Making Better Land Use Decisions Requires Strong, Supportive Leaders

Election season has finally arrived for 2004 and we are now considering an array of candidates for local offices throughout our metropolitan region. At the same time, our metro area is reaching new levels of awareness on the important issues surrounding growth, development, open spaces and the way we build and use our lands.

If these issues are important to you, then you should make every effort to vote and elect those candidates who share your concerns. To assist in this, several statewide groups (including realtors, business owners, environmentalists, farmers, public officials and others), have produced a brochure with questions to help you evaluate candidates for public office about their positions on land use in Michigan. The brochure, Finding Common Ground, was produced by Public Sector Consultants, Inc., with a grant from the People and Land funding program of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

The brochure and add campaign were based upon the broad bipartisan agreement on over 100 land use related issues published by the Governor Granholm's Land Use Leadership Council. These recommendations can be seen on the Land Use Leadership website at www.michiganlanduse.org. For more about these recommendations and reactions to them by our own metro area leaders, see Governors Conference and survey results .