As your jet plane dips down to Blue Grass Airport, you see the verdant, rolling green fields and white plank fences, maybe even a pasturing thoroughbred. In this breathless moment you marvel at the stunning scene of Bluegrass fields.

But a few hours later, talking to the politicos from the seven Central Kentucky counties, a less romantic reality sets in.

Measure whatever you like -- commuting patterns, economic buying and selling, the media, health care -- it's clear that this is one, closely interdependent region.

The private sector seems to see this clearly enough. The 1998 survey conducted by the Greater Lexington Chamber of Commerce gave top priority to ``developing a regional agenda supported by surrounding counties ... not just Lexington.''

The hard work of Bluegrass Tomorrow spells out regional realities in its 1998 planning framework.

And this summer saw the birth of something called Bluegrass Partnership Initiative, with the Greater Lexington Chamber in the midwife role. Also emerging is a regionwide ``leadership'' development program with all the chambers in the region cooperating.

On the public side, Bluegrass Tomorrow has been busy gathering all the mayors and county judge-executives into a ``roundtable.'' Its advocates say this is fast turning into the first real arena for public officials to be candid about tough issues that cross political boundaries.

Such cohesion is critically needed. Because without leadership, what you have is what we heard: essentially an earful of stories of minor disputes creating major relationship rifts over highways and sewage lines, competition over payroll tax and employment, and a dizzying patchwork of land use rules and fiscal incentives.

The scene reminds one of past years in and around Charlotte, N.C., also an impressive sight from the air, with neighborhoods neatly nestled under a thick canopy of trees; lakes and rivers; openings for muscular industrial areas; and shiny spires of the finance empire focused on ``Uptown'' Charlotte.

Charlotte got a head start with coordinated governments -- the urban county effecting a virtual merger with the city of Charlotte. But that was the exception. Up to the early 1990s Charlotte-Mecklenburg had almost no coordination with the surrounding counties. The split showed in postponed environmental decisions and chaotic transportation planning, even as traffic mounted and people complained bitterly.

Today's Charlotte isn't problem-free, but there have been dramatic strides. Through the newly-formed Carolinas Partnership, the region has a practical arrangement for coordinated economic development across 16 counties. Its political leadership, with voter endorsement, is showing unprecedented cooperation around a regional transportation plan that calls for exclusive busways and judicious use of rail.

The Charlotte region today has a broad-based citizen organization to study issues and lean on government to make better decisions. It's not just the big banks that make Charlotte; it's the spreading collaboration and idea that it's the region that matters.

What Charlotte and its neighbors decided was that the status quo, no matter how comfortable, wouldn't be enough for a sustainable future. The Bluegrass situation today just begs for a true consensus about how to ensure the region's future success.

Begging for a consensus

Just like Charlotte of years ago, the ``talk'' in Bluegrass counties seems stuck on chasing growth with more roads -- adding lanes, building bypasses. If anyone thinks that's the way to build a good future, invite them to call someone in Atlanta, where they practiced the road-building arts to perfection and now have such foul air that the federal government won't give them another dollar for highways until they produce transit and other alternatives.

Yet in the Bluegrass region today, cross-county coordination on roads, not to mention public transit, too often seems out of reach. There's no regionwide organization that fits the real region, to coordinate or make decisions on transportation and link it to land use.

To outsiders, Bluegrass politicians seem like good people trapped in bad systems. The only officially designated transportation planning organization in the region focuses only on Fayette and Jessamine counties (an arrangement in which Jessamine keenly feels its junior status). Even if this organization were to reach out to the other five counties, under state and federal regulations there wouldn't be any more money on the table.

The Bluegrass Area Development District, the research and planning arm of elected officials across a 17-county swath of Central Kentucky, gives regional approaches a good try. It serves admirably as a place for officials to talk things out, and it does good research. But it is only government officials, not the business and civic sectors critical in today's regions. And it has no incentives to take risks.

This pattern isn't just political misfortune. It is breeding really bad environmental threats. While water lines get extended to all sorts of remote spots across the rural counties, there's no apparent rush to follow up with sewer services. Citizens in Madison, Jessamine and Clark counties tell story after story of subdivisions, some quite large, built with septic systems since the mid-1990s.

In the Bluegrass region's geology, polluted fluids that go into the porous limestone soil will get into underground streams quickly. Someone else is almost bound, eventually, to drink the product. What will it take to generate public outrage -- fish dying or children becoming the victims of nitrate poisoning?

Also, the notion that every family can grab a few Bluegrass acres dies hard. Witness the apparent scramble in the late 1990s for 10-acre lots in Fayette, five-acres in Scott, one-acre in Clark.

But the moment is also ripe for regionwide, collective action, an innovative stroke to give the Bluegrass region the capacity to decide on its inevitably shared future.

From the seeds planted by the ``roundtable'' effort, why not consider forming a Bluegrass Regional Council, composed of the county judge-executives and a representative selection of mayors from across the region?

How to fill the void

The region could then take a forward leap to recognize the partnership nature of all major public efforts today. Citizen and business stakeholders could be included in the new council, nominated by the public official members, perhaps up to a third of the whole number.

The structure should balance the representation from around the region, including the possibility of a voting majority from outside Fayette. Even when treated fairly, Jessamine County can hardly help feeling like the junior partner in the current metropolitan planning organization.

The Bluegrass Regional Council, once launched, would fill a major void, combining the responsibility of public officials with the impatience of the business community to set strategic goals, find funding and move expeditiously.

The biggest bucks would go to those transportation improvements that would do the most to reduce paralyzing traffic snarls; to give people in the urbanized areas a real choice about transportation; and to a system of waste-water treatment that assures citizens and industry of a reliable supply of good water into the future.

But how to raise money? A potential central project: creating a system of tax-base sharing for the region akin to the voluntary arrangement between Louisville and Jefferson County.

The payroll tax, the ``biggie'' among local revenue sources, would be the logical candidate. Today proceeds of that tax flow in high percentage to the job rich counties -- Fayette, Madison and (since the advent of Toyota) Scott County. Under a new agreement, 50 percent of the added payroll tax revenues from all the counties could go into a special fund to finance projects of major regional needs: public transportation, selected highways, big-time waste-water treatment facilities, etc.

This would be a way for Jessamine, for example, to get investments in sewage facilities and the Interstate 75 connection it clearly can't get now. Madison, soon to discover virtues of treating waste water, will be able to be part of a regionwide discussion on waste-water treatment for the next century. All counties might think of a more coherent future transportation system.

United they stand

Why would Fayette do this? And why would Scott, the region's other ``winner'' from payroll tax collections, go along? The answer lies in the growing recognition that all the Bluegrass counties are in it together. Bad waste-water practices in Jessamine, we were told, will eventually affect drinking water somewhere else in the region. Choking congestion in Lexington spills into Clark County, adds to population pressure in Woodford. Failure to find ways to protect the Bluegrass advantage weakens the magnet that has drawn success so steadily to the entire region.

What's more, if the region gets a reputation for infighting rather than smart, shared bold maneuvers, then every county and city in the region suffers instead of succeeding.

The leadership role really rests with Fayette County. It has the most at stake: the most jobs, the largest residential base, the state's flagship university and corporate presences. Fayette's leaders could, indeed, make a move of historic significance by agreeing to look beyond their immediate loss in sharing payroll taxes, to a future in which the entire region their county anchors is able to embellish its reputation and capacity. It's out of such foresight that the true winners of the 21st century will emerge.