For his nearly three decades of service, Bruno Talevi was named the Otsego County Planner of the Year last week.

Otsego County planner Diane Carlton said that Talevi was an advocate for planning when the stance was unpopular and that he was unanimously selected by the board as this year's recipient.

"When he started at this twenty-eight years ago, planing wasn't thought of as necessary," she said. "He's such a gracious person. Even when he gave his acceptance speech he remarked on the staff instead of on himself."

Talevi said most towns didn't have land use regulations or rules set for subdivisions, but now the major municipalities and most of the smaller ones have laws.

"This is a source of enormous personal gratification for me," he said.

Talevi has been a county resident for forty-three years. For sixteen years he served simultaneously on the newly formed Otsego County planning board and the Oneonta capital budget and planning commission.

"It was county representative Joseph Kenyon who grabbed the bull by the horns and formed the planning board in 1969 or 1970. It was by necessity. The state was heavily encouraging zoning ordinances then," Talevi said. "It gives local communities greater control over what happens in their own backyard."

"The Otsego County planning board doesn't get involved with the economics of development in a community. We look at traffic control, adequacy of water, emergency provisions like fire trucks and ambulances and the impact a proposed project will have on the environment."

He credits planners Diane Carlton and Terry Bliss for the counsel they provide for the board.

The biggest controversy he's seen in his time was the development of Glimmerglass Condominiums, which took nearly two years of "going back and forth" before the situation was resolved "to most people's satisfaction."

Local communities have been more forthcoming in soliciting advice from the Otsego County planning board, and this makes Talevi happy.

"I've enjoyed being on the board," he said. "We've come so far. And I think we've done a great deal of good for this county."