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What started as an issue on politics, morphed as we started the editorial process. Originally, the Fall/Winter issue was going to look at tools and techniques for calming the political waters, but we kept coming back to the issue of public information and outreach, subjects we covered in our first year of publication (and will probably continue to cover far into the future).

While it has taken us a bit longer to work through this issue, we are pretty pleased with the range of information included in this issue and hope it helps calm the waters in your jurisdiction:

The Politics of Planning in Rural Areas, a Case Study from southern West Virginia, by Britt Ludwig.

The Art of Choropleth Maps: How to Make Them and How to Use Them without being a GIS genius.

Let's face it...people love maps. Take maps to a public meeting, and you will find your participants grouped around the images and talking about the information. If you include them in documents, they are usually the first pages readers will scan.

While GIS programs will create choropleth maps, not every one has access to state of the art programs like ESRI's ArcGIS or the ability to learn the intricacies of arcs and nodes. This article uses a fairly common vector graphics program (Freehand) to create choropleth maps for plans, presentations, and print materials. The article also includes a short, crash course in comprehensive plan statistics and map classification systems.

The is the first in a series of articles on maps, mapping, and accessible programs.

The Staff Analysis: A guide to evaluating proposals and writing an effective staff analysis.

A good staff analysis will do more to calm the political waters than almost any other document a staff planner can create, yet they are often overlooked. This article covers the elements of a staff analysis and analytic techniques.

The Much Maligned Newsletter: The perfect outreach tool for your community.

A newsletter? Really? How old school. A quarterly newsletter can do more to keep citizens in touch with local planning, provide a resource for local planning information, and provide a quarterly calendar for upcoming events and opportunities than can your webpage alone. We sometimes forget that not everyone is well versed in the internet; the quarterly newsletter provides one possible approach to keeping citizens informed, regardless of their computer acumen.

Due out on newstands on March 2, 2012