What role do you see the county playing in ensuring the Hill Country and Hays County’s natural resources are not depleted?

You have to create a vision and a plan, and then you need to go out and implement the strategy. Specifically, Hays County went through a very extensive planning process with many jurisdictions and a large group of stakeholders and citizens and created our habitat conservation plan. That plan has now been put into full effect and led to the largest preserve in Hays County’s history. You always hear people say, ‘Development needs to pay for itself.’ Well that’s exactly what this is accomplishing.

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[caption id="attachment_134511" align="alignleft" width="220"] Rob Roark[/caption]

Rob Roark

Experience: 13 years experience in the semi-conductor manufacturing industry, volunteer with the Blanco River Regional Recovery Team to assist with flood recovery, volunteer with the Hays County Food Bank

Top priorities: maintaining quality of life while dealing with growth and keeping taxes low; improving planning for natural disasters; improving infrastructure

Why are you running?

I believe that our founding fathers never meant for public service to be a profession. I think you need someone who will go, serve and then is going to go back to the community and allow other people to have input.

Aside from growth, what is the biggest challenge facing Hays County?

When you have people coming into a community and you have this growth, one of the biggest problems we have is that people are disconnected from their communities. If you can take people and get them connected to their communities, and if you can get people to work together so that people are not relying on government or relying on others, that’s how you build stronger communities. How do we get multiple people to work together so that we can build up a lot of our resources within the community that are there, such as our social networks, our churches, our organizations?

What role do you see the county playing in ensuring the Hill Country and Hays County’s natural resources are not depleted?

We have got to start to look down the line at the next 10-20 years: Where are the areas that are going to be critical to us, especially as we’re looking into the flood areas and the flood conservation areas? For an example, San Marcos has done a very good job with dedicated green spaces. The county is attaching some of that to the Purgatory green space. We now have on the books almost 1,200 acres—larger than Central Park—that is right in the southwestern part of the district, the precinct I’m running for.