By Bill Lant
Columnist
We had a great Vision For Pineville meeting Monday evening. The Drury architecture students have really knocked themselves out doing their study of Pineville and Anderson and preparing the renderings for us to look at. The best thing that comes from this exercise is that it gets us thinking about what could be. I've said repeatedly that all of Southwest Missouri is ready to explode with growth. Of course, there can be some bad side effects from rapid growth. Many communities have failed to plan for large influxes of business and residential expansion and have been sorry later. The type of long range planning that the kids from Drury have done helps prevent those things from happening. Their focus was on beautification and improvement of our towns while providing plenty of room for economic development in the adjoining areas. Several of the students focused on "Green Areas" and walking and bicycle trails connecting our communities. There were considerations for retirement communities and youth activity centers as well. They have one more meeting planned in early December where both teams will present their final plans to us early next month. We will be able to display the renderings around the area for all to see. I think this is a great idea for Drury to work with our towns and I hope we can get them to do a couple more next year.
I went to Jeff City for my scheduled Roundtable discussion with the Juvenile Office and other stakeholders in our attempt to satisfy the Department of Justice. The two Roundtables have been extremely helpful in finalizing our plans to reconfigure the Juvenile Office. From the beginning, I wanted to make as few changes as possible while addressing the Department of Justices' concern that there was conflict of interest in the way we were doing it. It has taken a lot of persuading and juggling of responsibilities but I think we have come up with a workable solution. No one likes change, but there are times when there is just no other choice, and I think this was one of them. There has been a great effort on the part of the Juvenile Officer's Association to craft a set of Statewide Standards. These standards will either be implemented by directive of the Supreme Court or by Legislation in the upcoming session. We have designed our new system to have people in place to enforce the standards and make sure we are doing things the same way statewide.
State Rep. Bill Lant may be reached by calling 417-437-8223 or 573-751-9801, or emailing [email protected].
Editorial on 11/19/2015