Sometimes our community reminds me of a nesting doll.
You know, the big doll opens to reveal a smaller doll and then that doll opens to reveal an even smaller doll and again and again until you have a handful of exact replicas, except scaled down. Around here you can start with a big problem and uncover and uncover only to find replicas of the same problem — only the scale is different. It makes you wonder if the big problems came first or if the problems started small and then grew.
Let’s take a big problem: the image of our community. When you come into Henderson, whether you come in down Raleigh Road, Oxford Road, or Andrews Avenue, you immediately see burned out houses. Why does the city not enforce their ordinances and have the owners remove these eyesores? That’s the top layer. As you peel the problem away, more appear. Someone told me last week they drove around town and saw no fewer than twelve burned out structures. I can neither verify nor refute this, but it would make for good research. My bet is that it is far more than twelve.
We really do not take care of our community image. Another way we see this is in the care and management of our government properties. The Armory, the First National Bank Building, and the old municipal offices adjoining the Central Fire Station have been allowed to deteriorate because of neglect. The latest deal to put the Armory in the hands of the county and the bank building in the hands of the city may help remedy this, but… Well, the deal seems as messy as the properties. If they had flipped a coin to see which body took over the ownership of which building, that may have been fair, since the properties are no way equal in value. But impartiality does not seem to have been a component of the deal. The jury is out on whether these properties will be put to productive use.
The county government may think they are on the high road in the managing and upkeep of their properties, but they need to look around a little. For years I have enjoyed visiting the law library on the bottom floor of the old courthouse, and I have often used this public resource. Last week I had an occasion to go there for research, and I was appalled at what I found. The law library is now a junk-storage, catch-all mess. The shelves still stand with books, but storage boxes are piled everywhere. There are large doors lying on the floors and on top of some of these are Christmas wreaths. There are framed pictures, carpet rolls, and boxes and boxes and boxes of papers and files that may or may not be official. Now if the county has another law library in the new courthouse, I was not told, so I am assuming that the county has deserted this space and left it to pile up in mess. That is a real shame.
It is not a good idea to have all these boxes piled around in such a way that navigating the space was almost impossible. My first thought was that it was a real fire hazard. My second thought was if someone wanted to hide a money bag, this would be the place to hide it! It is a shame that a public building that has so much space that could be used in all kinds of productive ways can be allowed to turn into a junk hole.
As you pull back the layers that make up our community, what starts out seeming little can become a big problem both for our image and for our prosperity. From the overall first impression and image of vacant, burned houses to the neglected and abandoned government buildings, and even to the inappropriate use of space within a building, our community need look no further than our local governments to improve our image. We pay a lot of good money to have our governments managed, and it appears we are not getting our money’s worth. It seems that our local governments contribute to a big part of our image problem, yet they are supposed to be at the helm when it comes to correcting course. At this point, it really does not matter if the problem started small and grew or if the big problems allowed the small problems to be ignored. Image matters, and it is time to do something about ours.