Now, the work begins.

After a lengthy effort, the results of the “What Could BG Be” effort are in.

The program entailed gathering input on what people envision, and hope, the future of our community will be.

The impetus for the effort was the fact that Warren County is growing by proverbial leaps and bounds, with an expected 200,000 residents living here by 2050.

And as the saying goes, failing to be prepared is preparing to fail.

“Are we going to solve every problem, no,” Warren County Judge-Executive Doug Gorman said at an unveiling event Tuesday. “But if we don’t make a plan for 2050, it will go to us and it will change.”

The “What Could BG Be” program ran from mid-February to mid-March. Members of the public were invited to share their ideas for how the community should change and grow over the next 25 years.

The program received 3,940 unique ideas from residents and over 1 million “agree” or “disagree” votes, according to whatcouldbgbe.com. The categories that received the most ideas were arts and culture at 644 ideas, infrastructure and transportation at 574 and community identity with 479.

Some of the responses were obviously unserious, but the majority showed a thoughtful approach to determining what our community should look like.

What ideas are unpractical, already in the works or should be added to the planning agenda will now be determined by our community leaders.

What those may be are obviously too early to determine at this point.

We commend the many people in the community for putting together and participating in this initiative, including Innovation Engine, Warren County government, the nonprofit Computational Democracy Project, more than 100 community leaders and Jigsaw, a division of Google.

We believe such planning efforts will pay dividends down the road.