The consequences of combining some or all of Winchester and Frederick County’s government services will be mixed, with some changes for the better and some for the worse. An area where I see great potential for improvement through unification is that of planning , zoning, and economic development.

It seems like these issues are arising more and more often in local government and in the pages of this newspaper. On July 26, Eric Beidel published a detailed analysis of Winchester’s economic prospects. The city’s location, infrastructure, and historic charm were touted as assets for future prosperity, but there was a stark assessment of current obstacles to any revitalization of an underperforming downtown: many rundown and vacant properties, suboptimal demographics, and stiff competition with large retailers on the city’s edges and in the county. With the recent opening of the convenient Target and Lowe’s at Rutherford’s Crossing, I have less reason to go from Clearbrook into town.

The county, too, has its hands full of planning challenges, from the 277 triangle proposals to the burgeoning Snowden Bridge community in Stonewall district and the continued growth in Redbud. County schools are barely keeping pace with the pressures of population growth. The recent struggle over Rural Areas lot sizing displayed our conflicting interests and strong feelings, and the need for open discussion and careful decision making.

While I caught up with friends at the fair a few weeks ago, I saw the Preserve Rural Life tent get more attention than that of either political party. How our land is managed and how the community changes is a big deal.

So in the city folks are concerned about economic development, attracting a better tax base while preserving the great atmosphere of history and culture, old homes and family businesses. In the county, there is a desire to provide quality services –education, transportation, public safety –while preserving our family farms and traditional character. I would suggest that unified city-county planning offices and boards, and perhaps even unified government, would help solve the problems of both city and county.

It’s not hard to see the benefits of unified planning and decision making. Many county residents complain about the residential sprawl of new construction and the resulting stress on county services. At the same time, Mr. Beidel details how vacant buildings and a dearth of young consumers are hurting the city’s prospects. Imagine a planning policy that made moving into a nice brick home in Winchester more attractive for a new family than buying a new house of two-by-fours and plastic in Back Creek. This family’s living downtown would attract more retailers to the same area. Living so near their shopping destinations, they could walk more and drive less, easing traffic stress for everyone. Moreover, a farm or forest in the county wouldn’t be destroyed by their house and a stream not polluted by their runoff.

Our community needs to grow to prosper. It is important, however, that the right kind of residential, commercial, and industrial development happen in the right place at the right time. Right now the pristine rural areas of the county are bulldozed for stores and houses while fine old buildings in the city sit empty. In a human body, the wrong kind of expansion in the wrong place is not called growth; it’s called cancer. The body of our city-county community needs to plan carefully, for everyone’s good.

The separate offices that deal with economic development, planning, zoning, and permitting for the city and county should be combined. Unification will achieve a greater degree of synergy between town and country than any current system of memos and phone calls. We would see better comprehensive planning, better land use, better environmental quality, and I daresay better standards of living.

Once professional planning offices are combined, it follows than the citizen planning commissions should be combined. The members of these bodies move between city and county every day for work and shopping. It would not be that complicated or difficult to combine the city and county boards into one large body and then reduce its size to a more manageable one over several years, through attrition, maintaining a fair balance of representation for city and county interests.

Once professional planning offices and appointed advisory boards were combined, they would still be reporting to a pair of separate elected bodies, the City Council and the Board of Supervisors. The unified planners and advisers might decide that a policy was in the interest of the city and county, the supervisors agree and pass it, but the council disagree and ruin the whole thing. Does this make sense?

I would humbly suggest, as a 19-year-old fresh from James Wood and naïve in the ways of the world, that if it is good to combine agencies, it might also be good to combine their elected bosses. Unification may be the best way to deal with the changes that affect all of us. It certainly can’t hurt to talk about it, and I fully support the discussions being held by Mike Foreman the Unification Committee.

Matthew Reges lives in Clearbrook and attends the College of William & Mary.