The more things change...
No more obstacle course along Elm Street on Sunday mornings. No more faded paint atop the St. Luke thrift shop. No more tumbleweeds instead of customers’ cars in the hardware store parking lot. No more ruts in the Pilsen road.
It’s enough to make you think we’re not in Kansas (or, at least, in Marion) anymore.
Then there’s Dan Holub, waxing poetic with almost bleeding-heart fervor over the loss of social service funding — only to quickly return to a more familiar refrain about the Keystone Pipeline and all manner of other tax abatements that will leave the county no choice but to raise taxes or, heaven forbid, spend less.
City government, meanwhile, has a new mayor, a new administrator, a new developer, and supposedly a new attitude, all with the same issue as last year: Is the much taller restroom and stage complex (shown at right) that would replace Central Park’s current gazebo a soaring achievement or a towering folly?
Rumor has it one white elephant the city has long been paying to maintain may finally have a prospective buyer, yet just as that happens, the city ends up with another, the Bown-Corby building abandoned by Butler Community College.
Meanwhile, we applaud our new mayor’s attempts, however misinterpreted they might be, to return civility to government. We just hope civility isn’t a code word for squelching the ideas of all but a handful. Like an idea or hate it, but don’t hate without proposing an alternative.
— ERIC MEYER