University Outreach and Extension is helping local community leaders look at the options in solving these problems.
The Community Infrastructure Focus Team, comprised of experts from all four University of Missouri campuses and Lincoln University, is analyzing alternatives for communities to consider in addressing five basic issues:
Missouri Extension County Council Leadership Conference Chairman Jim Dickerson, a focus team member, said: "As I travel across the state, I see that we have crying needs in these areas, and there's a lack of information out there about how to address them. Extension's role is to help people find ways to meet those needs."
Community Infrastructure was one of eight areas that more than 19,000 citizens, in a statewide needs assessment, said University Outreach and Extension could help.
All of the issues the focus team is studying share similarities that can be used in creating a process that helps communities in decision making, according to Focus Team Leader George Nickolaus.
"These issues will pass away," Nickolaus said. "Next year there'll be another kind of infrastructure problem that will be acute. So if we can develop some underlying model, maybe we can have an impact."
Terry Jones, dean of arts and sciences at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, is leading the group developing the decision making model. "All infrastructure issues require the same decision points with the same types of information. We're looking at whether we can encourage and assist communities in developing an investment attitude toward planning infrastructure and how we can give them the tools they want and need to address infrastructure."
Among those tools are the ability to assess the current situation, examine financial alternatives and solicit citizen participation.
"For elected officials, there's a lot of pressure to think about tomorrow and not as much time to think about a few years from tomorrow," Jones said.
Jones said the group will draw on resources in political science, citizen education, sociology and economics from the four UM campuses and Lincoln University in developing a model. The focus team will work with such organizations as the Missouri Association of Counties and the Missouri Municipal League.
The solutions to the issues being addressed by the Community Infrastructure focus team have to work in the real world.
Nickolaus said: "Everything has to be tested as we go along. We have to go back to the communities and ask them. Solutions don't work in isolation."
"There are wonderful solutions to these problems, but there are consequences," said Nickolaus. "We have to find the solutions that work and are affordable."
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