Linn County Supervisor Linda Langston was installed as 2013-14 president of the National Association of Counties (NACo) during the 2013 NACo Annual Conference: County Solutions and Idea Marketplace in Tarrant County/Fort Worth, Texas. Langston is the first Iowan to serve as NACo President in its almost 80 year history.
Active in NACo since 2003, Langston was first elected as a NACo officer in July 2011. She has held many NACo leadership positions, including chair of NACo’s Health Steering Committee, chair of the Healthy Counties Advisory Board, chair of the Finance Committee and chair of the Arts and Culture Commission. She served as a member of the Health Reform Working Group, which was responsible for ensuring that the interests of county government were reflected in national health reform which later became the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Langston, whose home county was devastated by floods in 2008, said her presidential initiative will be: Ready and Resilient Counties: Prepare, Respond and Thrive. The initiative will focus on building a community’s capacity to be ready, resilient, agile and adaptive in the face of natural, manmade and economic disaster.
“It is not a matter of if, but when your county will come face to face with disaster,” Langston said during her presidential acceptance speech delivered moments after being sworn in. “Will you be ready?”
Langston said her goal is to build a toolkit of information and resources that present counties with best practices so their communities are prepared when disaster strikes. Under Langston’s leadership, NACo will sponsor training, peer networking and resource development to support county officials and other public- and private-sector partners seeking to promote local approaches to community and economic resilience.
This initiative will highlight opportunities for county leaders and other stakeholders to build internal and external capacity to engage in innovative, multi-disciplinary partnerships. Additionally, county leaders and partners will learn about tools and implementation techniques critical to achieving these goals.
Langston will lead NACo’s efforts on Capitol Hill to protect the tax-exempt status of municipal bonds and other legislative and federal funding priorities such as reauthorization of the farm bill, immigration reform, and transportation/infrastructure funding.
Langston was first elected to the Linn County, Iowa Board of Supervisors in 2002. She serves on a variety of boards, commissions and community organizations including Chair of the East Central Iowa Council of Governments (ECICOG), the Linn County Public Health Board, Downtown Rotary and the Arc of East Central Iowa.
Prior to being elected to the Board of Supervisors, Langston was a museum director and a psychotherapist in private practice, as well as a small business owner.
Born in Chicago, but raised in Iowa, Langston graduated from Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois with a degree in history and is a 2007 graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government for State and Local Officials. Linda and her husband Dave have two grown sons.
For more information, contact Jim Philipps at 202.942.4220 or [email protected]
The National Association of Counties (NACo) is the only national organization that represents county governments in the United States. Founded in 1935, NACo provides essential services to the nation’s 3,069 counties. NACo advances issues with a unified voice before the federal government, improves the public's understanding of county government, assists counties in finding and sharing innovative solutions through education and research, and provides value-added services to save counties and taxpayers money. For more information about NACo, visit www.naco.org.