(Photo Illustration - MetroCreativeConnection - Letter to the Editor)

I was born and raised in Parkersburg and I’ve been proud to admit that fact. When I was 18, I moved to Huntington to attend college at Marshall. Ten years later, I moved to Palm Beach County, Fla., where I lived until I moved to Las Vegas for a few years. About ten years ago, I returned to my hometown for family reasons. My mom has since passed, and I remain here, wondering if I should move back to Florida where I have nieces and nephews I seldom see, or somewhere else, somewhere warmer and more exciting.

I am not happy here, because the town hasn’t changed much. Few new businesses, a declining population, city leaders that get excited over tearing down vacant houses and rebuilding a building in the City Park. Despite the best efforts of our downtown business leaders like Councilman Zac Huffman, who owns an exciting new steakhouse near the Blennerhassett Hotel, downtown is dead.

Our mayor and council lack vision and direction. They spent over a year wrestling with a sanitation issue our mediocre mayor created or at least failed to fix. They still haven’t solved the recycling question Mayor Joyce created by canceling recycling collection in June. This whole issue had an easy fix that they ignored. All they had to do was raise the pay rates for incoming sanitation truck drivers and recruit new drivers and laborers, but Councilwoman Sharon Kuhl had the brilliant idea of raising the rates of the existing workers only but not the base rate for new hires and the other brilliant council members agreed. Now they’re talking about closing the city’s recycling center when all they have to do is charge non-residents a nominal fee to bring us their recycling.

Why not focus on attracting new businesses and new jobs? Here’s an idea: For every building you tear down, bring in a new business or home to replace it. For every fee you increase, why not do something to justify it? For every citizen that leaves, why not attract a new family to replace him? Aside from the new homes built by Habitat for Humanity, an excellent organization, there have been very few new homes built in Parkersburg in the last decade or so. Why not focus on attracting new activities to the city, especially downtown? I’d like to see a teen center. How about a hot new nightclub? (I used to be a DJ in my younger days.) What about a park downtown with basketball and tennis courts and a playground?

The point is: Our council members, except for a few, are deaf, dumb and blind to what Parkersburg has become: boring and stagnant. WE need a new mayor and council. Perhaps we even need a new system of government, a council-manager system. We need to refresh and revitalize our fair city before it becomes a ghost town where no one wants to live, work and play anymore.

Russ Bowers

Parkersburg