Construction on a new convention center and 150-room hotel to replace some of the Executive Inn’s 591 rooms is scheduled to start later this year. A $385 million medical center is under construction east of the bypass. Airport and riverport leaders are developing new plans to more intensively leverage the region’s location at the center of the country, and its existing complement of transport and warehouse companies, as a national shipment and logistics center. New highways are under construction to fully link Owensboro to Interstates 64 and 65.

But in the first chapter of What’s Done, What’s Next: A Civic Pact, a fresh assessment of Owensboro’s prospects, researchers from Neal Peirce’s Citistates Group also found that in an era of rising energy prices, globalization, intense competition, stagnant incomes, and diminished government resources Owensboro’s work to set a stronger economic and cultural foundation can’t rest.

On Monday, July 18, at 4:30 p.m. at Owensboro Community and Technical College in the Advanced Technology Center, the public is invited to a presentation of the findings from chapter one of the three-part What’s Done, What’s Next: A Civic Pact, by journalist Keith Schneider. Schneider, a member of the Citistates Group and the report’s lead researcher, has been a New York Times writer since 1981.

Refreshments will be served. Send RSVP to Shelly Nichols at shelly.nichols@plfo.org or 270-685-2652.

Following Schneider’s presentation Citistates CEO Curtis Johnson, a researcher for the Owensboro study, will lead an interactive discussion with an expert panel that includes Gabrielle Gray, International Bluegrass Music Museum; Hugh Haydon, Kentucky BioProcessing; Karen Miller, Owensboro-Daviess County Convention and Visitors Bureau; and Madison Silvert, Greater Owensboro Economic Development Corporation. Members of the audience are invited to participate with questions and comments.

The first chapter of What’s Done, What’s Next: A Civic Pact updates the 1991 report on Owensboro-Daviess County by Peirce and Johnson. Findings from the next two chapters, which focus on a) how Owensboro manages itself, and b) makes recommendations for anticipating new market trends and responding to the 21st century’s velocity of change, will be made public in similar presentation in August and September.

What: Presentation of Report Findings
When: July 18, 2011, 4:30 p.m.
Where: Owensboro Community and Technical College, Advanced Technology Center

Citistates Group

Keith Schneider
kschneider@citistates.com
(231) 920-0745

Public Life Foundation

Rodney Berry, President
rodney.berry@plfo.org
(270) 685-2652

This year the Public Life Foundation of Owensboro asked Peirce, Johnson and their Citistates Group to return and prepare a new study that 1) reports on Owensboro’s progress since the 1991 Peirce Report and 2) lays out a fresh path to success for the community in the 21st century. Background on the new project, What’s Done, What’s Next: A Civic Pact, is available here.

I was fortunate to be asked by Neal and Curtis to be the project’s lead researcher and writer.

Three Chapters

The project, which occurs from May to October, will produce a report in three chapters, each of which will be posted online. The findings of each chapter also will be made public in presentations at separate events in July, August, and October.

I’m excited about the project because it is an all-too-rare opportunity to 1) assess an American community during the first years of a new century and 2) suggest ways to succeed in an era of challenge and change and competition unlike any it has faced.

I’ve spent six days in Owensboro over the last month or so, and interviewed over a dozen people at length. Though my reporting is far from complete I’ve developed a clearer sense of what makes the community tick, and how it sets priorities and works to achieve them.

Owensboro, very plainly, is no slouch when it comes to identifying and closing on big goals. To wit: Without making any judgment yet on its negative or positive features, the city and county in 2009 voted to approve a tax increase to raise public revenue for the riverfront redevelopment. That decision was made in the deepest recession in eight decades and amid a storm of voter disgust for tax increases.

Early Conclusions

I’ve also begun to develop nascent conclusions about Owensboro’s weaknesses and how they could be overcome. It’s clear to me, for instance, that Owensboro’s residents, particularly young people, are not nearly as aware of the community’s many economic and cultural successes as they could or should be. There’s a pronounced civic grumpiness in Owensboro that is tied, no doubt, to the state and national economic downturn. But the all-too-common civic frown also incorporates deeper dimensions that seem entirely local.

Too many young people, based on my conversations and the overwhelmingly negative comments about Owensboro that appear on newspaper and television comment sections and Facebook, see the city and region as a social and financial dead end. One result is that a good number of the region’s talented young people leave.

One of the important goals in this project is to understand why that is happening in a region that is marketing itself so aggressively as a good place to live and do business. A second goal is to suggest ways to develop and apply a new formula of civic energy and engagement that holds people to their place in Owensboro.

Given the community’s recognition of the need to add new assets, and its ability to raise money and actually develop those new features, something still appears to be missing? We need to discover what that is. Why aren’t more people in Owensboro satisfied, even thrilled by where they live?

Owensboro leaders I interviewed, and young people I met, say it is not enough for Owensboro to be a great place to raise a family and an even better place to retire. We want to help Owensboro identify what else is needed in the community’s success formula. And we want to suggest ways to strengthen how the region identifies and gains access to the new ingredients.

The Citistates Group, supported by a grant from the Public Life Foundation of Owensboro, is updating its 1991 comprehensive analysis of Owensboro-Daviess County, conducting interviews and research to lay out a fresh path to success for Owensboro in the 21st century.

The Citistates Group was established by Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson. Peirce, an award-winning nationally syndicated columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group, specializes in exploring the challenges that cities face, and offering actionable solutions. In 1991, he led the research team that produced Owensboro, Kentucky: Reforging Community, a probing study of the shifts in approach — civic, economic, social, and even psychic – that Owensboro needed to consider to thrive at the turn of the 20th century. The report ran as a series of seven front page articles in the Messenger- Inquirer.

Curtis Johnson, president and CEO of Citistates, is a principal in the 2011 project. Johnson brings rich, diverse and relevant experience to the project as former chairman of the Metropolitan Council in Minneapolis-St. Paul, college president, author, leader of a public affairs research organization, and policy advisor to former Minnesota Governor Arne Carlson. Johnson and Peirce have co-authored similar reports in 26 regions over the past quarter century.

The 1991 Peirce Report largely characterized Owensboro as a Heartland city on the verge.

The Owensboro of the early 1990s, reported Peirce and Johnson, was a conservative community clearly comfortable with American economic and social convention. It chased smokestack industries, for instance, and disregarded the value of women as community leaders.

But Owensboro also was starting to respond to some of the emerging market trends that were pushing other big and small U.S. cities toward a new era of civic health – building new educational institutions, redeveloping the riverfront, constructing new civic spaces for the arts and culture, inventing festivals that could become regional and national brands, investing in downtown, and recognizing the threat from sprawling patterns of development.

Twenty years later the Public Life Foundation of Owensboro asked Citistates to update the 1991 findings and write a new narrative for Owensboro that takes into account what people want and provides a formula for success in this century.

We plan to dive deep into Owensboro-Daviess County’s governmental, economic, and political infrastructure to produce a civic x-ray of public decision-making in an era of high velocity change. The project’s goal is to understand what’s different since 1991 in how our community is managed and to provide guidance to citizens on how to more effectively engage, lead, and influence the governing process, effect change, and establish better public policy

The primary researcher and writer of the 2011 Owensboro report is Keith Schneider, a former national correspondent and 30-year contributor to the New York Times. Schneider’s cutting edge career includes reporting on the environment, agriculture, energy, water, land use, urban development, and public policy from four continents. He’s a leading innovator in applying the principles of original reporting and commentary to secure public interest advances. Long considered one of the top American journalists covering natural resource and policy issues he has twice won the George Polk Award, among the most prestigious in American journalism. Schneider has appeared on CNN, C-Span, National Public Radio, CBS-TV, ABC-TV, Westinghouse Broadcasting and others, and delivered talks to Congress, the United Nations, the U.S., Embassy in Beijing, and on more than 40 university campuses, including in Europe and China.

Schneider is in Owensboro this week to conduct iinterviews with community leaders, innovators, and advocates from all walks of life. He will return periodically over the summer for more interviews. The 2011 report will be released in three chapters — in July, August, and late September. The 2011 study will be published online and in text, and report findings will be disclosed during public meeting at the conclusion of each chapter. The interactive process also includes sharing drafts with sources for comments and to check facts.

The Citistates Group oversees all editorial decisions to ensure the project’s independence.

The $100,000 project is funded by the Public Life Foundation of Owensboro. Founder John Hager was owner and publisher of the Messenger-Inquirer when the 1991 report was completed.

For more information, contact:

Citistates Group

Keith Schneider
kschneider@citistates.com
(231) 920-0745

Curt Johnson
cjohnson@citistates.com
(651) 686-8198

Public Life Foundation

Rodney Berry, President
rodney.berry@plfo.org
(270) 685-2652