Think about the county where you live. Picture your favorite streets, event spaces, scenery, or terrain. If you’ve lived there awhile, chances are you know what makes it great: the natural, cultural, and commercial places whose characteristics make your community special to you and your neighbors.
Your connection to them becomes part of your sense of place. You delight in taking visiting family and friends to these special sites and you lament changes that threaten or despoil them. Because you value these settings, you hope those in local office appreciate them, too, and are working to maintain, protect, and enhance them—or at least to do them no harm.
As the Policy Specialist for CASSE’s “Keep Our Counties Great” campaign, my interest in communities begins with fundamental questions about places and the policies that impact them. Do the guiding documents of the community reflect the value of conserving our special places? Or do our government representatives and county planners undervalue such places, relying primarily on economic and spatial growth to measure the quality of life?