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Ground Level Blog
Dave Peters

Central Minnesota’s future: Join a conversation

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If your economy depends on clean water, how do you make sure the water stays clean while you take advantage of it?

For people living in one of the five counties around Brainerd in central Minnesota, we want you to weigh in on that question and others by going to this Ground Level page.

I've written a couple of posts (in February 2011 and again in December) about how a few hundred people in Crow Wing, Todd, Morrison, Cass and Wadena counties are trying to map the region's future.

It's an interesting example of people in a community trying to wrestle with challenges in order to maintain and enhance their quality of life.

After the last post about the effort, I told the chief organizer of this Resilient Region effort, Cheryal Lee Hills, executive director of the Region 5 Development Commission, the people involved could use Ground Level as one means to carry on a conversation if they wanted. It's a group that crosses a lot of lines -- different counties, different walks of life, different political outlooks.

Hills took me up on it so here it is, an effort to help Central Minnesotans discuss the economy, the environment, housing, transportation and anything else they think will be important 20 years from now.

The organizers of the planning effort put three questions about the economy and the environment to a handful of residents and their responses are posted on this page. As I mentioned in the first paragraph above, many think it's crucial to maintain a balance between environment and economy. How to do that over coming years isn't easy to agree on. How do you think it should be done?

If you live in Central Minnesota, we're inviting you to add your comments to the page and then join us here at 11 a.m. next Thursday for a live chat about the questions. Depending on how things go, we'd love to repeat the process in future weeks on other topics. Check back often.