Pinedale Community Assessment Follow-up
What should Pinedale’s future priorities be?
by Pinedale Online!
December 10, 2010
Ten community members attended the follow-up meeting for the Pinedale Community Assessment held by the Wyoming Rural Development Council (WRDC) on Tuesday, December 7th in the Lovatt Room of the Pinedale Library.
This was related to a series of follow-up sessions the WRDC held in September polling the community on their thoughts about living in Pinedale, now that five years have passed since they did the original community assessment when the oil and gas boom was in full swing. The WRDC provided a resource team to assist the Town of Pinedale in evaluating the community’s assets and liabilities in order to develop suggestions for improving the environmental, social and economic future of Pinedale.
The WRDC then created a document listing comments people made about Pinedale’s problems, challenges, assets and opportunities. (Pinedale Community Assessment 5-Year Follow Up report: http://wyomingrural.org/_pdfs/Pinedale%20Final%20Report%205%20year.pdf, 56 page PDF)
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The Town of Pinedale requested a five-year follow up of the community assessment from the WRDC. The purpose of Tuesday’s meeting was to narrow down the broad comments and come up with the top priority goals the Pinedale community, local government, organizations and businesses should use for future planning purposes. Jo Ferguson, WRDC senior rural development specialist, returned to facilitate the meeting.
After breaking out into three groups, the community members narrowed their thoughts down to the priority areas they felt were the most important. After deliberating, the groups then shared their priorities, which Ferguson did her best to consolidate into a final list that the group felt the town’s priorities should be. Ferguson said she would use the new list of priorities to create a matrix with specific ideas for each category identified that evening, which the town can use to create projects and create a timeline in which those projects should be accomplished. She said she hoped to have that matrix and priority project list by the end of this week.
Identified priorities:
1. Planning (County/Town comprehensive plans)
2. Education (board training, K-12)
3. Economic Development (Main Street program, tourism)
4. Human Services (affordable housing for elderly, affordable childcare, a hospital)
Below are the main priority areas identified by the three groups to create the above general priority list:
1. PLANNING: Revamp both the Sublette County and Town of Pinedale comprehensive plans. Either scrap and redo or significantly revamp existing plans. Create a comprehensive joint master plan between the County and Town of Pinedale with short and long-term plans and create a board to oversee the plan to make sure things get done according to the joint plan.
2. BOARD TRAINING: No specific board was identified, just the expression of a general need for people on boards to have better training on how to be a board member.
3. EDUCATION: There is a need to "educate teachers to take more pride in K-12". This was in reference to Sublette County School District #1.
4. TOURISM: Continue the Main Street Program for the Town of Pinedale. Use the lodging tax dollars for tourism promotion. Seed programs for town beautification. Encourage small business incentives and expansion. Rewrite Town codes to encourage reinvestment. Get a paid tourism director. Tourism promotion. Better customer service and business training. Branding marketing for Pinedale. Have more events. Promote existing facilities. Wi-Fi/broadband. Encourage a diversity of businesses.
5. HUMAN SERVICES: Affordable housing for all/elderly. Create a strong, stable workforce. Affordable childcare with additional facilities. Get more private paid doctors. A pharmacy. Public transportation. Get a hospital here.
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