Your Opinion: Conversation needed about community attributes

Dear Editor:

Your Oct. 24 editorial asks several questions of our community and its leaders. The one closest to my own heart is, "Are we complacent?"

I do not believe Jefferson City, as a whole, is complacent. There is not a smugness in the acceptance of the state of our community. Rather, I believe there is a sense of defeatism - "this is the way it always has been and probably will always be" - that is entirely too prevalent in our capital city.

We take for granted the current positive situations we find ourselves in: low unemployment, high levels of health coverage, being the home of a historic university, among others. We tend to do very little to improve upon those positives.

We take big or small wins, or big and small losses, in stride without truly understanding why they happen. There is neither an aggressive or proactive approach to protecting our current jobs and citizens, preparing for our future jobs and citizens, or even in staying ahead of competing communities at the local, regional, and national levels for those jobs and citizens.

Finally, there seems to be a lack of prideful leadership in our community to represent to our visitors, our investors, and, most importantly, to our current citizens that we are a thriving community which takes care of itself.

Personally, I have been behind the curtains of leadership in our community many times and know our leaders waste too much time chasing positive critical mass of large inertia projects - which are rarities these days. Meanwhile the negative critical mass of small business closures, hundreds of properties remaining on the market unsold, and more of our residents - of all ages - pining to leave the City of Jefferson continues every day.

I feel just as responsible for these losses as I expect those who are paid or elected to be responsible for them feel. The defeatism can only be countered with victories. Perhaps today's community leaders will turn things around. Perhaps we will all have this conversation every couple of years on this page. Or perhaps more of us will say "enough!" and seek to earn the victories, however small, needed to make this community one full of pride, full of optimism, and full of success stories which other communities look to with envy.

I look forward to that day and the responses of my fellow Jeffersonians.