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Mississippi
Gov. Barbour Urges Mississippi Officials to Create Smart Growth Community Plans
''Our goal is not to get it like it was; our goal is to get it how it can be,'' said Republican Governor Haley Barbour in his keynote speech at the 8th Annual Coastal Development Strategies Conference in Biloxi, urging local officials among some 400 attendees to take the advantage of post-hurricane recommendations from the Governor's Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal, and create smart growth community plans for generations ahead.
With the coast's affordable housing shortage high on the audience's list of concerns, reports Biloxi Sun Herald writer Mike Keller, the governor and his housing advisor Tommy Walman called for faster and better workforce housing construction, the former pointing to the hardship of those still living in more than 25,000 Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) trailers.
''If we took the convicts in Parchman (state penitentiary) and put them into those FEMA trailers,'' the governor said, ''they'd sue us for cruel and inhuman treatment -- and win.''
The governor reiterated his intention to restore coastal marshlands, and rebuild the barrier island to their 1900 footprint and height -- an idea, the writer observes, questioned by the National Park Service and some experts.
In addition, he also announced that the state will require adoption of International Building Code standards in South Mississippi reconstruction and that it will try to get people up and out of the floodplain.
His housing advisor also told developers to raise construction standards, follow smart growth principles and provide housing for all income groups, a course that actually boosts property values throughout the community.
''The perception of affordable housing is that they increase crime, they are too dense and the decrease property values,'' he noted. ''We've got to change that perception.'' -- Sun Herald 5/11/2007
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