Todd Kuhns on City Council

To round out the day o’ fun, I attended two additional meetings. The Kirksville Downtown Improvement Committee met at 5:30 at the Adair County Annex Building. A number of business people were there, along with representatives from the Chamber and City. The group discussed a new conflict of interest policy that they must adopt in order to finish filing as a 501(c) tax-exempt organization.

Cherie, the new Assistant to the City Manager, told the group that she is setting up a series of conference calls with our PGAV liaison. PGAV is the contracted consultants with the DREAM Initiative. They have a 96-question survey that they would like to conduct with the downtown business owners about the downtown organizational structure, which they can do in groups over these conference calls. Interested committee members signed up. They will also send out an email to the business owners who weren’t present to invite them to participate.

Incidentally, mark your calendars for a DREAM Kickoff meeting on June 2 in the Annex. There will be no KDIC meeting in July.

After KDIC, I hustled over to Village 76, a senior living community, for a presentation on the Missouri Senior Report. I learned that Missouri is the only state in the nation doing an annual report on the status of seniors in the state, so we have really set a gold standard that other states are modeling. The report is a collaborative effort between the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services and the University of Missouri Office of Social and Economic Data Analysis, and two representatives from these agencies gave the presentation. Nine Kirksville residents, representing a terrific cross-section of senior services and interests in the community, were present.

The results are too much to rehash here in detail, but I walked away with a couple strong impressions. First, Adair County is ranked #3 in the State on senior access to healthcare. Yet, puzzlingly, on overall health of the senior population, we rank #75, with a 50% increase in “health status” according to their indicators. Several of us suggested that mental health statistics were a potential missing piece to the puzzle. They stressed that Missouri will have to deal with a rapidly aging Baby Boomer population, estimating that 1 in every 5 Missourians will be 65 or older by 2020.

But with all this talk about senior issues, let’s not forget how much seniors contribute to our community. They are a strong volunteer force and fill many of our government positions. A large percentage of the wealth in Northeast Missouri is concentrated in our senior population, and they are our biggest savers. They also have a strong economic impact, as they bring in outside money (with Social Security, pensions, etc) and tend to spend it more locally than the rest of us. We owe a lot of the success in our community to their contributions.

The entire report is available at www.missouriseniorreport.org.