June 11, 2009
******FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE******
Contact:
Terry Cleveland, Advisory Committee Chair
Ph.: 307-315-1289
terry.cleveland@bresnan.net
Press Secretary Cara Eastwood
Office: (307) 777-7437
Cell: (307) 421-0197
BUILDING THE WYOMING WE WANT CONFERENCE WRAPS UP, RESIDENTS CHALLENGED TO ENGAGE
CASPER, Wyo. – Ninety one percent of participants at the Building the Wyoming We Want: Vision and Values conference in Casper today said that they’re confident the challenges associated with growth in Wyoming can be resolved if residents come together and work collaboratively to address them.
In an instant polling exercise, participants showed optimism about their ability to make the necessary changes at the local level to ensure that growth and development happen in a way that is consistent with Wyoming’s values.
But without active public participation, the very things that Wyoming residents care most about could be lost, advisory board chairman Terry Cleveland said.
“Change is going to happen, whether we’re ready for it or not,” he said. “We need a process to engage the sleeping giant, and get the public actively involved in deciding the state’s future.”
At the conference this week, Dee Allsop, a nationally-recognized opinion researcher, presented the findings of a statewide values survey that indicated Wyoming residents think that they, not the government, are the ones who should guide the state’s growth going forward. The findings indicated that access to the outdoors and the state’s safe, friendly communities were the most important to residents when asked what they value the most highly about living here.
The Governor challenged participants to take charge and to act so that the things they value in Wyoming don’t slowly disappear.
“We’re ready to roll up our sleeves and help, but the next step is yours,” he said.
In the final session of the two-day forum, Cleveland and Allsop joined State Auditor Rita Meyer and Gov. Dave Freudenthal in responding to questions about how the initiative will move forward.
The public-private partnership is currently working on developing a ‘toolkit’ of resources that will have two purposes. One is to help local officials understand the tools available to them to address growth-related challenges. The other purpose is to help communities develop their vision for the future and to devise strategies to implement that vision. A key resource is the power of GIS technology, which can create visual images of future growth scenarios so people can
see how their communities might look in the future, depending on how they choose to grow.
Alan Matheson, CEO of Envision Utah, explained how that initiative uses GIS modeling with great success. In public meetings, Envision Utah helps communities generate several different growth scenarios and then after voting on those, the scenarios are used to help guide development going forward.
Following the January 2008 Building the Wyoming We Want conference, the public showed great enthusiasm for creating an initiative similar to Envision Utah in Wyoming. Cleveland said that the Wyoming initiative will likely model its activities after the Utah organization and may even contract with Envision Utah for a pilot project.
“We’re looking for a few communities to come forward and volunteer to test drive this process,” Cleveland said. “We’re hoping to hear from communities around the state who think that this might help them get a handle on some of the challenges they face in the future.”
The initiative will provide resources and help in any way it can, the Governor said, but it will not make decisions for communities.
“We’re developing a tool box, not a decision box,” he said. “The decision about how a community wants to grow will not come from us and it will not come from this initiative. The whole reason this works is because it comes from the people themselves.”
The stakes are high, and the Governor encouraged participants to take the message home to their communities that it is no longer enough to sit on the sidelines and watch. He said that if you care about Wyoming’s future, you must step into the arena.
“One of the challenges is that in Wyoming, we all have our opinions about how things should be, but we also want to just let it go and assume that someone is going to take care of it for us. The problem is that the consequence of letting it go and not getting involved is that we sacrifice all the things that we love,” he said.
To learn more about the Building the Wyoming We Want initiative,
visit: www.buildingwyoming.com.
