Show me what you'll pay and I'll tell you who you are. If you attended or watched on the city's website Monday evening's Norwich City Council meeting and its adoption of a preliminary municipal budget for the next fiscal year, perhaps, like me, you can be forgiven for wondering about what exactly happened.
Not that you asked and not that it’s important (except to me) but we can do better than what went on for much of Monday’s meeting. My moment of Zen, if you will, started at the Council Informational Meeting at 6:30 where an excellent presentation of the city’s five-point marketing plan was offered, with a strategy to entice and excite businesses and families from across the region to get more in Norwich by relocating here.
And then, less than an hour later, many of the reasons that marketing effort highlighted, such as schools, affordable housing and other quality of life programs became just words as that same City Council seemed to decide the marketing plan needed no actions from them at all.
As someone who’s sometimes sneeringly referred to as a Norwich booster (and I wear that as a badge of pride), I’m disheartened and discouraged because the things we do speak so much louder than what we say. but I am not (yet) defeated. We continue to be a city where people speak AT instead of WITH one another. And I include myself in that because it's the responsibility of everyone who lives here to find a way to work together to do what's best for Norwich.
Norwich really isn't a place anymore where generations of families grow up and grow old together. We are not a city our children want to come home to. Instead of trying to build that city through collaboration, cooperation, and compromise, we eye one another with distrust and suspicion. We’ve forgotten no one has a monopoly on ‘best ideas’ and that most ‘best ideas’ are a result of joining together different ideas.
We have no patience for solutions and processes that can't be implemented and produce measurable results by the time we reach the end of this sentence. And that’s a challenge because so much of life is waiting for things to happen (but also being prepared to act while you’re waiting).
Leaving me to ask how do we make Norwich, again, a place for all of us to come home to? The politics of the past is how we got here. But where to next, and how? If you always do, what you've always done-you'll always get what you've always gotten. And the difference between a rut, which is what we are struggling to escape, and a grave, which is where we are heading, is the depth of our habits.
We need to think and work together, not just say it, but actually do it. We need to believe we can do better and then do better. We need to be the city we want to tell the world we are: proud of our past and confident in our future. We can only count on one another and we have to start to do that. If not now, when? If not us, who?
-bill kenny
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