Attracting a young and skilled workforce and being a welcoming community are among the goals identified in the Heartland 2050 Vision.
The vision for the eight-county region was released Thursday, following public outreach and studies about the metro area’s needs. Heartland 2050 is based on four guiding principles: equity, efficiency, inclusivity, and local control/regional benefit.
MAPA executive director Greg Youell says the vision needs to address the population projections for the metro area.
“We’re anticipating that our population will be at least one and a quarter million as we go out to 2050, and depending on our growth rate could be quite a bit higher than that if we’re successful at attracting people in to this metro area. So as we do that we think about how are we going to live, how are we going to get around, what are our biggest challenges and issues, that’s what this project was really focusing on.”
Other goals identified in the Heartland 2050 Vision are having the highest quality education system, and investing in efficient infrastructure. Youell says that conversation must take in to account the costs of multiple modes of transportation.
“The way that that’s been funded the past 40-50 years, primarily through gas tax revenues, that funding is not growing and there’s no interest in expanding those gas taxes. So we’re going to have to look really hard at how we fund our transportation infrastructure. There’s particularly a lot of interest in looking at alternative forms of transportation, such as mass transit and adding more options for walking and biking.”
Youell says the next step is for the eight counties, five in Nebraska and three in Iowa, to sign the Heartland Regional Compact. After that, the focus will turn to implementation committees and a near-term action plan.