Full Text of the Mayor’s State of the City Address

Mayor Weinzapfel’s last State of the City Speech to Rotary

Here is a link to the entire speech that Mayor Weinzapfel gave before the Downtown Rotary Club on Tuesday. It of course covers the positive accomplishments of the administration in great detail while ignoring some of the more controversial and less popular issues.

In one of the more humorous parts of the document Weinzapfel said that “Seven years ago, there was no strategic vision for creating jobs. Heck, there wasn’t even a plan that people weren’t following.” The belief among the people we have spoken with is that the Mayor is correct but that there still is not a plan that people are not following either. Similarly with the most recent downtown plan that was developed during the Lloyd Administration and still shows a baseball stadium where the District is and has no downtown Arena. The statement did however get a laugh at the expense of Mayors past and in a few years a similar line will produce a few laughs at Weinzapfel’s expense.

The Mayor chose to praise the performance of the EVSC as excellent on the very day that no schools within the EVSC were selected for 4-Star designation. The three non-EVSC schools that were recognized as 4-Star performers were not mentioned.

Some attention was paid to the demolition of some blighted homes and the Front Door Pride program. No mention was made of the 8,000 abandoned and uninhabitable homes that now grace the City of Evansville that represents an increase of 100% from the 2000 census data.

All in all the speech is a kind reminiscence of the time that Mayor Weinzapfel spent in office with minimal challenges set forth for future activities. As humans we do tend to accentuate our own positives and sanitize our bad memories. What Evansville really needs and what Mayor Weinzapfel could choose to concentrate on in his last 9 months is a good look in the mirror and a solid plan to solve our legacy problems. We encourage him to spend some time so that his successor can start from a position of knowledge.

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