recommended strategies - Hardee County

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Hardee County embarked on a community-wide visioning effort to help develop a framework for balanced future
growth and development while retaining the County’s quality of life assets. The Visioning is aimed at identifying
community goals and a means to achieve those goals, both short and long-term. Hardee County is faced with difficult
choices in the current economic times. Realizing that growth and development have the ability to either support or
hamper the community’ desired, county officials began to develop a Community Vision for the community that could
properly guide future development and identify solutions to challenges.
The Visioning process is intended to utilize a broad range of community comments, issues and opportunities in
developing community recommended strategies. The Visioning process is also intended to develop a framework within
which to proactively plan, develop milestones and identify potential community champions for the recommendations.
With each successive meeting, the community refined the broader comments into more focused, action oriented
recommendations that will be used to develop the overall final Vision. The strategies identified are not necessarily
government directed and/or supported, and in numerous cases involve local community and civic organizations with
specific interest or association with related programs. This method creates broad based community support and
responsibility for the implementation of the strategy.
identified to further assist in the targeting and implementation for subsequent action steps and overall strategy
development.
The Vision or the community’s plan has been built using comments received from the steering committee and focus
group meetings, formulated into an overall vision and a “road map” of ideas. In general, each Focus Group started with
the basic questions of:
“What challenges do you see to Hardee County growing, economically, culturally, environmentally?
What can be done to overcome those challenges?
Where would you like to see Hardee County in the next 5-10 years? 20 years?
What would it take to achieve that? Who needs to be involved to make the vision a reality?
What unrecognized or underutilized opportunities are present within the community that can assist (or be
refocused to assist) in achieving the community’s goals?”
The County identified five areas of review and analysis that were discussed through a series of “Focus Groups” and
community meetings to prepare the Visioning Report and to provide guidance for future projects and decisions. These
groups included:
• Economic Development,
• Land Use/ Recreation/ Open Space/ Environment,
• Quality of Life/Housing,
• Education/ Workforce,
• Infrastructure.
The Focus Groups identified both opportunities and constraints that
may impact the overall growth and development of Hardee County.
These groups provided input as to recommended strategies and desired
outcomes, including identifying “Community Champions” that would
include representatives from the various community groups,
individuals as well as governmental entities. These Champions were
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