National Association of Counties * Washington, DC            Vol. 30, No. 20 * October 26, 1998

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A Little Neighborliness Can Go a Long Way

California’s Great Central Valley is 450 miles long and only 50 miles wide, stretching from Redding through Sacramento to Bakersfield. It has some of the world’s most fertile farmland, where 250 different crops worth more than $14 billion are produced annually.

The valley encompasses 18 counties and 96 cities and is currently home to six million people. The population is expected to more than double in the next 40 years — potentially threatening the region’s viability.

To begin charting the region’s future, people living and working in the Central Valley organized a major conference, with help from the Joint Center for Sustainable Communities, to discuss local strategies for balancing population growth and economic development with agricultural preservation and environmental protection.

A unique partnership between NACo and the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the Joint Center works to encourage county/city and regional partnerships to address multi-jurisdictional challenges.

The Joint Center is working with communities across the country to serve as models for sustainability on a wide range of issues including transportation investment, urban design, environmental protection, affordable housing and energy use.

With Joint Center support, the conference, "Our Place in the World: New Thinking for a Big Valley," was held in Sacramento earlier this year, uniting hundreds of business executives, farmers, elected leaders, government officials, educators and others.

Workshops during the meeting focused on economic cluster analysis, the health of the water in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, preparing students for ever-increasing technological workplaces, incentives for landowners to keep land in agricultural production and ways to build livable communities.

The conference illustrated that building successful communities and a globally competitive economy requires that the Central Valley plan its future as a region comprised of distinct communities, linked by common resources, a shared heritage and many opportunities.

Over the next several months, the Joint Center will help bring together a small group of the region’s local elected leaders to discuss the role they can play in addressing the conference’s top-two rated needs — resource/farmland protection and better K–12 education.

Joint Center supports Hamilton County/Cincinnati partnership
On June 12, Hamilton County and the City of Cincinnati announced key actions that need to be taken to assure the region’s air, land and water quality for generations to come. The recommendations are the result of a comprehensive two-year environmental assessment process, called the Hamilton County Environmental Priorities Project (HCEPP). Among the recommended actions are:

• establishing a sustainable development initiative that addresses economic development, environmental quality, and neighborhood equity in the region
• establishing an environmental center for outreach and education
• organizing a county/city collaborative action forum that brings together all players to promote environmental stewardship and collaborative planning
• improving air quality impacted by mobile sources
• minimizing contaminated water from wet weather run-off; and
• increasing environmental enforcement of dumping and littering regulations.

To help implement these action initiatives, local officials from Hamilton County and Cincinnati are looking to the Joint Center for assistance. As a first step toward more full-scale implementation, 200 representatives from local government, business, and citizen groups convened for a full-day workshop Oct. 16 to develop sustainability principles to guide public decisions affecting land use, infrastructure investments, and economic development. The Joint Center provided financial and technical support for this workshop.

(County Services News was written by Kelly Schulman, research associate for the Joint Center on Sustainable Communities.)