Last week was a particularly newsy time in Wallowa County.

So you can be forgiven for skimming over a story from last week that has the potential to make a huge difference for the county for years to come: On Wednesday, Oct. 4, Joe Basile of Wallowa Resources presented to the county commissioners the final draft of the Wallowa County Community Energy Strategic Plan. Basile, the community energy program manager at Wallowa Resources, said he hopes the commissioners can adopt it at their Oct. 18 meeting.

It should be an easy call for the commissioners to approve the plan: For starters, it represents more than a year’s worth of work from a community leadership team. And, although there will be challenges implementing some of the suggestions in the plan, it sets up a framework to help get that work done — in particular, having the plan in place makes it easier to attract the kind of grant funding that will help pay for some of the plan’s suggestions.

Of course, it’s not unusual for governmental bodies to accept a plan like this, profusely thank the participants for their hard work, and then quietly set it on a shelf, where it quietly gathers dust.

This plan won’t go that quietly: This is a working document that includes a literal plan for implementation. For starters, the leadership team that helped craft the plan now will transition into an implementation advisory group to help push the plan forward.)

In Wallowa County, which sits at the end of the line in terms of energy, the need for this plan should be obvious: Rural communities often face a lack of energy access, high energy prices and can be subject to prolonged power outages.

But the county’s relative isolation also means that, at least to some extent, it can take matters into its own hands.

The leadership team creating the plan identified 34 recommended actions, and selected seven of those to take precedence for implementation. The proposal to move forward with a so-called “Microgrid Resiliency Corridor Project” has, justifiably, caught much of the attention thus far, and you can see why: The notion of “microgrids” built around the cities of Wallowa, Joseph and Enterprise, all powered by renewable sources and designed to increase the county’s energy resilience, is extremely promising.

But some of the remaining six actions could lead to quick victories, such as the idea of creating a mobile countywide weatherization team that will go to households and tackle basic projects to help them use energy more efficiently. Another idea calls for installation of solar-powered crosswalk signals and streetlights. And another idea listed among the first seven — to help irrigators understand the benefits of modernized systems — could not just save water (and money, considering the power bills that go along with irrigation), but could also create opportunities for additional sources of hydropower.

You can read the draft plan for yourself by going to the online version of this editiorial at wallowa.com and clicking on the link that will allow you to download the report. (If you’re reading this online, just click here.)

You’ll find that the report makes for compelling reading, if you have any interest in Wallowa County’s energy future (and, of course, you should: Consider, for just one example, that more than a third of the county’s households are considered energy-burdened, meaning that more than 6% of the household’s income goes to pay home energy bills).

It may be true that Wallowa County sits at the end of the line. But, as the report makes clear, the county has opportunities to lead the way to a brighter and cleaner energy future — and it could also set an example for other rural communities facing similar questions.