The announcement was made last week that Scully Estates is moving its office to Hillsboro.

Blame has been thrown around but here are the facts: Scully Estates paid $7,000 — full price — for a .7-acre lot in Hillsboro Heights, the city-owned business park. Agent Doug Sharp of Scully Estates offered the City of Marion $3,000, which the city turned down, for a similarly priced lot in Marion Industrial Park.

According to Hillsboro City Administrator Larry Paine and the real estate sales agreement, the City of Hillsboro only offered free utility hookups to the company for locating to its business park. Paine said the City of Hillsboro does not have a set policy but follows a similar rule of thumb as Marion. Therefore, Scully Estates didn’t qualify for any other perks.

The question has to be asked: How badly did Scully Estates want to stay in Marion?

It seems to me that a company of this size would not find it necessary to quibble over a few thousand dollars.

It’s a sad day when we lose a company that has been here more than 130 years. But it’s also a sad day when a company wants to leave.

Instead of letting this event divide our community, we should band together and figure out ways to keep businesses in Marion.

A year ago at this time, this newspaper asked our readers questions about Marion’s future.

“Where do you see this community in 10 years? How about 20 years?”

“What businesses do we want to see in the business and industrial parks?”

“What will be in our downtown?”

Do you know how many responses we received when we asked these questions?

None.

Zero.

Nada.

What does that tell us?

Does anybody care about this community?

What is the problem — lack of vision, poor planning, no forward thinking?

I think our biggest problem is apathy. We believe it is somebody else’s problem.

“We pay city officials to make this happen. It’s their fault.”

And there we go with the blame game again.

Some local business owners stepped forward a few years ago and invested their own money in a group to help with economic development. But they can’t do it alone.

Marion Chamber of Commerce offers support to its members but it can’t do it alone.

One of our most valuable resources is our businesses. When a town has a solid business base with a proper mix of manufacturing, retail, and service businesses, everything else will fall into place. People will move here to work. Schools will have steady enrollment.

The more people we have in our community, the more opportunity there will be for additional businesses.

It’s all connected.

We have two choices here — we can sit around, complain about what has happened, and be part of the problem or we can work together and find a solution.

Our future is in our hands — and shouldn’t be controlled by another community.

So, what do you think? Do you have ideas? Let us know about them. We’ll print them.

Let’s get the ball rolling.

— susan berg