There’s a version of the Treasure Valley’s future that works, and a version that doesn’t. The difference between them isn’t money or technology or even political will. It’s vision. How clearly and how early a community decides what it wants to be determines almost everything that follows. That’s the central argument Craig Rayborn, the new executive director of COMPASS, made on the latest episode of the Ever Onward Podcast, and it’s one that gets harder to dismiss the more you think about it.

Rayborn joined host Tommy Ahlquist and co-host Garrett Lofto just before his one-year anniversary at the helm of the Community Planning Association of Southwest Idaho. He came to the role with nearly 25 years of experience in transportation planning, including stints leading the equivalent agencies in Las Vegas and Houston, two of the other fastest-growing regions in the country. What he brings isn’t just expertise. It’s pattern recognition.

What COMPASS Actually Does

COMPASS is what’s called a Metropolitan Planning Organization, a federally required entity that every urban area over 50,000 people must have. There are over 400 of them around the country. COMPASS covers both Ada and Canyon Counties and has existed in some form since the 1950s.

What it doesn’t do is build roads, run buses, or make land use decisions. Those belong to ITD, ACHD, the cities, and the counties. What COMPASS does is think about the future: where people will live, how they’ll move around, what infrastructure will be needed to support that, and how to coordinate across the many agencies that will actually have to build it. Think of it as the region’s long-range planning conscience, one that’s trying to make sure everyone’s working from the same map.

Rayborn’s mandate from the board when he came on was to broaden that lens. Transportation planning, done well, can’t be separated from housing, water availability, economic development, or the dozens of other forces shaping where growth goes. His job is to facilitate the conversations that connect all of it.

The Gold Standard: Envision Utah

If there’s a model Rayborn returns to when talking about what good regional planning looks like, it’s what the Salt Lake City area did in the late 1990s through a process called Envision Utah. He came closer than he’d like to admit to going to work for the consulting firm that led it.

The Salt Lake region in the late 1990s looked a lot like the Treasure Valley does today. Population around 900,000 to 950,000, rapid growth underway, and a lot of unanswered questions about what the future should look like. The Envision Utah process was collaborative in a way that was genuinely unusual for the time. They brought together mayors, county commissioners, business leaders, and community members and asked them a simple question: here’s roughly half a million people coming to your region over the next 25 years, each dot on this map represents 10,000 of them. Where should they go?

What came back first was exactly what you’d expect: spread out, low-density development scattered across the region. Then the planning team went to work analyzing it. They came back and told the room what that pattern would actually cost in roads, services, and city budgets. The answer was eye-opening enough that the group went back and tried again, this time landing on a framework of concentrated higher-density pockets connected by infrastructure, with lower-density areas surrounding them. Each city could see itself in the plan. The region as a whole had something to build toward.

The results, Rayborn noted, haven’t been perfect. Local governments still make their own land use calls, and the buildout hasn’t followed the vision exactly. But the infrastructure was planned around that framework, and it’s made a meaningful difference in how the region has handled growth since.

“The places that have been the most successful at avoiding the negative impacts of rapid growth,” Rayborn said, “are the ones that get way out in front of it.”

The Treasure Valley’s Moment

The Treasure Valley has tried versions of this before. Every decade or so, a regional visioning effort gets launched, builds some momentum, and then loses it. The focus shifts back to the immediate, the pressure of the present crowds out the planning for the future, and the long-range vision ends up on a shelf.

Rayborn isn’t pointing fingers. He’s trying to understand why it happens so that this time it doesn’t. One of his priorities in year one has been studying those earlier efforts and learning what caused them to stall. He doesn’t have all the answers yet, but he has a strong conviction about what a successful process requires: a vision that’s specific enough to actually guide decisions, not just a collection of aspirational language; a real implementation plan attached to it from the beginning; and enough continuity of leadership to see it through across election cycles.

That last point is where Ahlquist’s argument for business community involvement cuts through. Elected officials cycle in and out every two and four years. Businesses and community leaders who are invested in the region’s long-term future can provide the continuity that government structures sometimes can’t. Rayborn pointed to Houston as an example, where the business community ran its own parallel transportation priorities process, sometimes pushed on the planning agency, and generally kept the pressure on for long-term thinking even as political winds shifted.

“The business community frequently knows a few months in advance of when we even hear whispers of something,” Rayborn said. “The sooner we know what’s coming, the sooner we can start making adjustments.”

Plans That Don’t Sit on Shelves

One of Rayborn’s personal rules, developed over years in Las Vegas and Houston, is that a plan isn’t finished until the implementation strategy is built into it. The best vision document in the world is worthless if there’s no mechanism to actually execute it. He’s bringing that discipline to COMPASS.

The current work includes a regional waterways and pathways plan that would use existing irrigation canal alignments as off-road trail corridors, a practical example of the kind of creative thinking that becomes possible when you’re planning across agencies rather than inside just one. And he’s working to build stronger connections with the development and homebuilding community, a relationship he says has historically been underinvested by planning organizations like his.

The Treasure Valley, Rayborn said, has the ingredients. Willing jurisdictions, experienced agency leaders, a business community that’s paying attention, and a heritage of getting people in a room and solving hard problems together. What it needs now is the discipline to lock in a shared picture of the future before the growth makes that picture much harder to draw.

As Ahlquist put it near the end of the conversation, someone once described wisdom as something that comes from bad experiences, and bad experiences from a lack of wisdom. The goal is to borrow enough wisdom from other places that this region doesn’t have to earn all of it the hard way.