Growth discussion must begin in communities

Posted by Wyoming Real Estate

January 14, 2008

CASPER, Wyo. - Gov. Dave Freudenthal encouraged participants at the “Building the Wyoming We Want” Conference to return home with the message that they can control their future.

“This is an amazing gathering of people who care about Wyoming. Go back to your communities and begin talking today about what you want your town to look like.”

The two-day meeting concluded on Friday, Jan. 11 after multiple panel discussions that focused on tools and ideas that attendees could take back to their towns, cities and counties.

“Think about the future based on the values of the people you’re trying to affect,” Freudenthal said in his closing address. “This starts with you, but you can’t be expected to do it alone. We have limited cities’ and counties’ access to revenues in this state so financially, and simply as an institutional matter, you can’t do it alone. The governor can support it and support it a lot, but we need to think a little about what ‘it’ is.”

In discussions on the final day of the event, state and regional experts on water and planning described how communities can get residents involved in thinking about their collective future.

“It’s not a project, it’s a process,” said Bob Grow of Envision Utah, a strategic quality growth partnership based in Salt Lake City. “First, you have to establish a common understanding of where you are and what you can do. You need to talk about your GIS systems, your transportation models and your land databases. You have to get stakeholders together and begin a process of thinking through scenarios with their various outcomes.”

Anne McKinnon of the Wyoming Water Development Commission said, “We need to create more choices for people - choices that reflect the costs and the benefits that are really there. We need to figure out how to encourage good development and harvest the energy of growth and harness it for the good.”

Effective planning tools can be designed for any size of community - from major metropolitan areas to small, rural towns, said Luther Propst of the Sonoran Institute.

“It starts with visualizing, understanding the community’s values and defining community character,” Propst said. “You also have to define what your region is, which can be a major challenge. Usually it does not fall along the county boundaries.”

A critical early step is to be sure that towns and counties know the planning tools that are already available to them, said Ellen Hanak of the Public Policy Institute of California.

“There are probably more tools at your disposal than you realize,” she said.

The experts agreed that discussions on how to begin local planning efforts should employ a ‘carrot and stick approach’ to convince skeptics that planning is a tool to preserve the value of private property.

While many in attendance spoke favorably of Wyoming beginning an effort similar to Envision Utah, that approach would take months or years to get started.

“That’s a lot of time to let water pass under the bridge and we’ve got a lot of work to do,” said moderator Ryan Lance, deputy chief of staff to Gov. Freudenthal. “We know what the box looks like - the question is how are we going to fill it up?”

Freudenthal cautioned that any community planning effort in Wyoming should not be linked to a particular project or an elected position.

“This is too important an effort to tie to the term of anyone in office,” he said. “What we really need is for people to articulate their values and act on them. This can’t be the governor’s vision but it should be yours, on the community level.”

Former Maryland Governor Parris Glendening of the Governor’s Institute on Community Design called the conference “extraordinarily successful.”

“I think this may even serve as a new model for us,” Glendening said. “We’ve been working with states that already ‘get it’ but in Wyoming, it seems to be about how to make this a public issue. I have been incredibly impressed with the turnout and the level of interest. People have been attentive, and have asked great questions. The question now is, where do we go from here?”

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