It is vitally important that Connecticut, as a small state, balances development pressures with the need to preserve its natural resources and provide spaces where people can escape urban environments and enjoy reinvigorating walks in the woods.

That is why the Open Space Grant program, launched in 1998, has continued to enjoy bipartisan political support through good times and bad. The program uses state grants to leverage local, federal and nonprofit funding to purchase tracts of undeveloped land, often in environmentally sensitive areas, and keep them in their natural state for perpetuity.

The goal of the program is to preserve 21 percent of the land in Connecticut, about 673,000 acres, by 2023. To date, Connecticut has 500,000 acres designated for open space preservation, about 75 percent of goal.

Ranging from 2.8 acres in Fairfield to 185 acres in the northwest corner of Waterford, the recent awarding of $4.7 million in grants will protect from development another 1,170 acres in 17 communities. A $4,000 per-acre state investment, it is quite a bargain.

Interestingly, two of the open-space plans in this area that were awarded grants began as an effort to assure that a natural “greenway” was maintained adjacent to the planned extension of Route 11. While the state Department of Transportation this year dropped the Route 11 completion project from its plans, the greenway effort nets the region important preservation sites in the recent round of grants.

The 185-acre Silver Falls Community Forest in northwest Waterford, for which the state awarded a $365,000 grant, will help maintain the quality of water feeding into the Niantic River watershed. Another 33 acres preserved in East Lyme, just north of the Interstate 95/395 interchange where an extended Route 11 was to connect, is adjacent to the 166-acre Gurley Brook Preserve and part of the Niantic River watershed. That effort received a $305,500 grant. Both were originally greenway initiatives.

The Department of Energy and Environmental Protection also awarded a $260,000 grant to add 82.5 acres in Lyme to the Hawthorne Preserve maintained by the Lyme Land Conservation Trust Inc.

Plaudits to elected leaders for maintaining this program and to local conservation advocates for putting together the proposals that make good use of the grants locally.