By Bart J. Allen

Are you as sick about reading what a great town Salina is, as I am? Don’t get me wrong. Citizens having a sense of pride in their town is understandable, even expected. And certainly, Salina does have some positive attributes. But on the other side, it has a ton of stinky downside that our leaders, and I use the word loosely, don’t seem to want to acknowledge, and never have for that matter.

While it’s always fun to focus on accomplishments, addressing the problems we pay them to, requires more than sitting around admiring the smell of their own farts and insisting what we’re all smelling is incense. When it comes to problems, the elephant in the room for Salina is the inability to grow even modestly in recent decades.

Let’s call it what it is. That’s really just a nice way to say that nobody wants to come live here. Businesses from the outside world don’t want to be here. Our leaders are loath to admit this, but that doesn’t make it any less real. People, and the businesses that employ them for that matter, do not want to come live in Salina, period.

The numbers don’t lie. What little population growth we have is due in large part to senior citizens moving to Salina for access to health care, not business growth. The young and educated, also known as the future, are encouraged to flee and not come back by those that love them. Even if they wanted to come back, what would they do? Wait on tables or make pizzas? We’re even beginning to lose long time residents that are sick of the stagnation and lack of even modest progress.

Why don’t people, or businesses, want to be here? Clearly, having two interstates, one of the largest runways in the world, and being dead center in the USA have little allure. And while that may or may not be true, I would hasten to point out what every farmer in Saline County knows. No matter how fertile the soil, incompetent farmers can’t produce a crop, no matter how hard they try or talk. The same is true of our leaders.

Salina has had decades of poor leadership with no vision. Our elected officials and community leaders have invariably taken the easy path to the detriment of the long-term development of the community. In other words, they slowly sold us out, year after year. All you have to do is look around you. The evidence is everywhere.

As usually happens when one takes the easy path, there’s a price to be paid, and we are now all living with the results of years of their poor leadership – an abandoned north end, a sad, anorexic downtown, the inevitable increase in taxes that comes with stagnation, good ol’ boy cops with dubious agendas, lack of affordable, decent housing, roughly a third of the city soon to be considered a “food desert” by the USDA, etc., etc. And, of course, the certain, undeniable fact that nobody wants to move to Salina.

While Salina does have its good side, we don’t need leaders that waste our time telling what we already know, though I’m sure it is much easier than actually attacking tough problems. They should pull their heads out and do their jobs before we pass the point of no return, if we haven’t already. Problems can’t be solved without acknowledging that problems exists.

 

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