That ethic of saving is a big reason Dane County is today the best place in the country to live. We save, avoid debt, and require government to be prudently managed.

Our key to growing better as a community is saving - saving our homes, time, land, and taxpayer dollars. Saving requires hard work and discipline, but we save to prepare for all our important life activities: buying a home, educating our kids, retiring. Let's bring that same outlook to our growth and make Dane County a better place to live.

As I promised, I have listened and learned from all of you and thousands more Dane County citizens about improving the way we grow. I came to recognize that our most important challenge is to improve our Diverse Environments (human and natural) with Sensible Intelligent Growth right Now. The first letters of those key words just happen to spell "design." (Funny how that happened!) We have to Design Dane!. That's what I am calling the proposals I offer you today. I hope Design Dane! meets your high expectations. I hope you will find these ideas comprehensive, sensible, and fair. One note -- unless you want to listen to me for two hours, I cannot present all of my proposals right now. But Design Dane! Action Plan you receive today offers the full package.

Building Strong Villages and Cities

We have to know where home is before we can save it. For 82% of us in Dane County, home is our cities and villages. They have always anchored our prosperity. In the last century, for example, our farms would not have flourished without Mazomanie's railroads. Cities and villages have the transportation, education, skilled work forces, and capital to create wealth and opportunity. The magnificent theater Stoughton is restoring and the Monona Terrace we just built symbolize the many forms of beauty in our cities and villages.

A big threat to Dane County cities and villages is rapid growth on their edges. Such growth leads to building expensive, necessary stuff like roads and schools and extending necessary, expensive services, especially fire and police protection. Edge growth spurs annexation fights among local governments.

Such growth is occurring in Dane County. One village alone has grown by 131% since 1990. All of us know the consequences of such growth. How many of your communities have faced a school referendum in the last three years. We can save time, money and grief if we grow sensibly. Sensible growth is growth that uses existing facilities as much as possible.

Villages and cities have the roads, schools, and services to benefit from sensible growth. Many of you mayors and village presidents know the need to grow sensibly and economically, especially with state spending limits and diminished funding in mind. For example, Black Earth reduced its Urban Service Area so it could grow around its revitalized Main Street. Madison has negotiated several inter-governmental agreements to insure separation between it and some of its neighbors. Oregon has embarked on an ambitious community planning effort in the face of high growth pressure there. This speech will get too long with more neat examples.

How can Dane County be a helpful partner to our cities and villages?

Promoting Healthy, Working Rural Communities

Lots of us still live on the farm. Dane County profits from one of the world's strongest agricultural economies. We rank in the top five Wisconsin counties in the number of farms and corn, soybean and dairy production. Our strong farm economy combines with the presence of the UW-Madison to make us the heart of Wisconsin's growing biotechnology industry. Of the 172 biotech companies in Wisconsin, 61% call Dane County home.

Let's not forget food. The world is growing and running out of land to feed the growing population. We have the soils, water, farmers, and technology to feed a lot of the world. Saving farms in Dane County will help secure our long term economic health.

We must promote working! rural communities. Dane County cannot slip from the Farm County to a Farmette County. Carve Dane County into settings for rural mansions and we lose the basis for our farm economy. Saving farms is also good for all of us property taxpayers. On average, one Dane County farm contributes the equivalent of eight average homes to the property tax rolls. Farms don't consume the property tax revenues that houses do. In short, farms cost us less than the taxes they produce.

We must act now to save working rural communities. Currently, we lose about 3,400 acres of farmland a year. That is more than enough good farmland every year to cover all of Lake Monona.

We face the potential for too much development. Analysis shows that the so-called "35 acre density rule" can produce between 250-350 additional residential lots for each Dane County township with Exclusive Ag zoning.

Most of our towns are working hard to preserve farmland but they need more help, better tools, and more power. We also have to face their common dilemma. Could we say "no" to our farmer neighbor who wants to sell part of the farm to secure a deserved and stable retirement?

I propose the following steps to promote healthy, working rural communities:

Conserving our Land and Water

Saving our land and water has some obvious benefits to those of us in Dane County who fish, hike, hunt, boat, bike, ski, snowmobile or walk. That covers most of us. But even if you are the world's most devout couch potato, you probably don't enjoy the sound of running water in your basement. Three times in the 90's many Dane County residents heard that sound as the result of big floods. One reason for those floods has been the widespread destruction of wetlands. We have drained, for example, 50% of Lake Mendota's wetlands. Dane County has a greater surface area of paved roads than all the county's lakes put together. A big increase in surfaces that shed water, plus fewer places for the water to go, produces more floods.

We can do better. Dane County now has saved over 5,000 acres of park land with recent major purchases of springs, streams, woods, and prairies. We know what to save. Citizens, local governments, conservation groups, and the County Board have worked long hours to map the creeks, prairies, parks, and trails we should buy.

Our growth, however, means higher land prices everywhere in the county. For example, Dane County just received an opportunity to buy some land with extraordinary environmental and recreational value. The cost of this parcel has increased five-fold in the last 10 years. And prices are not leveling off. If we don't quickly buy the land we need to protect, we will loose it or pay far more in the future. The bottom line - we need to save more land at a faster rate.

It would cost over $4 million a year just to buy mapped parks and open spaces. We can't commit to such spending in the normal confines of a tight county budget -- besides, we must involve all Dane County citizens in this decision. Therefore, I propose a countywide referendum to create multi-million annual funding over the next 10 years to help Dane County, local governments, and non-profit conservation groups in saving natural resource areas, parks and trails.

We are now entering a second generation of environmental stewardship that compels us to protect our key resources.

Linking Jobs, Housing, and Transportation

One thing we hold valuable in this day of two-income families and single parents is time. We can save a lot of time if our jobs are closer to our homes and we have convenient ways to get from one to the other -- and to the grocery stores, schools, day care centers, ball fields, and doctors in between.

The trend right now, though, is the other way. 52,000 people now commute into Madison every day - an additional 17,000 people from surrounding counties commute to other jobs in Dane County. Travel on our main highways has at least doubled over the past 15 years or so. The rate of growth in daily vehicle trips and daily time spent in a vehicle is far greater than the rate of population growth. We spend more and more time in our cars. As the chauffeur of my high school son, this is not often the best quality time.

We are going to need a lot more housing - 40,000 additional units by the year 2020. And we continue to produce more jobs. Our 2% unemployment rate is about the lowest anywhere.

So we face basic choices. Drift along and we will have lots of housing scattered all over Dane County connected to employment centers by costly congested roads. Or, we can coordinate economic development, housing, and transportation decisions so that more people can live conveniently close to their jobs. That choice saves taxpayer dollars and everyone's time.

Let's begin to choose wisely with the following steps:

Planning and Governing Together

Saving money, land and time depends on good information and planning. Planning will be a lot more effective if Dane County assists and learns from the other 61 local governments here. A starting point for sensible growth is cooperative planning. Communities should plan their futures to fit with what their neighboring communities are planning.

Cooperation is just one of several features of good planning. Planning for sensible growth has also to be comprehensive. It can't look at just traffic impacts or economic effects or environmental impacts. It must cover all those bases and more. It should involve a community looking at itself as a whole, with widespread citizen participation. Good planning looks beyond individual projects and measures cumulative impacts.

The big projects like ABS attract lots of planning expertise. But a house or warehouse or car wash or apartment each has its own consequences; they add up to either sensible or haphazard growth.

Let's call this cooperative, comprehensive, and cumulative approach Community Impact Planning. I will encourage this sort of planning throughout Dane County.

Improving the Way We Do Business

We have lots of partners in our effort to grow sensibly. Some of you will make your living building those 40,000 new housing units and the commercial expansions that will be part and parcel of our economic growth. Dane County should treat you as partners and customers and not as adversaries.

We can grow sensibly if we work together. I look forward to working on these ideas with the County Board and local officials. But this is too big -- or important -- a job for just office holders. If you think Design Dane! has good ideas, credit goes to the citizens who shared their ideas at listening sessions or the land use workshops or when they stopped me on the street.

We have to grow that grassroots citizen participation. I will appoint a Citizen Commission for Design Dane! to review and report on the progress we make in implementing these ideas. Another big part of its job will be to expand and improve citizen and business community participation in Design Dane! The Commission will issue a report card on our progress at annual "State of the Land" events. We will thank the people and communities who help Dane County grow sensibly. And we'll use that occasion to help us figure out what is working and what isn't.

I am hopeful, as I bring these proposals before you. As I listened, however, to thousands of citizens this past year, I ran across one emotion that could stop us from working together. It's fear.

Fear of annexation is motivating some development in some towns. Fear of the County, especially of the 4th Floor (that's where I sit), keeps others from revising outdated town plans. Fear of being landlocked leads some cities and villages to sprawling annexations. Fears about an uncertain retirement and complex land regulations lead some farmers to break up their farms. In every part of Dane County, citizens fear the effects of growth on their communities.

Fear can be a wake-up call. But fear sustained over a long time is destructive. It keeps one focused exclusively on one's turf, on defending what is mine. Fear kills cooperation.

I have that sort of fear -- the anxiety over growth and the demands placed on county government, the suspicion that some officials or organizations are just interested in short term, self-interested goals. I defuse that fear by reflecting on some of the real people I've met as County Executive. These memories remind me of what is best about Dane County -- and why we leaders cannot allow fear to stop progress.

For example, I remember Delma Woodburn. Delma will be 99 on June 2. She is the wonderful, spry, smart matriarch of the Woodburn and Donald families. They have been generous to all of us with their donations of woods, prairies, springs, and streams, at Donald Park, between Mount Horeb and Mount Vernon. I met Delma this past year to thank her for all this. I saw how she represents many of our community's strengths and values. She loves her family farm and helped manage it for decades. She lived in Madison and contributed to that great city. She helped found the Dane County Historical Society as one of our first citizens to recognize the beauty of our native landscapes. She remembered her dad, who served as a legislator a long time ago, fighting for women's suffrage in Wisconsin. She had her birthday then just in time to vote in the first election in which women could vote in Wisconsin. Delma knows with all of the wisdom of her age and experience that we can have vibrant cities, healthy natural resources, and productive farms together. We can expand opportunity at no one person's expense and to the benefit of our community. She represents the truth that hard work and a sense of community will always trump fear.

Today begins the reinvention of how the county invests in our future. This is a room full of people who aren't afraid of this hard work. With optimism and hopes, I welcome your criticism and your improvements on Design Dane!.

The Delma's of our county made it possible for me, a woman, to run for office in 1997 and have the honor and opportunity to serve our county. Now, in turn, it is my job to help us create the tools we need to invest for our children in the next century as our grandparents did for us. I'm eager to begin that work with you - right here, right now.