Volume 3: Saving Our Villages 
A Revitalization Guidebook for Cattaraugus County's Villages
Smart Development for Quality Communities Series
Cattaraugus County, New York, December 2004

This new guidebook, Saving Our Villages, presents the results of our visioning work with our municipalities and county consultants, Randall Arendt and Richard Swist. It gives a new priority to villages as we begin our journey into the 21st Century. This guidebook shows how our villages once thrived, began to change, and are coming back in a process of community renewal. It is our hope that this guidebook will become a valuable reference for ideas on renewing villages and for motivating stakeholders to support village renewal. Our work has included giving training and technical assistance to community leaders and developing a county-level vision to coordinate our work. We also began developing demonstration projects and case studies so that we can improve our capabilities and get better results.

In particular, this Volume of the county's guidebooks series illustrates: (1) How new business and growth are still possible in our villages, based on new ideas. The consultant's ideas are recommendations only to encourage thinking along marketing lines, and do not represent any commitments by the villages or the county; (2) How villages have value in their history, community affairs, and existing infrastructure. This is a cutting edge concept, which looks at our villages as a vital part of distributed infrastructure in the region's future. Villages can attract growth away from the dynamics of sprawl, and (3) How we can add our villages to an economic development strategy for county and regional marketing campaigns in the coming decade, with the intent of attracting new investments for older downtowns and neighborhoods, and to motivate stakeholders to share lessons learned with other communities so that each village is not faced with re-inventing the wheel.

Download Volume 3

This file is large, 9.3 MB, and download time will vary depending on your connection.