by Keith Schneider
October 17, 2011
Owensboro, Kentucky, May 2036 – On a sky blue Ohio River morning Mayor Denise Rose walks from her home on Baylor Place to a station platform on Frederica Street where she boards the sleek red and white Owensboro streetcar. The 15-year-old line links the shopping district at Southtown Boulevard to a downtown loop bounded by Third Street, Hathaway, and Ninth Street.
The ride, on dedicated tracks in Frederica’s wide center, is inexpensive and worth every penny. The view from the clean glass windows is a tour of a mid-size southern city founded in the 19th century, and renowned in the 21st century for risk-taking, innovation, collegiality, and hospitality.
Just beyond the line’s Southtown Boulevard terminus is Daviess County’s thriving farm sector, historically among Kentucky’s most productive and profitable. A new generation of growers is tapping multiple markets that includes Asia’s unyielding demand for grain, Owensboro’s own biotechnology sector that converts plant genetic material for a $35 billion global pharmaceutical market, and for switchgrass and other sources of plant sugars to convert to biofuels.
During the last 25 years, the joint Owensboro-Daviess County Food Policy Council, a panel of citizens, market gardeners, academics, and food industry executives also fostered the investments and connections that generated a $150 million-a-year local foods sector that employs 1,000 people to produce, transport, and sell fresh food produced in Daviess County.
Local food and the region’s recreational facilities kids say the swimming lake and park are great during the ever-hotter summers help reduce obesity and lower levels of heart disease, arthritis, diabetes, and other illnesses connected to being inactive and overweight. That, in turn, has improved civic vitality and reduced health insurance rates, which makes employment expenses and the cost of doing business in Owensboro more competitive.