase ways for people to enjoy the scenic treasures of the coast and the marine environment. The guidelines handbook first identifies scenic preferences of Texas residents and visitors to the coastal zone using a photographic preference test of typical scenic examples. These examples were selected after previous research efforts identified the basic scenic character types found on the Texas Coast. These basic scenic character types are: beaches, salt marshes/mudflats, coastal grasslands, estuaries, lagoons, urbanized beaches, residential coastal development, coastal commercial developments and industrial sites (Mills et al. 2005). The second major aspect of this document is to illustrate a means of assessing the scenic quality of the coastline by applying the results of the preference survey to case study examples. The limitation of this handbook is that it is not a comprehensive scenic inventory and assessment study, but rather a selective demonstration using these case study examples. Finally, this handbook illustrates how specific land use measures can be applied at the local, site specific level to protect and enhance the scenic resources of the Texas coast. These design suggestions can be readily adopted into zoning and other protective measures through local code revisions and procedural changes of the project site review process by local planning boards.