Reactions to a rural narrative

by Dave DeMars

news@thenewsleaders.com

Having listened to Ben Winchester’s presentation on Aug. 17 at Peace Lutheran Church in Cold Spring on “Rewriting the Rural Narrative,” Dave Leitzman and his wife, Jane, both of the Collegeville and St. Joseph area, shared their insights.

One of the items that caught Jane’s attention was the lack of a library in St. Joseph. While the College of St. Benedict has a beautiful library, it does not belong to the city.

“It is the college’s library,” Dave said, “and the college extends to the community the opportunity to use it. It runs on college time. That means in the summer, it’s open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. If you are doing any kind of a project that goes beyond the work day, you haven’t got access to it.”

“And it doesn’t have children’s programs and summer reading programs, and it doesn’t take grants to bring in speakers and music groups to the community,” Jane said. “It doesn’t act as a conduit to get library materials from Great River (Regional Library) in St. Cloud.”

Jane went on to explain how she was working with people from Resurrection Lutheran Church and the Catholic Church in St. Joseph to welcome Somali immigrants to the community. How wonderful it would be to have an after-school program to help them with their language problems, she mused.

“The community library would be the ideal place,” she said. “We don’t have that so we will have to figure out some other alternative.”

Dave explained now that the new government complex has been built, it may be possible to use the old Kennedy School for that purpose. At least there seems to be some interest in doing that, he said.

“As Jane said, there are many more services that an active community library provides that an academic college library does not,” Dave said. “That’s evident if you look at what goes on in St. Cloud at Great River (Regional) Library.”

Dave said he agreed with Winchester’s depiction of the dying small-town narrative where the town has lost some of it commercial businesses such as a grocery or some other business.

“Even if they are re-occupied, it’s not what was in there when the store was built, and it’s not the same as when the original services were there,” Dave said. “We get the impression things are really bad, that the town is dying because all the buildings are empty and we don’t have this and we don’t have that. What he (Winchester) demonstrated is our concept of what the town was in 1950 is dead.”

Dave went on to say the new concept of the town is much more lively and interesting than the old concept. It’s important to disabuse ourselves of that notion – of that narrative.

To a degree, Dave said he sees St. Joseph as suffering from that kind of narrative. At the same time he points out there are three large apartment complexes being built on the edge of St. Joseph and that will help to drive some of the commercial development in the town.

“The notion that a lot of money is in our pockets, what (Winchester) called transfer money, that’s going to be an economic strength for any community that plans ahead to build it,” Dave said.

He also expressed concern about the amount of debt young college grads have and how it limits them in moving to rural neighborhoods. Jobs in the St. Joseph area, good-paying jobs that would attract workers to the area, were also of concern.

“If the focus is on bringing in jobs to a community, and then the issue is where will we find the workers, the answer is how much are we paying those workers,” Dave said. “If you pay a living wage, you will find workers, but if you pay less than a living wage, then you will not find the talented people you need.”

Jane said according to one study she had read, it takes two people working 80 hours per week at minimum wage to pay the modest rent and make a life in the Twin Cities Metro area. She was sure the problem was present in St. Joseph and even more so in St. Cloud.

“Most of our jobs are service jobs, and entry level service jobs have always paid minimum wage,” Dave said.