The county’s 20-year strategic planning project kicked off in August of 2021. There are many opportunities to learn more about this endeavor’s goals, methodology, and content. The county encourages you to visit their Engagement website to learn more about the project and how you can participate. If you feel that your county government is on the right path with its efforts to build an Orwellian Utopia, you don’t need to do anything at all. That will, however, allow us to continue cruising toward more socialism, crime, filth and welfare.
However, if you are serious about taking greater responsibility for your way of life, you will need to do a little bit more than observe or decide that you can’t continue to live here. Do you have children (or plan to) who may want to live here over the next 20 years? Maybe you owe it to yourself and your family to influence the county’s future?
I get it. You are busy working and raising a family. You voted for leaders to represent your values and to manage the levers of government. Can’t those elected leaders handle this without you? Well, of course, they can. And they would be happy to do so! This is a valid response for those who feel that our government is already working well for all of us. Does that describe you?
If you agree that we must provide some input to this effort, but you don’t have any time to invest, you can at least sign up to receive the project’s weekly updates newsletter. Just skim the headlines. You can delete the newsletter if you don’t even have time for a cursory review. See how easy it is just to make some basic information about this project available to yourself?
If you thought THAT was easy, you might be interested in offering a minimal amount of feedback about some essential wish list items. Participate in the elementary Community Vision Word Cloud. You can submit up to four words or short phrases that describe what you want Buncombe County to be like within twenty years. If you can’t think of anything, here are a couple of suggestions. Feel free to use any of these if you are having a hard time coming up with some on your own:
- Clean
- Crime-Free
- Prosperous
- Fiscally Responsible
- Well-educated
- Vibrant
- Limited government
Five minutes. Boom! You’re done! That was easy!
But wait! See how you have now been drawn in and have decided that you have oh so much more to say? You might need 30 – 60 minutes to complete the project’s online poll. After providing a few demographic details, you’ll be presented with several multiple-choice questions that will be used to help provide direction on what should be included in the comprehensive plan.
We were disappointed to observe that when asked to select from the offered multiple-choice responses, those responses often tended to lean toward ones that will delight only the liberals. Please don’t give them a reason to interpret your answer to these questions in a manner that you did not intend. Also, though, please don’t allow them to defeat you by making it seem impossible for you to complete the poll.
We found an option for you to add a choice of your own in most instances. We were then usually able to locate one option corresponding to our values and a third option that suggested that we had no opinion. Thus, we were able to complete the question in a way that allowed us to provide our honest reply without being trapped into proclaiming support for an idea with which we disagree entirely.
If you support liberal ideas, the poll is straightforward to complete. It is (by design?) more difficult if you do not. Don’t give up. Your voice matters!
Another option for participating is to attend one of the three remaining virtual public engagement meetings:
There are 23 seats on the Buncombe 2043 Steering Committee. Keeping an eye open and then applying for a vacancy on this committee requires more ongoing commitment to the effort (Monthly 2-hour meetings into the Spring of 2023). At that point, the project will present a plan with suggested policies and action items to County Commissioners.
You can choose either (1) to be informed and involved throughout this process or (2) to be shocked and dismayed when a plan with which you disagree is adopted as a roadmap into our county’s future.
