How we should approach improving Galesburg

My speech from the first meeting of the Galesburg Revival Society

Hey everyone. I’ve been quite busy lately, but I’m looking to make a more concerted effort towards writing more. While I’ll still have a good focus on Galesburg I’m wanting to write more about other topics so expect more of posts outside of the Galesburg urbanism context in the future.

Below is my written speech that was given at the initial meeting of the Galesburg Revival Society. It’s a pitch for the organization but it’s also a pitch for how we should go about improving Galesburg. It’s designed to be an hour long presentation so it is quite long. Regardless, thanks for reading and hope to do more writing in the near-ish future.

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Hello, my name is Joe Hicks, I’m very happy to be here and for all of you to be here.

I’m very excited and optimistic about the future of Galesburg, and if you’re here most likely you are too, or are at least open to being convinced to be optimistic. As a native I know the feeling of being guarded against getting too optimistic so I completely understand anyone’s hesitation.

I believe it really is the time to turn to the new chapter of Galesburg’s story, and I believe it’s in our hands and can make it happen. 

But before we start, I want to show you all a video. If you’ve been a reader of mine you’ve probably seen it. This is Galesburg in 1912. I am obsessed with this video. Main Street is absolutely thriving, people are out and about enjoying their time. When I saw this video I was so struck by the contrast today. Galesburg had been a thriving town. Many will say we can’t return, but I think we can. 

And now, a super brief background on me. Like I said my name is Joe Hicks. I grew up here in Galesburg. Unfortunately I don’t get to use the phrase born and raised because I was born in the Chicago suburbs and then came to Galesburg at the ripe age of 2 months old. But even though we moved here my family has long standing roots in the area. My mom is from Abingdon with her family from the area for a long time. My dad’s side of the family lived here off and on with my great grandfather having been a fireman at the old fire station downtown that is now Iron Spike. Interestingly my family has no surviving story of how our ancestors came to the new world. My mom’s family has been in the area a long long time, and the best we have on my dad’s side is some family coming from Virginia. So the roots are deep here, I don’t have much ancestry besides Galesburg to go off of. 

But anyway I grew up here, went to Costa for K through 8, then Galesburg High School. After High School I went to the University of Illinois and studied economics and political science. Since graduation my day job has been managing truck drivers.

I’ve always been interested in Galesburg, as a town. I was always a little bothered by the pessimism that ran through town when I was younger, which I now know was totally warranted. When I was in the first or second grade Maytag announced it was leaving and the town changed drastically over the coming years. I remember looking at the big Galesburg Picture book and seeing all these pictures of a long lost town. A town that was bustling, full of life, one much different from the one I saw in my lived experience. 

And my path was almost no different than many of our bright young natives. I left to go to college, and after graduating I moved to Wisconsin for work. But when I was there I was unable to get excited for the community and had trouble building a social network. Regardless, I had moved away and was left feeling an emptiness in me. And I thought, in this age when so many people have issues with having friends and family and genuine connections, why don’t I move back to Galesburg where I still have all of those connections. Almost all of my close friends still live in Galesburg still, and I’m on good terms with all my family, so why not move back? 

And then I did. In September 2020 I moved back to the Burg and I’m happy to report that not once have I regretted the decision. Since then I’ve gotten into writing about our town. Public Policy, Economics, politics, and urbanism have always been great interests for me, so it was natural that I’d use those lenses to look at my hometown, and boy has it been a fulfilling project so far. 

But enough about me, what about our town? What’s Galesburg’s history?

This year in 2023 our town is 186 years old, which as far as American cities go is decently old. I recently read this book called They Broke the Prairie by Earnest Elmo Calkins which was a history of the first 100 years of Galesburg released in 1937 for the centennial celebration. 

Even as someone who had lived in this town a good amount of my life I still only had vague notions about Galesburg’s history.

So in the 1830s, George Washington Gale was a revivalist minister in upstate New York. He and his followers envisioned a new town out west with a community focused on God and manual labor, with a college to train young men in the art of both. He and his followers pledged money to start this new town.

Expedition parties were sent out to find the site for the new town. The federal government had a program where you could buy federal government land wholesale for the low price of 1.25 an acre. 

But the problem was that by the time the search party made it out west most of the “good” land had been taken or bought by speculators. While any federal land available was available for purchase for the price of 1.25, land that had any sort of timber or other natural resources was going for 15-20 an acre, which was not affordable for the settlers to start the new community they envisioned.

They came across an area called the Military Tract. These were lands set aside for veterans of the war of 1812. But when all the land wasn’t claimed it was then opened up to be purchased at the $1.25 figure. 

To quote from the book:

“They saw a high prairie, nearly central between the Illinois and Mississippi, thirty thousand acres of the finest soil lying in one unbroken tract, without a tree or hill or other natural feature”

So think about that. We sometimes like to say there’s nothing here in Galesburg, but before Galesburg there was TRULY nothing. So empty of any value that it had been passed up by veterans who would’ve gotten the land for free and also many settlers, this was not land we got in a rush, it had been passed over many times. It was nothing but unbroke, featureless prairie. The bounty of the land was trapped below a thick layer of prairie sod that needed to be broken.

The founders bought the land that would become Galesburg, took the then treacherous journey from upstate NY to the Galesburg area, and then got to work breaking the prairie up so they could farm it. 

They saw the potential bounty that was available in our soil. But it was hard to realize that bounty. Transportation of agricultural goods was still tricky. Mind you this was before the railroad. Grains would need to be hauled to whatever the nearest river port was at the time, often being Oquawka on the Mississippi river. But even then the trip was treacherous by wagon and wasn’t always profitable. There was one instance of a group trying to herd a whole lot of pigs up to Chicago to be sold for slaughter. But in the end the whole endeavor took so much in labor and supplies that the whole trip lost $5000 in the transaction, which mind you this is in 1840s dollars.

But then came a new technology that offered promise to be able to better sell the goods of the land, the Railroad. Back in the 1840s and 50s railroads were a brand new technology. Almost nobody in this area had seen or really understood what a railroad was. But the founders and notable people of Galesburg knew enough that it could be a great boon for it to come through Galesburg. 

But there had to be a fight to get it. Knoxville had convinced two railroads that if they came to Knox County that they would put the station in Knoxville and couldn’t put one in Galesburg. This infuriated the people of Galesburg and set them on the course to fight to get a station in Galesburg if there was going to be a railroad in Knox County.

So they found that the town of Burlington IA was trying to build a line connecting it to Chicago. The Galesburg promoters, the chief promoter being Silas Willard, worked with this new charter since they were open to running their line through Galesburg. But in order for the railroad to be built through Galesburg, the investors from out east needed to know the people of Galesburg were serious about having the railroad come through town. So they told Galesburg they needed to put up $300,000 to show they were serious. And then over the course of the next year or so, the town did it. Now mind you the town was only around 1000 citizens then, so they were able to raise the approximately $300 per person. If you run the inflation numbers that comes out to roughly a little over $11,000 per person in today’s dollars!!  Imagine that, if we were able to raise 11,000 per person for a project, with our population of 30,052 that would come out to an equivalent of a little over 330 million!!

Regardless, the town raised the money and what would become the C, B, & Q was born. The railroad brought considerable wealth and growth to the town. The railroad coming through enabled the vast riches of the soil to be unlocked to be sold at further markets. No longer was it a loss to take your pigs to Chicago to be sold, that’s just where they went. 

Now there is plenty more history to our town, but just from these two events, our founding and the railroad coming through town, I want to highlight some insights that they offer.

First, is that Galesburg has no natural draw. We don’t have the type of weather to naturally draw people in. We don’t have the nature or outdoors features to draw in a lot of people. We don’t have any natural resources other than our soil, but that is already used up to the max. We aren’t in a strategic location like a river or lake. We aren’t near an even bigger town to cruise off their growth. Our city wasn’t founded by some natural beauty. We have nothing that naturally attracts people to our town. We live in what is essentially a human interest desert. The only reason the town was founded on this location is precisely because this land had been discarded by all the others, it was seen as undesirable. We are this patch of dirt because there was absolutely nothing about this spot that had any obvious value. Yet we have a city.

Secondly, to live here you must choose to live here. The founders very specifically chose to form this community. Looking around this room I’m pretty sure almost everyone here could be living somewhere else. Now whether it would be easy to live somewhere else is a different question, but if we truly wanted to leave we could. To live well in Galesburg is to choose to live in Galesburg, because again there isn’t much of a natural draw to this town.

And lastly, the fate of our town, its fortunes, have always been at the behest of dedicated Galesburg boosters who promote the town. Since there is no natural draw and we have to choose to live here, we need promoters and activists for anything to happen here. Anything this town has or has ever had has come at the hands of the people of this town working to make or get it. Without the foresight and gumption of the local boosters we would have never had the railroad and would likely be no bigger than Knoxville is today. Without local promoters we most likely wouldn’t have had the industry that was a major part of Galesburg over the years. And we kept it longer than we otherwise would have without the dedication of the people of this town, only leaving when factors way beyond our control and foresight forced the change. The people are the draw, or at the very least build and create the draw.

What do we do with this information?

With these insights in hand, what do we do with it?

We’ve had about a 20 year period now of stagnation. Or if not a stagnation which might be too harsh a word, we’ve at least been drifting. We as citizens of Galesburg, embodying the spirit of the puritans who founded this town, are civically minded and willing to do what we need to do for the community.

But the problem is that it hasn’t been obvious what the next step is. I’m sure some of you heard me mention the town raising the money for the railroad and thought, now why can’t we get the town to raise X dollars for whatever other project. And the answer is that the railroad was a very real, tangible, investment in the community that offered real dollar returns on that investment. The town had a real pressing economic need and the railroad was the answer. So we were able as a community to come together to achieve the goal that everyone saw as important.

We are pragmatic and hard working people. One of the founding ideals of this town was that you could find meaning in your life through labor. It was certainly a guiding philosophy during the 20th century when many moved here to work the better jobs we had. Some of you here I’m sure were some of them. But since we’ve lost our way, we haven’t had something to work on. I’m sure if there was an opportunity today like when the railroad was being proposed through town, I’m sure we’d have no problem raising $11,000 per citizen. Our city would graciously invest in our futures. What’s unfortunate is that there is no true verifiable big project that will turn this community around toward growth and prosperity all on its own. 

The goals and possible paths forward in the present are much murkier, there is no standardized playbook on how to restart a declining formal industrial town. We had the one playbook of economic opportunity, but that is not easily regained. The possible investments we can make are much more infinite but the returns are much less certain.

Now that may sound like there’s nothing we can do to move the town forward, but there are actually loads we can do!

My proposal from the beginning has been that we have the formula wrong. When the jobs left town we thought we needed to get jobs back to get a better town. But it’s my belief that to get jobs we really need to be a better town to live in. And not to say we don’t have a good town, I think we do, hell I’m choosing to live here. 

We tend to focus a lot on economic opportunities with good reason because that’s something real and tangible that we lost. Many people have left and will continue to leave town because of their economic prospects. But this may be shocking to some, but some people are still choosing to move to Galesburg now even with our decreased level of economic opportunity.

As the American society gets richer the more people choose where they live not strictly because of economic opportunity, but also community and amenities offered. Think of it as a sort of “consumption opportunity”. Consumption can be the houses on offer, stores available, culture on hand, ease of travel, restaurants available, the “feel” of an area, the lifestyles offered, the neighborhoods available to live in. 

Think if you were someone trying to decide to build a new factory. Towns all over the country will offer you big tax credits. With transportation as cheap as it is you also don’t need to worry too much about your exact location. If everything else is equal, don’t you think they’ll want to locate their factory somewhere they actually want to be spending time at? Not to say it’s the primary factor, but it’s at least something we can control and could give us a leg up over other communities. 

I think in order to increase our economic opportunity, we need to increase our consumption opportunity. We need to increase the enjoyment people get out of being here. But we need to do it in a smart way. We need some play book on how to make the town better that isn’t a moonshot or drains us of resources. 

Strong Towns

Now I will say a good amount of my analysis and frame of inquiry has been directly influenced by this book, Strong Towns by Chuck Marohn. I don’t know what I would be writing and talking about if I didn’t have this book. It gives words to so many things that before I didn’t have language for. As part of this organization I’ll be proposing we will be holding discussions on this book, but we’ll discuss this at the end.

So what are the main takeaways from this book? If we look at our city, how our city is funded and the services we provide, how in a dollar and cents way do we make it work. How is our city government funded? Well we have the fuel tax, the sales tax, but looming large is the property tax. The property tax is the most stable and enduring source of funding for our city government. One way to look at it is that our city is a fixed plot of land trying to cultivate a crop of buildings of enough value to fund our services and maintain our infrastructure.

Now how do we measure the financial health of a city? Now I’m generally not someone who sees a government needing to run like a business. A government can spend money on things that we think are good that don’t necessarily turn a profit. But at the end of the day, and especially for a local city government, some part of the machine has to make more money than it spends.

One metric that cuts across all the rest that we get from Strong Towns is to look at the assessed value of the whole city over the total value of our infrastructure. Why? Since we use property taxes to fund the city government there needs to be some assed amount to cover the cost of the infrastructure. For the math to work out a town needs a ratio of about 30 to 40 times the assessed value of the city over the value of their infrastructure. That leads to a city that can fully fund all the maintenance of its roads, bridges, sidewalks, water, and sewer systems along with all the services it provides. This doesn’t lead to rough streets, it means there’s enough to maintain them as they should be. 

For this presentation I’m going to call it the City Financial Strength Indicator. And as of the last year we have financial documents for 2021, the City Financial Strength Indicator is 10.5.  We get this number by taking the sum of all the property values, which was $1,322,679,444 and divide it by our government’s capital assets without depreciation which was $125,317,499.

10.5, when we should want to be at least 30. 

This isn’t to say we truly have no money, or that we’re just struggling to get by, but you and I know we’re just kinda getting by as a municipality. We’re able to do some of what we want but certainly not all of it.

I recently decided to see how this number has changed over time, And when I went back to look at the data from past years I saw a shocking result. 

If we go back to 2002 we were at 22.5! We were almost twice as financially strong then than we are now. This graph of this value’s change in the last 20 years is damn near everything, this explains so much. This is our degrading streets, the higher taxes, stagnant real estate prices, low economic growth, investment in our infrastructure. All of that is captured in this graph. Luckily we’ve seemingly stopped the decline but we’re still not in a great position. We got here today because while the assessed value of all of our real estate has remained stagnant, there has been over a 2x increase in the assets the city owns. This is our roads, bridges, overpasses, ect. 

This means that our already high taxes aren’t high enough to fully take care of our city, all of our obligations. There are some on the left that I tend to agree with that when faced with limited money we should care more about the people than the roads. But I also want to live in a town where we can care for the people and also keep a cleanly maintained city. I don’t think that’s too unreasonable to ask. And the point of this presentation isn’t the view of many people that “we pay so much in taxes it must be going away to corrupt purposes they should just use it on the town.” but the realization that there isn’t enough money that can be collected from any reasonable level of taxes to fully support the town we have. 

So what do we do with this information?

Well that gets to my big proposal. A new civic organization that is dedicated to making Galesburg a better place to live and making the Galesburg community and government stronger. The name I have given for the project is the Galesburg Revival Society.

The vision is something of a mix of a civic society, service organization, advocacy group, think tank, and policy workshop. All going towards turning Galesburg towards growth, prosperity, and rising tides. 

What should we be working and advocating for?

I see the future of Galesburg and this organization working in a framework that is shaped like a pyramid. Our approach in our activism will be to move from the bottom up. But for the sake of explaining it I’m going to start from the top because this is the broadest goal.

The overarching goal of all of this organization and what many people want generally, is a more thriving Galesburg. That is the highest mission of what we want to do. It is our pride in our location, we want a Galesburg that is more thriving. But that’s pretty vague, how do we work to achieve that?

So we move down to the second level we have two goals to strive for that would make a more thriving Galesburg. 

First is that we need more people. 

Population decline is a hell of a thing and makes everything worse. We need more people in order to have a town that's on the rise and also becoming a financially better off city.

We need all types of people: More residents, more tourists, more customers, more businesses, more students, more workers, more families, we just need more people!

More people makes everything better. More people means more demand for housing so we build on vacant lots and renovate old homes and means more tax revenue. More people means more business for our shops businesses and the greater the chance new businesses open. More people means more students find Knox College an interesting place to go to school and ensures the college remains open for another 200 years. More people means more money going into our public schools so we give our kids the best opportunities. More people is what we need. 

Crucially, we need to increase the people involved with Galesburg while also increasing the City Financial Strength Indicator from earlier. That is our second point, that we need greater financial strength. If we want the benefits of having more people then we need to make sure we’re increasing our financial strength, not treading water. If we increase our population by 50% but we also have a 50+% increase in our infrastructure then we aren’t a whole lot better off than we were before. Or another way to put it, we need to increase the wealth of the community. Assessed values are essentially wealth, and to be able to better afford the city we already have we collectively need more wealth.  

For both of these there are significant headwinds. We live in a state with a declining population, in a region with a declining population, and a city with a declining population for the last 60 years. We also live in a country where our cities are encouraged to plan their cities that make them financially unsound, we call this sprawl. We have an enemy, it’s the past and the circumstances we find ourselves in. Old scores don’t matter, if we want to survive as a city we have to understand what’s keeping us down and work twice as hard to achieve it with all the headwinds we face. 

But those are the two goals for building a more thriving Galesburg. But then what do we do to Achieve THOSE?

As I see it there are three pillars of action we take to attract more people and make us financially stronger. 

Part 1 - Creating a better place where people choose to be

Now this can mean multiple different things because being here can take many forms. Being here could mean moving here. Being here could mean coming as a tourist. Being here could mean opening a new business location. We need people to choose to be here.

Here’s a map of where I believe our efforts should be focused. I believe our efforts should radiate out from the train station, to Seminary Street, the surrounding neighborhoods, and beyond. We don’t really realize what potential we have. We have a quaint old downtown that’s relatively intact that is a short train ride from a metropolitan area of about 10 million people, that being Chicago. We have way more trains running through town than any town our size. If we get a hotel within walking distance and enliven the area around the train station we could become a tourist destination.

Not only could we become a tourist destination, but focusing on radiating out from the trains station is a relatively good map of where the most value investing to be had is. Not to say the train station is the end all be all, but that generally the closer you get to it the greater value and investment is going to be for the community, and the further away the rate of return is less. These are some of our old neighborhoods with many empty lots. If we can rehab these neighborhoods and get more housing built in them then they can become better communities and increase our financial strength for almost no cost to the city. 

This isn’t to say that far away neighborhoods shouldn’t receive any attention, but that the closer to the train station the bigger bang for the buck the investment is going to be for the community. Ideally every neighborhood will be enriched and enhanced. Some neighborhoods will take off without much assistance while others need much. If we can we’ll do the work in the places with the highest returns, but not exclusively. 

We want to do the work that encourages more people to come downtown, work that makes more people want to live in our neighborhoods, work that makes more young people want to attend Knox College. And if we do it right more people will come. 

I also like to think of starting up the downtown economy like starting a fire. To start a fire you want to take your little embers and encourage it to grow by giving it oxygen and kindling. It can become a big fire but it has to be encouraged in the right way. In an opposite manner if you’re trying to go from a matchstick to light a big wet log you’re not going to succeed no matter how many matches you light. So we need to encourage the embers of our downtown economy, and currently I see the two embers are the couple blocks of Seminary St radiating out from the Train Station, and the block of Cherry Street with the bars and restaurants on it. We need to encourage those two areas because that’s where the embers are and could lead to a raging fire that the downtown economy could be. 

Part 2 of the Galesburg success formula.

We need to keep the cost of living low. 

Like I said earlier there is no natural draw to our town, we live in a human interest desert. We can’t be like a suburb of Los Angeles and let our cost of living skyrocket because we’re rich and there’s huge demand for our property. No matter how much we make Galesburg a place people want to live, since we’re in the middle of nowhere and don’t have nearly the amenities of a big city, if we’re going to cost the same as a big city they’re most likely going to choose to live in a big city. 

We also need to keep the cost of living low because if we don’t we’ll force out a lot of our current residents. I’m not here trying to make a better future just for future residents who have more money than our current citizens, I want both our current citizenry and the future ones to all be able to enjoy our better Galesburg. 

And while the biggest part of Cost of Living is housing, there are other facets of it too. Transportation, child care, food, energy are all factors in that too. So while some of those are a bit bigger than any local organization can deal with, we as a community can certainly work to make housing more affordable, transportation cheaper by making alternatives to cars more accessible, and make sure there are as few barriers to building renewable energy as possible. 

Which all of that dovetails nicely into the last pillar. 

Pillar 3: Make Galesburg a place where it easy to develop our land

If we’re going to have more people moving to Galesburg, or even just more businesses and tourists, we’re going to need to build.

Sure we do have lots of old houses and buildings. I would love to see all of them rehabbed and made useful again. But any serious plan of adding more housing or space for businesses is going to need newly built buildings.

It seemingly takes a long time to get things done. That Dunkin Donuts has seemingly been in the permitting process for months, and they’re a big national chain that is quite experienced at setting up new shops. I don’t know if it’s our rules or the process but that seems like an awfully long amount of time to get a building approved. Now if we look at it and the reasons it’s taking a long time is totally within our values, then that’s fine. But I’m sure there’s some steps of the process that’d make some of us wonder why it’s even part of the process.

Those delays can be costly, and can drown out a lot of smaller players. What if someone local wanted to build a new fast food restaurant, could they survive taking months to get approval for the project? What if a big employer wants to come to town, but it takes many months or years to get their facilities approved let alone built? And what if that employer comes, many people move to town but we are able to build much new housing? What’re we going to do when many current community members get outbid for their housing because some more people want to live here.

I think we need to take a careful, deep look at this process. We need to decide what we truly want and what we can do without. In this area each individual rule and process we have can be good on it’s own merits, but take them all together can lead to a burden that’s too big for would-be builders.

Like do we value every residential lot in town being at least 50 ft wide, or do we value more housing? Or to put it differently, are new residential buildings worth it if it’s on less than a 50ft lot? Because right now our zoning code says we’d rather have nothing than have a house on a 30 ft lot.

Do we value having parking for cars over more places for people to live. Let’s say I want to build a 4plex. According to the current zoning code I’d need to provide 8 spaces of off street parking. What if none of the residents of that building owned a car? I’d have to take up all that land and all that money to build those parking spaces. That adds costs that could sink the project financially. Would we rather have a 4plex with no parking or would we rather no building at all?

Because if we’re going to become more financially resilient, we’re going to need more property values. Based on the calculations we only have about a third of the property values we need to be a financially strong city with the amount of infrastructure we have. So if we’re going to get more property values, and we need to keep the cost of living low, we’re going to need to incrementally build denser. And to be able to do that we need to make sure that as few additional hurdles are in the developers' ways, so that should be a key focus of our organization.

Now this doesn’t mean that we want developers to cut corners and build unsafe buildings, but we need to figure out what our true values are in regards to land development and see what we can do without, knowing that we need more development to be a financially strong city.

We already live in a city where the cost of housing is less than what it would cost if we built it new. This means that there isn’t much incentive to build housing. We need to make sure that the barriers are as small as they need to be while also ensuring they conform with our values for safety and living standards.

As one last note on this subject, I know I’m not the biggest fan of waiting for the big employer to come to town. But let’s say one does. What if we could say to them that we’ll get their plans approved within 6 months or less? That’d be a great deal, but what if we went further and could also say we’re ready to permit the construction of many more homes to keep up with our towns growth. That would be an unbelievably good selling point to a business so that they don’t have to start raising wages as soon as they get here just to keep up with the cost of housing. That would truly show that we mean business.  

So we have our mission, a more thriving Galesburg

We have our goals, more people while also increasing our city’s financial strength.

We have our means to achieve those goals:

1 - Creating a place people choose to be

2 - Maintaining a Low Cost of Living

3 - Lowering the barriers to new development and making it cheaper

Now that we have all that, so what’s at the bottom?

We are at the bottom of this pyramid, this is what we’ll be. The Galesburg Revival Society. 

We will be an organization that tries to find projects and reforms that conform with the 3 pillars with the goal to make Galesburg grow in population and financial strength. This can come in the form of identifying problems, seeing a need, or seeing an opportunity that isn’t being realized yet. What we as an organization will do is 

1. Identify problems, needs, or opportunities that Galesburg has

2. Develop plans for those issues

3. Fight for these plans, whether politically, through fundraising, or even just sheer manpower.

4. Promote Galesburg

I want to make sure that everyone who believes in Galesburg has an avenue to help through our organizations. Whether what you have to offer is your brain, your insight, your labor, your money, or even just showing up, there will be a place for you. There are so many people who want to see this town succeed, and our goal is to provide real guidance on how to make that happen bit by bit. 

Part of that is that we also as an organization need to see the whole town. A little while back I had an article in the Register Mail about going for a walk around town. This will also be a core part of our organization. I want members to be walking around their neighborhoods all across the city. I want everyone to truly see their neighborhoods from the walking level, the level you can truly see and feel what is needed. Sure we can see most in our cars, but in our sealed off bubble of glass and metal we aren’t connected. We can’t stop and admire or linger or really look at something, we can’t stop and have a conversation with someone. It’s hard to see where people are struggling, where solutions are needed. We need to be enmeshed in the community, we can’t be outside of it, we need to be of it. 

And our scope doesn’t just have to be the built up city. I want to have committees where we discuss different parts of the town and find out what we can improve. Like a committee looking at our schools. A committee to organize more local cultural events. A committee to plant more trees like the project 350 is doing now, maybe there could be a collaboration there. A committee on housing. A committee on neighborhood improvements. A committee on getting US 150 rerouted out of town. 

>For most of these committees and a good bulk of our day-to-day work we’ll work on small scale solutions that are easy to implement. There are many trees to be planted, lines on streets to be painted, empty lots to clean up and encourage people to build on. But we also need to look bigger.

In the background I want there to be committees on big projects, things that are bigger than what we can do on our own, or even the city can do. Now this is not going against my no-moonshots policy. But let’s say there’s another recession and the federal government is giving out money to shovel ready projects, wouldn’t it be great if we had a ready-to-go plan to rebuild more of Seminary Street to make the area more cohesive. Or what if we had a plan ready to go to reshape Main Street to be a more walkable, hospitable place. 

These are plans that the city could conceivably make and implement on their own, but would take a lot of time and resources aside from the normal governance they already do. We’d be able to work on these separately, and then if they want to use our plans they’re free to use them. Because when it’s time to pump up the economy with new projects it can often come down to who can start the soonest, and if we’re ready to go with all the engineering plans and estimates ready to go we’ll be way ahead of most other communities. I want to make sure Galesburg is ready to go to get money to make itself better as soon as the opportunity strikes.

Conclusion

So that’s my proposal, at least the general outline. There are so many possibilities and ideas out there and I can feel that we as a town really want to move on to our next era. We feel we’re done living in the past era, we’ve spent enough years wandering.

While we have lost much of our town, there is still much history to be written. These are before and afters of our town. But these don’t need to be like this forever. 

Bill Gates once said that we often overestimate what we can do in a year but underestimate what we can do in 10. Earlier I mentioned the book about the history of Galesburg book that was written in 1937 for our 100th anniversary. While we’re not going to turn Galesburg around completely in the next year, what’re we going to look like in 2037 when we celebrate our 200th anniversary? Don’t we want that history to be a story of redemption after a period of prolonged stagnation. And not just the 14 years until our 200th anniversary but what about 20 years, 50 years, what is our town going to look like in 100 years in the year 2123?

It is not destiny that our town will decline for the rest of time. I sure hope we don’t keep declining until 2123. We sure face so many headwinds, but if we put in the work we can grow and prosper and be one of the best cities out there. Again we got the bones of a great city, but achieving that will come on the back of making deliberate efforts bit by bit. Just as the sum of many small burdens can stop something from happening, the sum of many small positive changes can be really transformative.

We want to be making our investments, as individuals, an organization, and as a community that will reap durable returns year after year. We have so much potential as a community, we just need to be deliberate about realizing that potential. Our ancestors created this town from nearly nothing. There is nothing of natural value that drives people to be here. We will continue in our founders legacy in believing in our community, and putting in the work that needs to be done to make it a better place to live. I choose Galesburg, and hope you do too.

Thank you.