A New Year, A New Opportunity
Maybe a 'rebirth' in city hall is what we need

Bruce Springsteen wrote the rock classic, “Born in the USA.” If I were to write one, I guess you’d have to title it “Born in City Hall.” I don’t suppose it will be a blockbuster hit, but it is a true story, and it epitomizes a new kind of needed patriotism.

I actually was born in city hall in Frenchburg, Kentucky. Like so many of the poor from the Appalachian region, my parents later uprooted and left for jobs in Ohio. Years later, I was on the phone with the city clerk of that small town in Eastern Kentucky. We were discussing their town’s new project: the renovation of city hall.

Later, out of curiosity, I asked her what had become of the old hospital where I was born. “Oh,” she gasped, “that’s what we’re renovating into city hall!”

That’s made for good story-telling all these years, but I’m beginning to believe it symbolizes much more in these harrowing times when good citizenship is an elusive and ill-defined entity.

I’m struck by the irony that, while the city hall of my birth was once a hospital, you could now pretty much say that city halls throughout this country are on life support.

How does one become a good local citizen in an era when local place is so diffused that even that bastion of solid New England perfection – Vermont – is complaining of newcomers spoiling the landscape by demanding that Wal-Mart be allowed in?

The fact is that people can live and work anywhere. City and community leaders have to work harder than ever to create places where people will want to live.

Throughout history, cities at various times have been magnets for an influx of masses. Cities in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois were the place to go for ill-educated Southerners who needed good jobs. And, indeed, they found them.

Eventually, however, the factories closed down and moved their operations to low-cost southern states. They found an eager supply of workers, and a trend began that saw people moving back to those places.

Today, the South is again losing jobs to… well, we’ve all heard about NAFTA and outsourcing.

The quality of life we enjoy today revolves around our vast array of choices – cheaper consumer goods tailored to our needs, a proliferation of information about anything we want to know and communities that we can take or leave.

The problem with the latter is that we are too willing to leave or criticize without realizing that communities and governments don’t run well in isolation. You cannot run a community via a Web site.

As one mayor said, “A lot of things are virtual, but the last time I looked you still needed real fire trucks to fight real fires.”

No matter how mobile we become, no matter how far into cyberspace we can go, we will still live somewhere, raise our children somewhere, go to church somewhere and have neighbors whom we adore or abhor somewhere.

Surveys tell us that Americans yearn for the warmth and strength of community life. Let’s borrow from the days of old when city hall was the gathering spot for community life and the place of necessary governance that is the basis of our life with one another.

But we can also make city hall a thoroughly modern phenomenon. Because of our borderless world – one in which many people have choices as to where they live and work – let’s set about creating “intentional cities,” resolving to make the place we choose to live and work the best it can be.

Being intentional in building our cities means paying attention once again to how our cities are run. It means taking advantage of what the world has to offer through good examples of city-building instead of ducking into our homes and escaping through non-reality “reality” TV shows.

It means deliberate planning for a future that will increasingly center upon the needs of people – all people from every walk of life.

All of us born in the USA have been given the opportunity to make the best of freedom and do our part to keep representative democracy strong. It is time to commit to it.

Sylvia L. Lovely is executive director and CEO of the Kentucky League of Cities.
editorial@lanereport.com

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