Mission

“PACE is a dynamic collaborative process, which exists to assess, protect, and improve the community’s environmental quality and health. This will be achieved through research, public education and implementation of a healthy Delaware plan. The plan will promote public policy on issues impacting environmental quality, sustainable development, health risk, and quality of life.”

Vision

“The people of Delaware County live, work and play in a healthy environment in every stage of their life while they preserve and enjoy their county’s natural heritage and an enhance quality of life.”

Environmental Health Division (EHD) throughout the United States face intense challenges due to the way the nation currently addresses environmental concerns. Such challenges result from economic, social, political and scientific developments that directly affect the environmental health of communities. To survive and remain effective in their role, EHD need to enlist strong support from the communities in which they serve. The Protocol for Assessing Excellence in Environmental Health was a pilot project developed by the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) and the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), designed to serve as a community environmental health assessment tool to assess and understand local environmental health and quality of life concerns. PACE-EH was a highly participatory and community driven process in which local communities could potentially influence all the steps from issue identification, issue refinement, developing indicators, and ranking to development of strategies for action plans. EHD that embraces the challenge of listening to the community to determine environmental priorities and strategies must be willing to shift paradigms, because the results of such community collaboration may not conveniently fit into classically established environmental health services or programs.

Reported here are the methodologies, challenges, strengths, and weaknesses of the protocol as tested by the Delaware County community assessment committee. It is concluded that although this process required extensive internal capacity and access to technical support as well as financial and staff investment, PACE-EH is a dynamic, gratifying and effective process to involve stake-holders in the discussion and proposal of solutions to environmental health and quality of life concerns.

Land Use Planning

Accomplishments to date

Delaware Environmental Education Partnership (DEEP) 

HSTS Plan

Hands on the Land

Litter Law