Sometimes, I think it is how you frame a situation

Thinking about community and community building is, I think, deciding how to frame the opportunities and challenges and interesting events that are happening within a community.

Hartsville has a progressive, interested and active planning commission. This group took on the responsibility of updating the city's comprehensive plan to make it a living plan that the City Council could use as a roadmap for growth. Plan updates are required by law but the planning commission went beyond the requirements and invested this update with an opening vision for Hartsville in 2020 -- and this is the first vision anyone has laid out for the community in over a decade. City Council has accepted the plan and continues to search for ways to make the plan an integral part of the way they move the city forward.

There was a news article written about a recent meeting of city department heads with the city manager and head of the planning commission that was a sort of plan update. As everyone knows, the economy is in tough shape, prices for key commodities like fuel are out of sight and the city gets a great deal of its funding from taxes. So, there is a budget focus. The headlines from the meeting were that the comprehensive plan could be stalled because this is a tough budget year. So, I am thinking about framing. It is a tough budget year. My experience with government is that every year is a tough budget year. It seems to me that the most useful frame to put around an updated comprehensive plan is something to the effect -- We are in a tough budget year it is good we have this plan to help us sort out some of the priorities so can move forward even in a tough budget year. The way the story was reported (the reporter got it right) was that because this is a tough budget year it might not be all that possible to really work on implementing the plan at this time.

It seems to me that putting a frame around the plan that identifies the plan as an important tool for continued growth of the city despite budget woes would be more effective than applying brakes because it is a "Year of the budget."