Walter Edgar interviews Greenville Mayor

The interview that is currently airing between Walter Edgar and Knox White is inspiring from a community building perspective. The major lesson remains, nothing happens overnight but nothing happens if people do not join together to make things happen. That is a lesson we learn over and over again in Hartsville but it is also lesson we have to keep teaching ourselves. Hartsville is good but right now - not great. Hartsville can be great -- if we want to be great. We are a small city. We will not be for everyone but we can be much more enticing and attracting that we are right. We have to keep working. (Hartsville was just mentioned in a sentence with a number of other progressive cities -- it is the company we want to be in. We have to keep ourselves in this company.

This week I was speaking with a high school student from Long Island. His father had been in Greenville many times on business. The prospective Coker student and Coker lacrosse player, described the downtown as "cute." Not a bad description coming from a teenager. His father also mentioned that Hartsville did remind him of Greenville, even if on a smaller basis. We have the basics but we need to work much harder, doing much more to become a totally attractive place to live and visit. We have lots of people working on this. We have lots of ideas percolating. We need to find ways to continue working together from all our areas (divided any way you might want to think about it) if we are going to survive the set of challenges that are now facing us.

Knox White just said the first time he saw someone taking pictures of downtown Greenville was in 1999.Today cameras and tourists swarm downtown Greenville every weekend and often during the week.

Walter Edgar's Journal will air again on Sunday evening and I hope others will listen. Mayor White had a short paragraph about the need for inclusion and the difference inclusion makes. He said when you do not include you run into lots of problems. I think his quote was, "You pay for it dearly."

Monday, we welcome a new city manager, Natalie Zigler. She will be walking into some amazing challenges as she moves into her office on the first day. I hope those of us who have been living and growing in Hartsville continue to rally and help her and our current City Council become those people we look back on in five, ten or fifteen years with a pride for the positive changes they were able to help us develop as a community.

List some challenges --

We have some beauty spots -- Coker College for example but one look at our entire city and you know we need real emphasis on beautification.

We have high-achieving schools -- but try to prove any of our schools are high achieving to a first-time visitor who (with the exception of the Middle School) sees buildings that have been and look like they have been around for five or seven or ten decades. You want to know what difference a nice looking school makes -- talk to the people who work and learn at the middle school or to the people who teach and learn at GSSM or to the Coker College students who inhabit the new library and information center.

We have some unique retail experiences -- but if we are going to be a mecca for shoppers, we need a lot more unique retail experiences.

We have a cosmopolitan atmosphere -- that we often keep hidden from outsiders. In the arts -- you won't find many communities of our size with our offerings -- but many who live in Hartsville are not aware of a portion of what is offered.

One person for whom I used to work had a saying that I have used in many group discussions having to do with community building. His admonition was "When you stop getting better, you stop being good." We have lots of room to get better.