AUGUSTA — After nearly a year of work, a council organized to identify what would improve life in Kennebec County over the next decade has arrived at a half-dozen issues that need to be addressed throughout the region.
The council has listed priorities that include attracting a younger, more diverse population and creating more quality job opportunities.
The findings of the goal-setting council, made up of community leaders in the business, nonprofit and government sectors, are detailed in the Impact 2032 Report to the Community.
The top issues, according to the report, are job opportunities, high-quality schools, access to affordable healthy food, health care services, public safety and a reasonable cost of living.
The next step, to be completed over the next several months, is to develop a specific plan to accomplish these goals.
“In my role at the United Way, I hear about myriad community issues year-round,” said Courtney Yeager, executive director of the United Way of Kennebec Valley.
The United Way is one of the goal-setting council’s member organizations.
The findings detailed in the 59-page report were not surprising, Yeager said, but the consistency in the responses was unexpected.
“I was surprised how in step everyone was across the community,” she said.
At this point, the report notes, there is general agreement Kennebec County would benefit from a larger, younger, more diverse population. To achieve that, Kennebec County should become a destination and should work to keep more young people in the area.
Developing a strong education system, supporting the creation and expansion of local business, increasing the quality and quantity of job opportunities and expanding the region’s housing quality, stock and affordability emerged as the recommendations to help make that happen.
The Report to the Community, published at the end of October, presented a summary of the data collected from live and virtual community conversations held in the spring, results of the survey and white papers that were developed in conjunction with Plimpton Research that detailed information on demographics, data trends and existing needs throughout the region.
While the goal-setting council started its work at the end of 2020, the data collection via a survey and series of in-person and virtual community goal-setting meetings took place this year.
Yeager said the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the survey results, which organizers said they expected.
“We did try to design the survey questions and the community conversation questions with that in mind,” Yeager said. “We did leave a lot of the questions open-ended, which definitely led to some really open conversations. People could talk about whatever they wanted to.”
While the pandemic’s influence is being considered in examining data that has been collected, it has also magnified some issues.
“They were floating under the surface,” Yeager said, “but weren’t quite at the level of rising to the top, and something that we all really wanted to tackle together.”
The top concern that people identified and on which they seek to focus: quality job opportunities.
“I think that’s because we had so many community members and employees who were furloughed or lost their jobs,” Yeager said, “and their own families were impacted by that.”
Yeager said expert panels composed of community leaders have been digging into the data that has been collected so far and will come up with one goal in each of three topic areas — health, education and financial stability — and a set of measurable indicators for each.
“We’re going to have strategies we can suggest to businesses, nonprofits and municipalities when we ask them to endorse these goals,” she said.
The council seeks to get about 75 organizations throughout the county to endorse and support the goals before the public launch of the goals which is expected in July 2022.
“It feels like the work would be over the short term,” Yeager said. “But that’s when everything gets started.”
She said businesses, cities, towns and nonprofit organizations can start working on examining their policies and priorities to contribute to meeting the goals.
Members of the council said they hope community members will offer their expertise and experience for others to use.
“We’ll just continue to work together and feed off each other to make this the most successful project it can be,” Yeager said.
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