Keith Bergthold, a brainy guy who is second in charge of Fresno's municipal planning and development department, has been talking to people throughout the San Joaquin Valley about the importance of collaborative regional planning.

By Bergthold's count, he has made 30 presentations to city, county and Council of Government boards during the past five months -- each time outlining growth scenarios for our region. I've seen his thought-provoking talk and now I'm sharing it with Bee readers.

It's long. Probably the longest blog item in fresnobee.com history. It has footnotes. It's not presented in the most reader-friendly-format. But it's worth wading through, and I am looking forward to your comments.

Here it is:

Fearfully and Wonderfully in the Making (1)

Exploring Some of the Treasures, Challenges, and Possibilities of the San Joaquin Valley

Article by Keith Bergthold

The San Joaquin Valley must be a gift from God, like that of children, valuable beyond measure and full of pleasure, pain, possibility, and paradox. Both children and valleys are living things constantly in need of accountability and encouragement to simultaneously accomplish what can seem contradictory goals, such as forming a unique identity, learning from and preserving the best of the past, and assimilating and applying contemporary wisdom. We also ask both children and valleys to grow strong, be productive, become good examples, and strive to make meaningful contributions to a better future for everyone. Unfortunately, many of these important attributes of healthy growth and well being are all too frequently undermined by patterns of complacency, neglect, and sometimes even intentional abuse that sow seeds of doubt about self-worth and the potential for success – for both children and valleys.

Our Valley can be hot, smoggy, and intolerant, and sometimes very cold and foggy. But after a hard early spring rain the dramatic scope of its beauty and magnificence are magically revealed. Green fields of varying shades and sizes hopscotch as-far-as-the-eye-can-see, running under crisp blue skies to the base of snowy mountain peaks. It is a monumental sight, a cross-section of an expansive geography more than 250 miles long and 50-80 miles wide bounded by the Sierra-Nevada foothills on the east, the Diablo and
Coastal Ranges on the west, the Tehachapi Mountains on the south, and the lower Sacramento Valley on the north. The shape and position of the Valley make it one of earth’s most prominent features in photographs taken from satellites and space orbiters. The San Joaquin Valley is the wide part of the larger Central Valley of California that connects the sprawling metropolises of the Los Angeles Basin to the south with those of the San Francisco Bay Area in the north.

By all accounts our great Valley is the best endowed and most productive garden on the planet, ironically situated in one of the fastest urbanizing regions of California. Our small farmers and big growers still manage each year to harvest and export healthy, nutritious food and high quality fiber in larger quantities than most entire countries produce. But we are home not only to an enviable combination and abundance of crops. We are also home to a rich variety of people, cultures, traditions, and talents, who make up the burgeoning populations of spreading metropolises such as Fresno-Clovis, Bakersfield, Stockton,
Modesto, Visalia, and Merced. The Valley population grew by more than 500,000 people in the past six years alone.
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1 The title of this article invokes several key words from Psalm 139:14 in an attempt to extend the
psalmist’s claim of God’s high value and esteem for humankind to an irreplaceable valley with superlative
possibilities.
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Our nearly four million microcosm of humanity with its mixture of cuisines, customs, and world views now rivals the diversity any major U.S. or world city, and is expected to expand to more than nine million Valley residents by 2050, most of which is projected to result from births.

The San Joaquin Valley can comfortably claim to be the true heartland of our nation’s most populous, dynamic, and diverse state. As writer Gerald Haslam aptly notes in Another California. . . A Real One (2), our Valley “is the real Golden State and the gold here is called opportunity." The physical possibilities for growing globally important food and cities are of epic proportion. Much less than 10% of the approximate 20,000 square miles of our eight-county “enclosed prairie” is now built upon. We are a region with extraordinary economic and strategic potential. While farming presently rules the land, its sovereignty is being relentlessly eroded by relatively low-density residential developments extending out in all directions to form our emerging and merging metro areas. Our cities are beginning to grow together, inter-connected by ever widening swaths of big box stores, auto malls, commercial strips, parking lots, express hotels, mini-mart
gas stations, fast food restaurants, distribution warehouses, office parks, parking lots, and more of the same
over and over again at a pace that prospectively leaves our Valley looking little different in 100 years than Southern California does today.

Amazingly, when you drive along our rural roads attractive and worthwhile things of a bygone era begin to appear that are not readily apparent from the new freeway vistas.These are resilient reminders, the more hidden treasures of the Valley’s small town heritage and family farms. Many genuinely quaint, wonderful and walkable downtowns with century old facades and family merchants still open doors for business each day.
The occasional Victorian framed farm homestead, long ago absorbed into the neighborhood of one of our cities or rural communities is there to be discovered. Some are alongside a mansion or cottage of a town founder.

Others are down the street from the town’s first library, fraternal hall, or church. Beautiful old farm houses with gabled roofs and sweeping porches near antique barns with weather vanes, wooden water towers,
surrounded by orchards and working fields still randomly dot the county roads, as do the fruit stands of new Americans who tediously tend nearby rows of strawberries, blackberries, and assortments of vegetables on our more recent versions of the family farm. Weathered wood tool sheds, abandoned harvest processing canopies, the infrequent rusted tractors and wagons, lonely roadside animal loading shoots, a Grange building here, a one-room school house there, all raise the quiet voices of our land-based history
and fortunes. All have a distinct frontier farming flavor that resemble and strongly resonate a past like the rural landscapes and other valley scenes captured in the art assembled by Heath Schenker (3).

So much worthy of keeping, and so much pressure to wipe the slate clean to make more room for the latest real estate market fashions. Our fertile and very well located Valley has assembled many treasures that come packaged with very complex challenges. We have the distinct opportunity and risks associated with using our Valley’s significant gifts to accommodate the demands and character of California’s renowned and pervasive growth. We have unparalleled natural
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2 Architecture, Ethnicity and Historic Landscapes of California’s San Joaquin Valley, City of Fresno
Planning and Development Department, 2008
3 Picturing California’s Other Landscape: The Great Central Valley, Haggin Museum (Corporate Author),
Heath Schenker (Editor) 1999.
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and human-made landscapes with native stewardship legacies presaging frontier family farming that has now morphed predominantly into large scale agri-business that together form a fragile web of land, resources, communities, and heritage architecture we dearly prize and yet concurrently place in the gobbling path of ubiquitous suburbanization. We have desperate poverty and debilitating environmental issues that are not mitigated by current modes of travel and trends of development.

We are indelibly linked, like the rest of our country, to a world changing faster and becoming less hospitable for America and the American lifestyle than anyone could have imagined just a few decades ago.
So! Here stands the San Joaquin Valley - Uniquely blessed by nature, location, heritage, and inhabitants – A globally relevant region, hosting an enviable array of treasures with extraordinary possibilities and daunting challenges - Now stressed by current development practices and forces of change both within and beyond our control - yelling loudly, if you listen, for thoughtful attention and policies, asking to be stewarded and cared for – asking to be guided to a lasting future, one honoring an important past and productive present, one deserving of an authentic potential to contribute to a better world.

Regional Challenges . . . What’s Our Valley Up Against?

The major challenges we face are as big as our Valley, are approaching critical crisis stages, and must be articulated clearly and often to maintain a complete picture of the realities that have to be changed for any shared aspirations to gain a foothold. Deadly air pollution is poisoning residents of the Valley, forcing many families to flee and even more with other choices to not consider moving here in the first place. Bad air is
currently costing an estimated $3.3 billion annually in added expenses for medical care, premature deaths, lost work, and school absences (4). Our geophysical bathtub-shaped Valley traps smoggy ozone and airborne particulates from dirty engines and other sources operating here and drifting in from other regions, placing us in an odd rivalry with an exponentially more urbanized Los Angeles for the ranking of most polluted air in the United States (5).

Conflicting demands for land and water resources manifest in a zero-sum contest
between spreading cities and agricultural uses. Our regional population growth and food production capacities are on a collision course, competing head-to-head for the same land and water. Our Valley has been leading the state in recent trends of increasing conversion of prime farmland to urban uses (6).

Prevalent urban development and agri-business practices need lots of land and water, and there is simply a finite amount of each. Fatefully, the Valley forefathers founded their towns on the best farm land near or
accessible to the most plentiful water. As we expand our cities from these original town sites we necessarily consume both resources to the detriment of sustainable agriculture.

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4 Barbara Anderson, Russell Clemings & Mark Grossi, “Fighting for Air,” Fresno Bee, December 16, 2007,
http://www.fresnobee.com/868/story/263215.html, (accessed January 23, 2008).
5 “State of the Air: 2007: Best and Worst Cities,” American Lung Association, 2007,
http://lungaction.org/reports/sota07_cities.html, (accessed January 23, 2008).
6 California Farmland Conversion Report, CA Dept of Conservation, December 2006.
http://www.conservation.ca.gov/dlrp/fmmp/pubs/2002-2004/FCR/Documents/FCR_02-04_intro.pdf
(accessed January 23, 2008).
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Economic disparity and debilitating poverty currently threaten increasing numbers of our residents and the health of social and economic conditions in the future. The U.S. Census Bureau issued a report in 2007, which found that six San Joaquin Valley counties had the highest percentage of residents living below the federal poverty line in 2006. The report also stated the same six counties were among the 52 counties with the highest poverty rate in the U.S. “If the San Joaquin Valley were to become a new state in the
country, we would rank last or second to last in per capita income,” said state Assembly Member Juan Arambula, D-Fresno. “I think the figures show that our people are worse off even than those in the Appalachians.” (7)

Low literacy, low educational attainment, and low workforce skills add to the persistence of our poverty and are formidable barriers to attracting and growing world class companies and industries requiring educated and skilled workers. San Joaquin Valley counties have lower percentages of students completing college prep courses and taking college entrance exams than the rest of California (8).

Because our region appears to be a net exporter of the few college graduates raised here and those who pass through, it is also quite difficult to establish and grow entrepreneurial knowledge-based and creative
economy businesses that organically build upon local and regional networks of likeminded folks. As a result of these circumstances, we are inadvertently but systematically shunning significant potential investments that could raise individual and family incomes, pull many permanently out of poverty, and attract well educated young people to the region who might seek their life’s economic ambitions here. Anachronistic local jurisdictional boundaries, and related political and fiscal models continue to thwart larger goals and strategies, and the mutual cooperative action drastically needed now to effectively address crisis level regional challenges.

Across our Valley we can still be heard to argue passionately from our silos for unilateral and
inviolable local government autonomy in the face of intractable issues with no local solutions. We compete with each other for sales tax generators rather than collaborating to build globally competitive regional infrastructure and enterprises that will measurably benefit all. We nod approvingly with politically correct manners when newsworthy regional ideas are publicly vetted, while exercising our local veto authority to preserve narrower self-interests. Global challenges will not reward these provincial attitudes much
longer.

Global Challenges . . . What’s Our Country Up Against?

Needless to say, the destiny of our Valley is also inextricably tied to trends worldwide that portend seismic shifts over the next 30 to 50 years. There is no automatic bequest or inheritance of strength from our tradition of hard earned national prosperity. Little about the future can be taken for granted, assumed, or inferred. The world will be utterly different going forward. America’s dominance in many arenas is now being or soon will

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7 Brad Branan, “Six San Joaquin Valley counties have the highest poverty rates in California, and among
the highest rates in the country, new census figures show.” The Fresno Bee, August 29, 2007.
http://www.99to5.com/?p=41 (accessed January 23, 2008).
8 California Partnership for the San Joaquin Valley, K12 Public Education Work Group Report.
www.bth.ca.gov/capartnership/pdf/K-12Education.pdf (accessed January 23, 2008).
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be challenged in every way imaginable. The speed and scale of the growth and
development of Asia is unprecedented. Emerging 21st century global economic giants like
China and India are slumbering no more and have impressive gains and goals that will
impact our daily lives forever more.

More new international economic powerhouses are coming on the scene in Southeast Asia, South America, Europe, the Middle East and in the former Soviet Union. The world economic power structure is rebalancing right before our eyes, just as America’s aging accelerates, both of people and infrastructure, and we
retire our most skillful and competitive of generations. Even if these new players take a breather soon, their surging economies are ushering in changes to all the rules of the economic game as we have known it. Three major and seemingly irreversible trends, not to mention the now well documented threat of global warming, are noted below that the whole San Joaquin Valley must acknowledge and address together for us to sustain and succeed in the future. The demise of U.S. global economic superiority appears all but certain; it is just a matter of time (9).

The BRICs, Brazil, Russia, India and China, are now projected by Goldman Sachs to achieve greater combined economic output than the total of Japan, the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, and Italy (the G-6) by 2039, and China is forecasted to pass the U.S as the world’s largest economy by 2041. These are polar ice cap melting magnitude predicaments that will soundly curb the influence we are used to
America asserting around the globe. Yet, according to John Kao, author and consultant to companies and countries on global innovation, we Americans largely remain complacent about losing our competitive edge. We must motivate and move ourselves to a stronger sense of informed global reality. Our real hope is to rediscover our roles and capacities as innovators for the world. Otherwise we slip to the footnotes and anecdotes of world economic history (10).

Global growth is repricing the planet’s resources, escalating the costs for all goods and services beyond our usual control or ability to manage them as we have in the past. Commodity-based inflation is in an incessant upsurge pushed by steeply rising consumption outside the U.S. China alone already consumes more grain, meat, coal, and steel than the U.S., and at current income growth rates and life style changes which emulate American norms, the Chinese economy will consume 99 million barrels of oil per day by 2031. The whole world only uses 84 million barrels of oil per day now (11). The obvious implications are that the American life style cannot be replicated worldwide nor supported by the natural capacities of the earth. Something has to give, the planet, the price, innovation, or us.

The rapid aging of America will create serious and enduring fiscal, tax, and economic competitiveness problems for the U.S. We are getting old and staying old longer than we ever anticipated we would. In 1950 there were 16 workers for each Social Security beneficiary.

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9 Parag Khanna, “Waving Goodbye to Hegemony,” Cover Story New York Times Magazine, January 27,
2008, http://www.paragkhanna.com/2008/01/waving_goodbye_to_hegemony.html, (accessed February 4,
2008).
10 John Kao, Innovation Nation: How America Is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why It Matters, and What
We Can Do to Get It Back, New York, Free Press, 2007.
11 Lester R. Brown, Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, New York,
Norton, 2006
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In 2000 the ratio was 3.4, and by 2030 there will barely be two workers for each retiree. The number of Americans 65 and older will double as a percent of total U.S population between now and 2030, all hoping to defy gravity and be generously supported by a smaller relative public and private sector workforce that appears to be less educated, skilled and motivated than those retiring. To keep all the promises of never
ending pensions and health care may require a near doubling of taxes upon our children and grandchildren. Some call it “fiscal child abuse.” (12)

City, county, state, and federal budgets will likely be in extended crisis and distress, forced to slash a wide range of important benefits, services, and infrastructure investments, substantially raise taxes
and/or borrow beyond repayment capacities. These responses are all prescriptions for serious loss of competitive advantage in a treacherous global economy just when America will need it most.

What We Can Do: Seize Our Regional Possibilities - Use the Power of Cooperation

To briefly summarize the perspectives offered above: Fast paced, sprawling, and cumulatively degradative growth gravely challenges our Valley’s treasures and is dangerously fouling our air. Fragmented and conflicting goals, policies, anachronistic local jurisdictional boundaries, fiscal models, and governance practices still conspire to chill progress toward the meaningful collaboration, innovation, and investment required to elevate and achieve widespread education and skill development, heritage preservation, environmental quality and resource conservation, sustainable food production systems, human health and equity of developmental opportunities, and the creation of globally competitive economic advantage for the San Joaquin Valley as a whole.

Despite all the challenges, there is reason now for hope about our Valley’s prospects. Public, private and philanthropic investors are picking up the signals of our positive turn. Evidence of our willingness to grapple with and to model regional change is readily visible in the advent of the eight-county Regional Blueprint Planning Program, and the California Partnership for the San Joaquin Valley. The Regional Blueprint is designed to be an on-going framework for collaboration among regional agencies, local governments
and state agencies to promote mobility, housing and transportation choices, access to better jobs, healthy communities, and a thriving economy. Each of the eight counties has a blueprint planning process that will be merged into a Valley-wide vision and plan for 2050 (13).

The California Partnership was established in 2006 by our Governor to improve the economic, social, and environmental quality of life of the San Joaquin Valley. “The Partnership brings together public and private leadership to drive action with public accountability for outcomes to realize the vision of the San Joaquin Valley as California’s 21st Century Opportunity.“ (14)

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12 Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns, The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know
About America’s Economic Future, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2005.
13 “California Regional Blueprint Planning Program,” California Department of Transportation, 2007,
www.calblueprint.dot.ca.gov, (accessed January 23, 2008).
14 “California Partnership for the San Joaquin Valley: Partnership Overview,” 2007,
http://www.sjvpartnership.org/map_overview.php?static_page_id=6&sc_id=4 (accessed January 24, 2008).
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The Regional Blueprint and California Partnership are hopeful and visionary efforts that also require new forms of accountability, commitment, and vigilance to bring about and hold their long-term strategic value for our Valley. In order for there to be meaningful regional results, we must all see ourselves as the authors and implementers of our visions and plans. We must be the people we are waiting for to define and solve our mutual problems and secure our shared future. We must be willing to collectively adopt regional
plans and consistently implement them at the local level. If we choose to remain autonomous and compete against each other, or look to others to help us or save us from ourselves - we and future generations in our Valley are doomed.

In this regard, these two new and necessary regional initiatives are testing the deep waters of local jurisdictional autonomy with broad-based regional planning and the tempting opportunities of regional cooperation like never before. In a short time they are spawning and emboldening numerous other collaborative efforts like the San Joaquin Valley Affordable Communities Initiative, the San Joaquin Valley Clean Energy Organization, the San Joaquin Valley Housing Trust, the Metro Rural Loop in Fresno, Madera, Tulare, and Kings Counties, and the Model Farmland Preservation Study, to name just a few. Related SMART and GREEN efforts like Fresno’s Green Strategy, the Southeast Growth Area (SEGA) Plan, a national Vernacular Architecture Forum to be held in our region, and many other New Urbanist and historic preservation efforts across the Valley, all attest to the emergence of a fragile but real regional identity, the shared sense of our Valley’s treasures, and a new spirit of mutual possibilities we can
explore by working together.

Of particular significance is Fresno’s Southeast Growth Area (SEGA) Plan, being drafted by Peter Calthorpe. SEGA is a 14 square mile growth area of Fresno just south of the City of Clovis and just west of the City of Sanger still predominantly agricultural and rural. Thinking longer-term, SEGA should represent the permanent eastern boundary to ultimately contain the Fresno-Clovis metropolitan area. The focus in planning SEGA is being placed on designing and recommending SMART, GREEN, New Urbanist
performance-based land use, transportation, infrastructure, and building systems tested by Calthorpe in other regions and countries. These thoughtful systems when employed in our Valley through SEGA will sustainably reduce air pollution, green house gases, energy and water consumption, while creating enjoyable compact, transit-oriented, and walkable town centers and neighborhood villages connected by open spaces and trails that integrate and honor historic landscapes, rural lifestyles, agriculture, cultural and
natural features.

It’s a tall order, but Peter Calthorpe and local-regional partners are up to the task, and Fresno is clearly showing it is ready to embark on a more sustainable future based upon its sizable funding investment, interagency partnership, and community outreach for the SEGA plan formulation process.

Metro Rural Loop -- A Design Metaphor for Regional Cooperation (15)

Building on the momentum of nascent regional points of view and emerging regional planning, some of us decided to go beyond the Blueprint planning period of 2050 and look out 100 years to capture what might be thought of as the ultimate magnitude of the growth facing our part of the Valley. We hoped this might startle allies and antagonists alike into common action to address our regional and global challenges, and move them to help make the Regional Blueprint and the California Partnership strategic tools for lasting regional results.

From preliminary studies conducted for our four county subregional focus area (Fresno, Madera, Tulare, and Kings Counties) using California Department of Finance projections for 2050 – regional economic planning consultants forecasted a breathtaking year 2110 low estimate of 6.6 million people (1.0% annual
compound growth from 2050), and an unnerving high estimate of 11.9 million people in 2110 (2.0 % annual compound growth from 2050). The growth anticipated from our 2007 base of 1.6 million people, in either scenario, is staggering, sobering, and beginning to appropriately startle. Where will people work? How will people get to work? How and where will they live? How can we sustain agriculture? How can there possibly be enough water and clean air? How can we effectively compete with China and India? How can we prosper while the U.S. generally struggles?

We began to imagine a spatial design or pictorial image of an integrated system of transportation and land uses that might supply the physical framework and infrastructure layout required to artfully manage our modern paradox in the Valley: Conserving resources, agriculture, health, and heritage while encouraging investment, economic growth, world class cities, and broad-based opportunity. More particularly, we drew a
conceptual geo-graphic for an innovative Metro Rural Loop.

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15 Refer to http://midaswebtech.com/projects/sjv/seed_grant_list.php and Planning Resource Postings
http://www.fresno.gov/Government/DepartmentDirectory/PlanningandDevelopment/Planning/Ongoing+Pl
anning+Studies.htm
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Metro Rural Loop is conceived as a system of region-connecting, high-capacity, multimodal transportation corridors supported by regional land use policies that lead the development of transit-oriented bands and nodes of global quality industry, commerce, residential, public, and recreational open spaces along corridors, while protecting significant amounts of farmland for long-term food production.

Metro Rural Loop transportation corridors would offer a transit-focused combination of light-rail, goods
movement rail, rapid buses, dedicated truck lanes, and more that sustain regional mobility. SMART, compact, walkable New Urbanist centers and villages bounded and interconnected by urban forests and regional trails would be designed to permanently protect and integrate strategic and community agriculture, environmental and habitat lands, historic landscapes, neighborhoods, and buildings, and conserve water and energy while reducing carbon emissions and increasing air quality. All would be managed ollaboratively through a network of public-private partnerships dedicated to sustainable, high-quality, urban and regional development, cooperation, and competitiveness.

For example, if Fresno, Madera, Tulare, and Kings Counties crafted a four-county regional identity, the Metro Rural Loop might resemble the following spatial concept. On the conceptual map above there are approximately 2,300 square miles within the Metro Rural Loop, 300 of which are now estimated to be urban and suburban. If we can collectively direct new SMART urban growth to 1 to 1 1/2 mile-wide bands along and
within major urban centers adjoining and connected by the multi-modal transportation corridors - and produce average densities of 10,000 people per square mile versus the current average of just over 4,000 people per square mile – we can house an additional eight (8) million residents and still retain and protect more than 1,200 square miles of strategic and community agriculture, environmental and habitat lands, and historic landscapes within the Metro Rural Loop.

Otherwise, projected growth will consume all 2,300 square miles over the next 100 years. The goal is to not only protect strategic lands internal to corridor and spoke boundaries, but external as well, using the Metro Rural Loop boundary design and adopted regional land use policies as the ultimate tools to define and permanently protect irreplaceable resources. The comprehensive thrust of the Metro Rural Loop concept targets the integrated achievement of growth and conservation goals in a regional framework (16).

Strategic Land Protection

The Metro Rural Loop concept calls for the adoption and maintenance of a new urban-rural regional spatial design plan for the south San Joaquin Valley of permanent urban land use boundaries that protect strategic and community agriculture, environmental, habitat, and resource lands, and historic landscapes. Current
plans do not provide this protection.

Water Policy and Management

Our four-county focus area can barely add one million folks, let alone eight million, with current urban water consumption, waste, and management practices, and still irrigate important farmland even using new water
technologies. The Metro Rural Loop concept calls for new water and other resource development and use policies that substantially reduce average per-person urban consumption – all part of a companion focus upon SMART growth as described below.

Smart Growth

The Metro Rural Loop as conceptualized is the ultimate Mixed-Use Transit Oriented Development (TOD) for the future – one with hundreds of connected miles of high design/higher density, GREEN, compact, walkable, mixed-use, transitoriented development supporting clean, rail-based people and goods movement, Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) , and the local transit systems required for substantial reductions in
the growth of all polluting emissions, green house gases, vehicle miles traveled, energy, water, and other natural resource consumption.

Constituency Building

The Metro Rural Loop concept requires a level of community and regional cooperation, and organization, which we believe can only be accomplished in a network of public-private partnerships dedicated to sustainable, high-quality, urban and regional development, cooperation, and competitiveness. A joint powers authority of some type among participating jurisdictions is mandatory, however, this must be
energized and sustained by a more integrative and inclusive base network of constituents – one with a mutuality of community, business, environmental, and government interests.
The Strategy

Through marriage and allegiance to the Regional Blueprint principles and strategy, and assisted by a Seed Grant from the California Partnership for the San Joaquin Valley, we birthed the Metro Rural Loop Corridor Preservation Feasibility Committee and Study.

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16 Editorial, “Good planning crucial to Valley's future quality of life,” Fresno Bee, January 6, 2008.
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The study components noted above are progressing and constitute a critical part of Regional Blueprint alternative future scenario analyses. We are working diligently to meet quarterly in the cities and county seats with all staff and elected bodies in the four counties and among the 30 municipal jurisdictions to get and keep all of us in “the loop.”

We are meeting with constituent leaders from all sectors to build the base needed for a strong public-private supporting partnership network. Once the study tasks are completed in 2008 – and assuming a broad consensus has been established about the value of preserving Metro Rural Loop corridor options and serious consideration is being given to the requisite regional land use policy development and plans – the real work begins of forging formal partnerships, agreements, protocols, funding, budgets, staffing, and more. With a regional consensus, we then must act decisively to fund, develop, and adopt the following:

*Specific natural and cultural resource management plans, policies, and funding strategies.

*Specific agriculture preservation plans, policies, and funding strategies.

*Specific corridor right-of way alignments and environmental studies with alignment recommendations.

*Joint powers agreements for adopting alignments, resource management and preservation plans, coordinated regional land use development policies and zoning, and shared long-term corridor protection and administration in all participating jurisdiction’s General Plans.

*State and federal legislation to encourage and preserve joint powers and/or regional authority, increase local, regional, and state bonding capacity, and provide formal priority for infrastructure funding from the State for agreed-upon phases of Metro Rural Loop land acquisition and system facility construction. · Supportive planning, resource sharing, and technology infrastructure in all participating jurisdictions.

*A new tradition and ritual of relating to each other as valued interdependent regional partners who can and will offer hope, vision, and vigilance for our entire Valley

So! Here stands the San Joaquin Valley: Fearfully and Wonderfully in the Making

Our Valley is a true treasure - with very difficult challenges – and superlative, world class potential if we collaborate on our possibilities. We are just now beginning our shared exploration of regional perspectives and the formulation of bold regional plans and strategies to solve our collective problems.

We are starting with a strong sense of honoring our past, the land, and each other – values we hope will influence and guide the implementation of goals for regional innovation, growing and attracting the best and
brightest to our Valley, successfully competing in a global economy, healthy and prosperous generations to come, and of contributing to a better and more sustainable world.

Wow! – What a Valley we have and can hold together.

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