Page 27 - 2015 Compass Now

How do people rate the efforts to protect the natural environment?

Respondents of the COMPASS NOW 2015 Random Household Survey were asked to rate efforts in our
community to protect the environment. The results are shown in Figure 4. For the entire region, 65% of
community respondents felt their community was doing a good or excellent job in this area, while 63.2% of
Trempealeau County respondents rated their county’s efforts as fair/poor. La Crosse County respondents
rated environmental protection as excellent more often than other counties.

Figure 4: Efforts to Protect the Environment

Poor/Fair Good COMMUNITY
35% 51%
Excellent
14%

Source: COMPASS NOW 2015 Random Household Survey

The Built Environment

The term built environment refers to “the human-made surroundings that provide the setting for human
activity, ranging in scale from personal shelter and buildings to neighborhoods and cities that can often
include their supporting infrastructure, such as water supply or energy networks2.” It is typically those
community assets that planning commissions and zoning authorities have concerned themselves with for
many years. However, more recent attention is being paid to the built environment, as research shows that it
plays a huge role in the overall health and quality of life of the population. Components of built environment
include the transportation system, neighborhood and housing developments, roads and bike paths, and
availability of healthy food.

Transportation planning is assessed and coordinated by Regional Planning Commissions (RPC) and
Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPO). Short and long-range Metropolitan Transportation Plans
have been developed for areas of the Great Rivers Region3. The La Crosse Area Planning Committee (LAPC)
has been designated by the governors of Wisconsin and Minnesota as the MPO to perform transportation
planning activities for most of La Crosse and Houston Counties.

In 2008, the Mississippi River RPC developed the “Regional Coordinated Public Transit-Human Services
Transportation Plan4.” This plan summarized transportation for La Crosse, Monroe, Trempealeau and Vernon
Counties. Overall, the Great Rivers Region is served by many forms of transportation. The region, for the
most part, is very rural, and providing transportation services to a rural community is challenging and
expensive. In the region, few existing services are coordinated across county boundaries. Some informal
cooperation between agencies has taken place but with minimal success. The MRRPC transportation
plan summarized the largest transportation issues that are needed in the future to meet the increasing
transportation needs of the region’s population. They identified the following challenges:

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