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Planning and Building and Agriculture Departments recommending the Board approve and authorize the Chair to sign a letter of support to California Department of Conservation Division of Land Resource Protection that endorses the proposed Sacramento Area Council of Governments and the Metropolitan Planning organization to create a Coordinated Rural Opportunities Plan for our region.
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DISCUSSION / BACKGROUND
For the last 15 years, SACOG has worked through its Rural-Urban Connections Strategy to understand and support the potential for our region’s rural, agricultural, and natural resource lands. Most recently, in May 2020, the Regional Prosperity Partnership, comprised of the Greater Sacramento Economic Council, Valley Vision, the Sacramento Metro Chamber of Commerce, and SACOG released a regional prosperity strategy that identified food and agricultural systems as a top priority for fostering inclusive economic growth. This strategy calls for a proactive effort to identify areas with potential to enhance the region’s agricultural economy through focused infrastructure investments in assets like transportation and broadband.
To create a regional strategy, this proposal would develop a Coordinated Rural Opportunities Plan (CROP) that will focus on three areas:
(1) inventory all of our previous RUCS research related to agriculture along with all of the agricultural plans, strategies, and programs throughout the six county region and distill that information to understand the challenges facing agriculture today and the current strategies to address them, (2) identify general themes and geographies where existing strategies are not working as planned or where no strategies have been identified, (3) create a framework for implementation identifying what infrastructure investments are needed to support the continued viability of agriculture in our region.
This project assumes the local efforts to protect agricultural land will be bolstered ...
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