Lubbock gets ripped by lots of folks in Texas and the Southwest for a variety of reasons—it’s too isolated, it’s too flat, it’s too windy, it’s too conservative, it’s racist, it’s too (fill in the blank).
Certainly we have our problems, and we can’t do anything about our location on the planet, our topography, or our wind. But when one looks around at the important things of life, Lubbock and the South Plains come out pretty well when compared to other places.
While no one would argue that our schools can’t be improved, our young people receive a pretty good education. The Lubbock Independent School District has been struggling for several years because many of the families who can provide extra training and resources for their children are moving to suburban school districts. Wayne Havens is a great person and very good administrator who gave his life to education and young people, but it appears that our new superintendent brings new energy and new ideas to the system that may payoff in the classroom.
Central Texas residents love to poke fun at us because of our reputation for dust storms. I was in Austin last week, though, and when I walked out of the motel room at 7:30 a.m. the temperature already was into the 80’s and the humidity was so high that my eyeglasses immediately fogged up. Compare that to this morning’s conditions here where it’s about 65 degrees, little humidity and virtually no wind.
But it’s our economy where we really stand out. These are tough times in our country, and the economy is in the tank from coast to coast and border to border with only a few exceptions. Lubbock may be the biggest exception.
A headline in today’s Avalanche-Journal (http://lubbockonline.com/stories/082909/loc_487349910.shtml) would have you believe otherwise, but the story by new business reporter Walt Nett paints a pretty decent picture when you compare out economic condition to other places in the nation.
Walt reports that the Lubbock Economic Index, provided and reported monthly by Lubbock National Bank, was 127.2 for July, a slight downward change from June and a 4.1 percent drop from July 2008’s 132.7.
Is that good? Nope. But how many local and regional economies would absolutely love to have only a 4 percent drop in their economy during these last 12 months?
There are lots of problems to work on in this community (they’re everywhere, though), and, for some reason, we frequently like to beat up on ourselves. But as I enjoy the weather this morning on my back porch and read about our economy in my favorite newspaper, I’m going to remember the bumper sticker I saw when I moved here in 1969…
Lucky Me! I Live In Lubbock
No comments:
Post a Comment