In the midst of a crisis, like the one we’re in now with schools and most businesses shut to try to prevent the spread of coronavirus, it’s good to know our government leaders are looking ahead to plan for a brighter future.

Last year, before the coronavirus had been identified in China, Albany County Executive Daniel McCoy had convened the Albany County Business Advisory Board, which unanimously endorsed short-term and long-term steps to change the county’s economic trajectory.

Camoin Associates completed a 200-page Strategic Economic Development Plan that was unveiled on April 7 and is posted to the county’s website.

Kevin O’Connor, the county’s new director of Economic Development, Conservation and Planning, said, “Albany County is one of the only counties in the region that doesn’t have a countywide economic development entity and this blueprint here will put us on the path to get that and hopefully be well positioned to help business recover from the COVID crisis.”

Reporter Sean Mulkerrin takes a deep dive in this week’s Enterprise, looking at changes wrought in neighboring Schenectady County where a public-benefit corporation has, as the report puts it, “coalesce[ed] leadership to create economic opportunities, attract and retain businesses, generate new revenue, and diversify the county’s tax base.”

Albany County could use that sort of coalition since the report says that currently more than 50 groups do some part of the work yet there is a huge gap.

Ray Gillen, who chairs the Schenectady Metroplex Development Authority, established 22 years ago, uses a model of investing in the community rather than “chasing smokestacks.”

States and municipalities, according to a 2016 Brookings Institution study, spend as much as $50 billion to $80 billion every year on tax breaks and other economic incentives “despite a mountain of evidence showing that tax incentives produce mostly marginal returns.”

We heartily endorse the model used by the Schenectady Metroplex, investing in up to 100 economic-development projects a year, creating capital assets in the county, which broaden the property-tax base, increase sales-tax revenues, and create jobs.

However, another aspect of Albany County’s plan that Mulkerrin delved into concerns us. The plan’s method for implementing the new county-wide economic strategy is to create a local development corporation.

LDCs, as they are called, are private, not-for-profit entities that, according to the state comptroller, “are exempt from many of the constitutional and statutory provisions that guide the operations and financial transactions conducted by local governments,” such as public-procurement laws that require a competitive process for awarding contracts, the Freedom of Information Law, and the Open Meetings Law.

O’Connor told The Enterprise that transparency will be the “hallmark of any entity that is created in the county for economic development.” We’d like some written guarantee of that in the charter of the yet-to-be-created LDC.

“Every politician I’ve ever met has talked about transparency, but they don’t necessarily act that way,” says Mark Grimm, a Guilderland Republican and Albany County legislator. Government fails, he said, when the public isn’t paying attention.

We also agree with Grimm’s view on the need for diversity on the board of the not-yet-formed LDC. For all the report’s talk about inclusivity, Grimm said, he counted 16 men (one of whom is a person of color) and two women on the advisory board. The board of the LDC should include small-business owners, people of color, people who work at not-for-profits, and more women.

One of the goals of the plan that most pleases us is the call for a countywide comprehensive plan, which the report calls “a critical first step.” For decades on this page, we have called for a master plan — a single united vision — for Albany County.

“Comprehensive plans, which define a community’s vision and establish long-range goals and land-use strategies for achieving that vision, directly impact economic development,” says the report. We know this to be true from the decades of coverage we’ve given to master plans in the towns and villages we cover.

We believe the report itself could serve as a useful starting point for developing the county’s comprehensive land-use plan. The plan’s third volume gives a worthwhile overview of the current state of transportation in the county (roads and bridges, freight, public transit, and bicycle infrastructure), of water and wastewater, of energy (both non-renewable and renewable sources), and of telecommunication.

The plan also looks at land use. Given the towns The Enterprise covers, we are particularly interested in agricultural, residential, and conservation lands.

Agricultural uses — the county has nearly 500 farms — comprise approximately 7 percent of the total area in Albany County, the report says, and are concentrated in the towns of Guilderland, Berne, Knox, Westerlo, Rensselaerville, New Scotland, Coeymans, and Bethlehem. Agricultural uses are sparse or completely absent in the town of Colonie and the cities of Albany, Green Island, Cohoes, and Watervliet.

In 2018, Albany County updated its Agriculture and Farmland Protection Plan, which came up with an economic development plan, summarizing challenges that farmers face in Albany County. These include the high cost of doing business, competition for land resources, the need for market and economic development, the need for better roads and better internet service, and help for new farmers. Nearly 92 percent of farmers are 45 or older.

Large commercial parcels located in rural areas are often associated with agricultural and tourism-related uses, the report says, giving the example of Indian Ladder Farms in New Scotland.

Conservation uses comprise about 5 percent of the total area in Albany County, the report says, and are concentrated in the more rural towns of Rensselaerville (7,575 acres), Berne (7,170 acres), Guilderland (3,330 acres), and New Scotland (1,625 acres).

Vacant land uses comprise 18 percent of the total land area in Albany County, the report says, and are relatively evenly distributed throughout the county, including vacant commercial, industrial, and residential lots. Abandoned agricultural lands are concentrated in the towns of Berne (1,330 acres) and New Scotland (1,025 acres).

A comprehensive plan for Albany County, working in conjunction with its municipalities, is essential for economic growth and to see that future development is sustainably and strategically located.

What these figures make clear — 7 percent of the land in the county is farmed, 5 percent is conserved, and there are fewer than 3,000 acres of vacant farmland — is that open spaces need to be preserved. Open spaces are vital for  the future of our planet for everything from wildlife preservation to clean water. Once land is developed, it is rarely, if ever, returned to open space.

We’ve long lobbied on this page for county legislation to preserve the Helderberg escarpment, which could continue, as it has for centuries, to serve as an economic driver of tourism as well as a means of preserving important natural habitats.

Now is the time to act.