Hendersonville’s Main Street Advisory Board held a four-hour planning meeting for promoting Hendersonville. They have a vision and a mission statement. Funny. It seems the economy was thriving much better before all this mumbo-jumbo became standard fare for organizations. Besides, after three or four visions or mission statements, they all sound alike. Who wants to be eighteenth-century instead of twenty-first? Who wants to invest in unstable whimsies instead of working for sustainability? Who gets involved in an organization to totally waste it instead of enhancing and promoting it?
The next step from visioning sessions – which I theorize have a high correlation with economic weakness, the main causal factor being that fluffy words do not improve the quality of goods and products developed and exchanged – is listing goals and objectives. This is not bad in and of itself, but they do not instill a sense of tangible progress when they are like Hendersonville’s MSA’s:
To fulfill its mission, the group has set goals and objectives to work on and is now forming committees to focus on organization, design, economic restructuring and promotions.
When government is involved, there always seems to be an element of redoing facades of local businesses. I can understand a desire to live in a posh environment, but the business owners can only afford so much. Then, there is a sense that gateways need to be defined. Perhaps it helps with diversity goals to have a physical line drawn between insiders and outsiders. Then, there are the inevitable Smart Growth elements.
Then, the big thing with government/planning visioneering is a claim that activities will expand and retain business. I have in the past expressed impatience with groups that want to play chess with the worker bees. If the worker bees manage to toil and sweat and still make a profit after providing all the overhead agencies with their sense of place with adequate corporate gifting and living wages – on top of adhering to a bunch of silly rules – then the visioneers can take credit for the economic upturn.
