Wanda and I attended Tuesday’s Blue Springs City Council meeting on a topic that is important to both of us and to most of the citizens of Blue Springs. I shared the following thoughts with Mayor Ross and the Council.
“Mayor Ross and members of the City Council, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this evening. In addition to today’s historic presidential inauguration, my wife Wanda and I are celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary today. Still we both felt the issue I am here to speak about tonight was too important for our community to wait until the February meeting.
Harry S. Truman once said, ‘Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.’
For many years, the elected leaders in Blue Springs held fast to a plan for Adams Dairy Parkway that resulted in a lack of development and growth on our premiere north-south corridor.
Martin Luther King Jr. once said that, ‘Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.’ Our community had faith four years ago when forward-thinking leaders supported changes to the existing plan for the parkway. Because of those changes, the retail and restaurants long desired by the residents of Blue Springs are coming as well as thousands of high-paying jobs.
In my opinion, the behavior of Councilmen Fowler, Solon and Shaver at the last council meeting was an embarrassment to our community and risked the progress many have worked so hard to achieve.
Mayor Ross, I respectfully encourage you to have the council reconsider the actions taken at the last council meeting regarding the Parkway Place and Parkway West projects. Just as you ask the council to address each other with respect, insist that they also treat those people investing in our community with the same respect.
I know that consensus building is important to you because you spoke of it often during your campaign for mayor. We both know this is important to our citizens because of comments heard at the thousands of households we visited and the town hall meetings we participated in during our respective campaigns. I hope you will guide the council to evaluate projects on their merits, weigh the costs versus the benefits to the community, and let go of the unrealistic expectations of an 18-year-old plan that the rest of the council and our community let go of long ago.”
I encourage you to share your thoughts on this topic with your elected leaders on www.AboutBlueSprings.com and www.examiner.net.