Cities with Vision 

Cities with vision were what I needed in 2008. I needed to be surrounded by people who understood what I was going through.

It was in the Great Recession: the most dramatic employment contraction of any recession since the Great Depression.^[i] Already, 8.4 million Americans had lost their jobs. When there is a serious economic downturn, the owners joined the unemployed and cut back on their spending.

My friends asked me, “Why do you want to spend money to go to the National League of Cities Convention in nearby Orlando? Do you really want to listen to over 4,000 mayors and city commissioners discuss their economic woes? You have plenty of your own.”

“Those people represent cities with a vision to get through times like this. So, yes,” I admitted. “You’re right. I’m not a politician, just an average American citizen.

THE STRUGGLE –

To get through the collapse of an $8 million dollar housing bubble, Casselberry had to be the Number 1 city in our area. People had to like it so much that they would buy what houses were built. Then builders would buy land to build more.

My problem was that our business owned acres of land that my father had bought over the years. Nothing produced cash unless land was sold.

I felt the National League of Cities and I had the same goal—having a quality city. If they knew how to do it they would teach me, too.

I had no other option, except spend hours of idle time writing about the history of our city. The book was about my decidedly nontraditional father, Hibbard Casselberry.

During his lifetime, he started eight businesses, survived the Great Depression, two world wars, a government shutdown of his business, a corporate takeover, resistant family members, stubborn politicians, and reluctant bankers.

In 1940, he founded the City of Casselberry, Florida, as a real estate tax free town. For the next thirty-five years it was a tax free city—a unique fete by any measure.

My fear, however, was I needed more than the ideas and innovations my father used. Surely they would not work four decades later.

At the convention, I walked from one breakout session to another for days. The halls buzzed with mayors and city commissioners swapping stories about what they would like to do if money was not a problem.

When they get home, they will search for ways to pay for environmental, housing, regulatory, and human needs with declining revenue.

I wanted to ask some of them more probing questions. “How do you manage to do you run a city in a bad economy, pay the mortgage or rent, have a quality personal life, stay reasonably sane, and financially solvent?”

But there were no super heroes at the convention. No one had the cure for an economic downturn. There were only human beings searching for answers, and trying to make their cities better.

At the last session of the convention, an empty chair beckoned me to the front table, as if the information there would be fresher than in the back.

The lights dimmed in the convention room. I kicked my shoes off, rubbed my sore feet together, and settled in.

THE JOURNEY

Being new to this level of city government, the names of the last panel of mayors did not mean much to me. The job of transferring their immeasurable knowledge into memorable sound-bites fell to Michele Norris, the host of National Public Radio’s, “All Things Considered.”

“Please welcome the members of my panel. These men are nearly legendary in their accomplishments. They are Ralph Becker of Salt Lake City, Utah; John Heckenlooper of Denver, Colorado; R. T. Ryback of Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Joseph P. Riley, Jr. of Charleston, South Carolina.”

The Qualities of a Great Leader: 

An hour later, my notebook bulged with papers and scribbled notes. I sat back to listen as Norris summarized the session. What visionary leaders have in common is that they are innovative. They can find possibilities where others cannot. They have vision—ways to get through tough times. They take risks.” I smiled because these characteristics felt strangely familiar and comforting.

Then Norris paused and looked at them. “And, they’re a bit crazy.”

The word crazy jabbed me like a poke in the funny bone. A loud, startled “Ha!” escaped my mouth. People at the table looked at me as if I were some oddity from the nearby Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not Museum. I buried my embarrassment and wrote faster.

“Great leaders build coalitions and, above all, they serve their communities.”

Without knowing it, Norris had given me what I least expected to hear. My father held every attribute she described. Anyone in the family would have recognized him. And more than a handful of people thought he was crazy.

Hibbard Casselberry worked inside and outside of the city government structure. He tried to educate mayors and city commissioners in how to build a prosperous, sustainable community. What my father taught was not old fashioned, but a solid foundation of how to grow a small town or community into a prosperous, sustainable city. The mayors and city commissioners around me were there to learn just that. All would be well.

[i] http://stateofworkingamerica.org/great-recession/  - The State of Working America – by the Economic Policy Institute