John Daggett is thinking big, he’s thinking long-term, he’s thinking about what’s good for us.

Too bad the odds are stacked against him.

Daggett is the executive director of Embrace Northern Colorado, an organization that, among its goals, would like to see the establishment of a regional authority that speaks for us all with one voice.

This new authority could serve as a cross-jurisdictional planning commission of sorts for Fort Collins, Greeley, Loveland and other Northern Colorado municipalities.

Its members would be elected.

It would tackle water, transportation, housing, job-creation and other issues that relate to the region’s growth and over which we now sometimes find ourselves fighting rather than cooperating and coordinating.

Daggett is a familiar figure to many. A former city of Fort Collins transit official who spent nearly six years as the regional initiatives director at the North Front Range Metropolitan Planning Organization, he knows of what he speaks. He’s also been pushing regionalism in his role at Embrace Colorado since 2008, so he’s broken plenty of bread with plenty of folks on this issue in the years since.