The Northern Oklahoma Development Authority has created a prioritized list of what Watonga needs in order to grow and keep growing. It was paid for through a grant, so the 12page template didn’t come out of the city’s coffers. I’m sure such plans aren’t cheap.
And it isn’t considered a carved-in-stone document that must be accomplished, or the world will stop revolving. The capital improvement plan is intended as a jumping off point for the city to address the needed upgrades to the infrastructure of the community, keeping its citizens healthy and promoting growth. Towns without sufficient infrastructure fail to grow and the idea that a big company is going to come in and upgrade everything so that it can locate here is a fallacy.
Those days are done. Companies go where their needs – good roads, rail access, water supply and good schools – can be met. They look for places that already have their ducks in a row, with decent housing and parks, places to eat and shop and for spouses to find jobs already exist. Places the residents have made it clear that those things are important to them, too. And where the residents and businesses are willing to back the city government to obtain and keep those things in good shape.
Towns along the interstates fall into two categories – those who were ready for the opportunities to expand and grow and bring in businesses, like Weatherford, and those who sat on their laurels and hoped a business would choose them anyway and subsidize that growth, like Erick.
So what does this plan show us? That we need better water and sewer solutions. That our first responders need to be able to communicate with each other. The highway needs to be worked on. None of that should come as a surprise to anyone who has been in town more than 45 minutes.
The electric and water delivery systems need to be brought up to date. Cop cars and other city vehicles should be replaced on a rotating basis as the need arises or the old ones wear out.
Essentially, a boatload of work needs to be done on this fixer-upper of a town. It isn’t easy to determine what needs to be done right now and what can wait. The real problem different things are important to different departments. There are only so many resources to go around. So it is that an independent authority can help sort out those priorities.
And the plan is only a serious suggestion. It’s like a roadmap. There is more than one way to get where you want to go, depending on what your priority is. I can get to Oklahoma City any number of ways. There are only a few that let me stop off at Eischens Bar for fried chicken. So it is with the improvement plan for our town.
We can get where we want to be municipally many ways. Some are better than others and none of them are going to be easy or cheap. Some of them the residents are going to have to help pay for.
So after reading the plan – you have read it, haven’t you? – it is up to us to decide what quality of life we want here, how we want the town to grow or fade, and what it will cost us. This is our town, our home. It’s time we started acting like it.