Monday morning assortment

-Today we've got another day of QCTimes articles about Quad City development-related topics. This article is a strange mixture of saying we need to attract new jobs and saying we need to attract new workers to fill old jobs that will soon be available as baby boomers retire.

-Yesterday, buried in an article about Deere getting a new military contract, we have this quote:

Olson said the contract does not translate into additional jobs at Davenport Works, which has already added about 700 employees in the past several years due to record high production levels and the introduction of several new products.

I recently talked to a Deere employee that was telling me about this. We both wondered where the news releases and media coverage have been? If a new company came in and hired 700 people, that would practically be the QC Development story of the decade. For some reason though, we've heard very little about Deere's recent successes. Its one thing not to pat yourself on the back, but when all we're hearing is doom and gloom, it would be good for the QC to hear about some success.

-That brings me to my next point, which could probably be an entire post in itself. Davenport and the Quad Cities as a whole do not sell themselves well. Over on AbsoluteDSM, when I mentioned that we had the first 3D IMAX in the state, many of the people from Des Moines said they didn't even know we had a science museum. Does the CVB bother advertising outside the area? Many people didn't know about the festivities that took place this weekend downtown and in the East Village. We should be showing off the Figge, the downtown housing options in Davenport and Rock Island, the skatepark, and all the other things we're doing. Getting people looking at Davenport is the first step in getting people looking at moving here.

-And finally, a link to a crime article from Time magazine. The article is about the crime wave sweeping Milwaukee over the last few years. Its not very reassuring, but at least it tells us we're not the only city dealing with large increases in crime. Here's a quote from the article:

If police are struggling to answer 911 calls, they have even less time to patrol neighborhoods, so they can't build the trust essential to preventing crime. Tensions between the city's African-American community and police are particularly high--40% of the population is black and 47% is white, but there are three times as many white cops on the force. As Alderman Ashanti Hamilton explains, "If the only time people in black neighborhoods see a police officer there it is to arrest somebody, then, of course, they're going to be nervous." Chief Hegerty says repairing this relationship is critical. "We have to count on law-abiding residents to tell us what's going on in their neighborhoods," she says.

Here's the link to the article. Its definitely worth reading.

-Ah, one more thing. Ian Frink is having an All-wards meeting Tuesday at 6 in St. Ambrose's Rogalski Center. Read about that here. I wonder why only Frink and Hamerlinck have blogs and regularly hold ward meetings.