Todd Kuhns on City Council

Tonight I saw the first big concert for the Kirksville Community String Orchestra. It was standing room only in the gym at Mary Immaculate, and the group played beautifully. Considering the orchestra formed only last September, they already have a strong following and good musicianship under the direction of Elaine Boda, a former cello professor at Truman. If you didn’t get to go, you missed out on a great concert.

Before Monday night’s study session, we held a special meeting to transfer some land adjacent to the Traveler’s Hotel to the Carson Gardner development firm. This is because the Missouri Housing Development Commission is reconsidering previous proposals they rejected earlier this year, so Carson Gardner had the opportunity to resubmit their proposal to develop the hotel into housing. We transferred the land back to them so they could include it in their proposal. They plan to use that portion of land as a parking lot.

After the meeting the study session began, and the council fleshed out its goals for 2008. Mari had provided us with the 2007 goals and update, as well as the 2008 goals that the previous council identified in January. We, of course, had lots to add and tweak. It’s clear that Richard’s focus is going to be first-and-foremost job creation, like he promised during his campaign. We spent a majority of the 2.5 hour meeting talking about strategies for economic development from different angles. Aaron had some good ideas about how to utilize college students in various capacities for service learning projects and research, which would be a win-win situation for both the students and the community.

I particularly want to focus on a Kirksville Pride campaign, increasing positive citizen involvement in city affairs and opening up the channels of communication a bit wider. We need to get people excited about Kirksville to make it a more attractive place to live and open up businesses. Everyone agreed we should spruce up our web presence and use technology such as blogs, email listservs and the city’s TV channel to interface better with the community and tell the story about what we are doing.

It’s hard to encapsulate such a long meeting . Only the members of the local media were in attendance - KTVO, KIRX, Daily Express and the Index. It’s funny how the numbers dropped off so significantly after the election. I’m hoping we can bring the interest level back up and pack the council chambers with community voices. The Daily Express posted a story online with more info about the meeting.

Mari is using her notes from the meeting to write out an updated set of goals based on what we discussed. I’ll report more about that next week. In the meantime, if you’d like to receive my weekly email update about city business, subscribe to my email list here. Soon, we’ll have the council newsletter available via email as well.