Vision West Regional Plan | Video

Evan Kruegel | 2/21/2013

Water, roads, and sewers, are all in need of improvements in Western North Dakota. Representatives from 19 counties and the Three Affiliated Tribes met in Watford City today to work on a Regional Plan for addressing those issues.

"Collaboratively, you can always have more impact. So we`re hoping that our regional plan will have some implications to the 2015 legislature," said Project Manager Shirley Brentrup.

Vision West, funded by U.S Housing and Urban Development, is now just over a year old. The project spent all of 2012 conducting infrastructure assessments on cities and towns throughout western North Dakota. This year, they`ll be grouping those assessments into a bigger regional plan.

"We will work to take the good information from those, and a lot of it is good information. Good solutions, and we`ll work to bring those in. But we hope to bring people together within the water world and emergency services, fire and ambulance, bring them together and work toward solutions that they feel are important to our region,” said Brentrup.

The assessments showed that daycare, water, sewer and roads are common issues across the board. Debra Walworth represents Golden Valley County, one of the smaller counties in the project, but the oil impact has hit her community as well. The medical facility in Beach is far too crowded and the city doesn`t have room in its budget for a new one.

"Through the assessment that Vision West did for the city of Beach, we are sitting pretty good with our water infrastructure and our sewer system. We have a little lagoon issue but the city is working on addressing that. So the city is taking care of what they can take care of, but the medical clinic fell to the side. So I thought it was a good project for us to work on,” said Walworth.

While different communities have different needs, every single county in western North Dakota has problems they need to address. So by assessing each community individually, the Vision West project hopes to gain a better understanding of what needs to be done to fix the problems.

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