Who’s in Charge Here?
How do Owensboro and Daviess county get ready for an even more challenging future? Not, we’d suggest, by throwing their traditional caution and conservatism overboard. Nor by failing to honor the bursts of creativity and imagination that created the community college and RiverPark Center and went out to successfully land a “biggie” like Scott Paper.
What Owensboro-Daviess County needs now, in our judgment, is a more expansive view of who can lead, who needs to be consulted and involved.
Take corporate leadership. In the 1960s, General Electric Company and Texas Gas Transmission Corporation were relied on for community leadership. Today Texas Gas carries on a sparkling array of civic outreach. Yet, as the GE experience reminds one, economic change generated outside a city’s borders can destroy a business-city relationship that once looked like the Rock of Gibraltar.
Today, more corporations need to be asked to accept major responsibility. Some are more ready than you think. Corporations homegrown and still growing, like Terry Woodward’s WaxWorks, are becoming as important on the local scene as any traditional utility or megaindustry.
Among the Owensboro area’s colleges, substantial expertise is building in multiple fields—sometimes insufficiently appreciated in the community.
On the political front, voters are casting aside the old politics with the election of people like David Adkisson as mayor of Owensboro, or Buzz Norris as county judge-executive. Each has a bagful of bright ideas. But neither of those two men seems to believe he’s the whole show. As Adkisson himself said when he first ran, the community needs to unleash the talents and energies of more citizens: “We cannot afford any spectators.”
Every community, to move forward, needs a vision. Cities without vision are all but certain to fail in the harshly competitive new national and international economy.
But in today’s world, when every civic group, every ethnic enclave, every geographic area believes it’s entitled to a voice, building vision is tougher than ever. What’s the secret? We suggest it’s including people, being willing to hear their concerns, taking their suggestions seriously.
The shots in Owensboro used to be called by a crusty old-boy network that met informally—oftentimes at the Campbell Club—to cut deals affecting everyone. As in cities across the country, that model no longer works.
The decisive change in Owensboro was signaled by the 1982 formation of Leadership Owensboro. The program has continued since, a deliberate effort to build a network of new leaders, within business, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations. The program’s had 300 graduates and is still growing.
But Leadership Owensboro’s outreach hasn’t been perfect. Its alumni haven’t reached out aggressively enough to stimulate community discussions of critical issues. Sign-ups among farmers, ministers, and grassroots groups have been too rare. If Leadership Owensboro is to build the region’s leadership for the 21st century, it will need more of all those.
Even with broader leadership, there’s danger that the good ship Owensboro, bearing down on certain critical issues, will find itself bogging down, scraping bottom, taking on water like a carelessly piloted sternwheeler of old.
It’s time for a wake up call. Owensboro and Daviess County need to think much harder about their assets, their liabilities, and how to broaden leadership.
Owensboro is unlikely to ever again be declared an All-America City, for example, until it clears some of the most dangerous rocks in the stream—the stereotypes various parts of the community have about each other.
The urban-rural stereotypes may be the most perilous of all. From rural interests, we heard: “People in Owensboro aren’t interested in us at all—except when they want our money. City people don’t work very hard. But they live pretty well. Agriculture has become just a stepchild.”
City people sounded just as estranged: “Farmers still practice a barn-raising culture—they’ll show up at the drop of a hat to help each other, but not anyone else. They’re not members of the Chamber of Commerce. They’re only concerned about being watchdogs.”
The 1990 merger vote, we concluded, was less about the critically important issue of consolidation of services, taxes, and efficiency than it was about feelings of alienation, about power. Even merger proponents said not enough people had been brought into the thinking and planning process early on.
And from a leading opponent, we heard there wasn’t that much actual disagreement about merging of services. The gut problem, he said, was that the “city crowd” was trying to put one over on rural Daviess County, to strip “county people” of “their” government. From that base, a whole range of antiestablishment feelings, in city and rural areas alike, rose to quash the merger.
A passel of other stereotypes hobbles the Owensboro-Daviess County area—professional versus working class, black versus white, and especially in a community with one of America’s slowest rates of population turnover, the few newcomers versus the big majority of lifetime residents. All too often, major community decisions in Owensboro-Daviess County “appear to turn less on what was said than who said it.”
If truth be told, the stereotypes are probably less extreme and severe than a generation ago. But they’re a massive barrier reef leaving no safe harbor for honest conversation and productive action. The challenge now is to carve a channel through those stereotypes, and probably not so much by frontal attack as by getting people to work together on all sorts of projects, building constructive interaction, building trust. Trust, in time, will drive out suspicion. Interaction softens the isolation.
We believe the Messenger-Inquirer needs to play a major role in this transition. Friends and critics alike, in our conversations, kept honing on the paper’s relationship to the community.
We need to confess, up front, our grounds for liking the paper. It invited us to town, gave us free rein to write an independent account, free of editorial direction. Not many newspapers in cities this size would take that kind of chance.
And it is accurate to say that not many papers in the Messenger-lnquirer’s circulation size are of comparable quality, from its appearance to the range of national and international news it covers. If one of the national newspaper chains bought up the paper, you could expect a strictly bottom-line mentality to take over and a lot of the paper’s spunk to fade away.
But the relationship between a locally owned paper and its home community is intimate, fragile, as prone to misunderstandings as the ties among members of any family. A simple error can get read as a slight. And it’s too easy to blame the paper for reporting unpopular or bad news when it’s only doing its job.
In a single newspaper market, a town that even lacks its own television stations, a special burden of responsibility falls on the Messenger-lnquirer. What it fails to print won’t get reported. The issues it fails to raise oftentimes won’t get debated.
The paper may not have to do a lot of investigatory journalism, trying to prove scandals and wrongdoing in high places. But it has an obligation to do what we’d call exploratory journalism—looking carefully at trends, causes, and prospects on every front from the complexion of local industry to the quality of the local schools and colleges to environmental hazards. Based on that kind of thoughtful, quality reporting, the paper has a compelling opportunity to get people thinking harder, and more honestly, about the problems the community faces.
We heard legitimate complaints raised about the Messenger-lnquirer. Several interviewees said they’d like more coverage of state government and economic trends in other regions of Kentucky. They wanted to see the editorial page reflect more local opinion. Rural people felt the paper was simply not respecting their point of view. Others said the African-American community shouldn’t just be covered when it starts to raise some modest hell—that ongoing events in black neighborhoods need coverage. And it was suggested that in a community where women rarely win office or get top business posts, the paper should be on a constant lookout for legitimate ways to give rising female leaders a clearer community profile.
The paper should respond to those kinds of criticism. If new, unconventional, different voices can’t be heard on its pages, where can they be?
But the newspaper can’t do it all itself. The community has to make a vigorous effort to overcome the old biases and stereotypes, to enable and empower more kinds of people in spirited planning and action on topics ranging from downtown development to agricultural land protection. For better or worse, the Messenger-lnquirer will be the critical means of communication as the region learns to talk to itself far more effectively.
That’s a tough challenge, but we see no reason it can’t be met. Learning from its errors and building on its breakthroughs, the Owensboro area has every prospect, through the l990s, to set a high standard of civic cohesion that works for city and countryside alike.
Next: Recipe for Success: Learn from Others, Support Innovation