Commentary: I was a San Diego County supervisor for 26 years. The local level is where things get done.

Well, 26 years go by really fast. But this last year seems like it took forever!

This has been a heck of a way to end 26 years on the county Board of Supervisors. But in a way, it’s also shown the resiliency of our county.

When I first joined this board, our finances were in dire shape, our infrastructure was crumbling, our employees had gone without pay raises for years, and morale had cratered.

But slowly and surely, our board began to right the ship. Today, our finances are strong and those infamous budget reserves that we get criticized for, well, they are what we leaned on to get us through this past difficult year.

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Our county facilities are energy-efficient and customer-friendly buildings, and we are constantly upgrading or replacing older structures to meet the needs of today.

We have invested in our county parks, and I’m proud to have overseen the development of the three regional parks in our district. We will soon add a new community park in Lincoln Acres, campgrounds in Otay Mesa and the Tijuana River Valley, and improvements to our recently opened Bike Skills Park in Bonita, which has gained national acclaim.

And San Diego’s great year-round weather made this the ideal place to develop a scenic bike path around San Diego Bay. The Bayshore Bikeway is nearly complete, and I’m proud to have championed its development over the last several years.

But we need to nurture the mind and spirit, not just the body, so we built three libraries in my district in Bonita, Imperial Beach and Lincoln Acres. They have become the hubs of the community, where people can gather for computer access, classes, meetings and events.

However, we know that not all people were living well. That’s why we adopted our Live Well San Diego vision to create healthy, safe and thriving communities.

Our seniors and our foster children are the most vulnerable members of society, and I was proud to work with former Supervisor Ron Roberts on the creation of the San Pasqual Academy, the first residential campus for foster children in the nation. We streamlined adoptions, and, together with Supervisor Nathan Fletcher, we improved our child welfare system.

The Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Initiative has helped countless grandparents who were suddenly faced with raising their own grandchildren and navigating through a confusing set of laws and processes that came with that responsibility.

It’s expensive to live in San Diego and many people have great needs, so we improved access to the CalFresh food assistance program and Medi-Cal health coverage. Affordable housing is hard to find in the region, so, with the leadership of Supervisor Dianne Jacob, we flexed the county’s financial muscle to create a Housing Innovation Trust Fund that will lead to the construction of hundreds of homes for families, people with disabilities, and veterans.

But it’s not just about the facilities we’ve built and the projects we’ve developed. It’s about the people whose lives we’ve touched.

It’s the pride of watching foster youth who had been placed into our system graduate from the San Pasqual Academy to cheers and shouts of support from their family and friends. It’s the joy of watching kids whose families can’t afford to visit Yosemite or Yellowstone play in the regional parks and playgrounds we’ve built for them. And it’s the incredible courage of two women, Milena Sellers and Maria Keever, whose young sons were brutally murdered two decades earlier. We worked with them and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to build an outdoor activity center in Imperial Beach to honor the memory of Jonathan Sellers and Charlie Keever.

Those are some of the memories I’ll take with me.

As a local elected official, I have often been asked about running for higher office. But it’s never really interested me. I’ve been fortunate over the years to have served my fellow San Diegans first as a councilman, then mayor, of my hometown of Chula Vista. And then as a county supervisor serving South County.

The higher the office, the more politics you deal with. It’s here, at the local level, where you can really get things done. It’s where you can check daily on the progress of projects or meet with people regularly to learn about their concerns and ideas.

I’ve been blessed to have had the opportunity to serve my community, and I look forward to staying involved and helping make this a great region for all to live, work, play and pray.

Cox served as a San Diego County supervisor for 26 years before leaving office this week.