NACo Board plans ambitious 2025
County officials who find themselves representing something between rural and urban could find a new home with NACo in 2025, pending the work of an exploratory committee looking at a potential caucus for mid-sized counties.
By: Charlie Ban
County News Digital Editor & Senior Writer
National Association of Counties
County officials who find themselves representing something between rural and urban could find a new home with NACo in 2025, pending the work of an exploratory committee looking at a potential caucus for mid-sized counties.
That, along with potential regional groups representing the interests of counties in the Great Lakes states and along the U.S.-Mexico border are in the offering for next year, following passage Dec. 7 of a $28.6 million budget during the Fall Board of Directors Meeting in Sonoma County, Calif.
The Board meeting was part of the County Crossroads Symposium that married programming from the Large Urban County Caucus (LUCC) and Rural Action Caucus (RAC), allowing members to mostly participate in both content tracts. NACo President James Gore, a Sonoma County supervisor, emphasized that caucus programming, like most NACo meetings, was open to all members regardless of their county’s size, and added that mid-sized counties had expressed interest in a caucus for several years.
NACo Executive Director Matt Chase illustrated the interest in the caucus and the flexibility with which NACo leadership has envisioned the group.
“I think Sonoma is a great example — you’ve got four colleagues, one is purely in Santa Rosa and there’s an urban supervisor and then you have one that is totally rural that doesn’t touch any urban,” Chase said to Gore. “We want to leave it up to that individual county official — where do you feel comfortable? We’re not looking to label counties, it’s ‘where do you feel comfortable?’ and you might want to participate in two of them or three [caucuses], so we’re trying to make it very inclusive.”
Of the nation’s 3,069 counties, 823 have populations between 50,000-500,000 and often face challenges not addressed by LUCC or RAC programming. Officials from those counties account for half of NACo Legislative Conference attendees and 42% of policy steering committee membership.
West Region Representative Joe Briggs, a Cascade County, Mont. Commissioner, spoke to the identity crises that many counties face.
“We need to remember that federal definitions don’t work in this environment either because there is not one singular definition of rural,” he said. “In Montana, I’m an urban county because I’ve got 84,000 people. In half of your states, I’m a frontier county because I have 84,000 people.”
Having approved the exploratory committee, the Board will review the committee’s findings at its meeting during the Western Interstate Region Conference, May 21-23 in Pennington County, S.D. and the 2025 NACo Annual Conference & Exposition July 11-14 in Philadelphia City and County, Pa. The 2025 Legislative Conference in Washington, D.C. will be held March 1-4.
The Board also approved committees to explore the creation of regional forums along the north and south U.S border regions, with more nebulous outlook for programming modeled on the Gulf States Counties and Parishes Caucus, which follows a variable, as-needed meeting schedule. The new regional forums would align with new federal regional commissions akin to the Appalachian Regional Commission. The Southwest Border Regional Commission includes counties from California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas and the Great Lakes Authority includes counties from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York.
Read more here.
