Granite City has to do that on their own. The county can't maintain peoples' properties. The County can't tell people to not shout at the top of their lungs at 3 am. The County can't stop all the drama fit for Topix discussions.
Granite City has its police and fire. The County manages the land and the courts, and patrols the unincorporated areas of the county and maintains some of the roads in unincorporated areas.
The County cannot make downtown Granite Great.
Edwardsville was the County seat before Granite City even came into existence. It's not their fault the lawyers, judges and other county employees need to have lunch.
But at the municipal level, those leaders can do plenty to make Granite City Great Again....or at least had the chance to do so 30 years ago.
Instead of saying "Oh shit we better get with it, Edwardsville is annexing tracts clear to New Orleans, some as thin as a powerline --- we better start doing something"
We should have been proactive long ago.
That feeling "the mill will take care of it all" has hurt us greatly.
My feeling is that only so much can be done now. Granite City cannot become a bedroom community, nor can it become artsy fartsy.
They may never attract premium retail.
However, industrial properties, warehouses and the such do pay a lot more in taxes than say another location of Five Guys or a Chipotle.
Everything along 111 at best should have been Mitchell....had they the foresight to incorporate back in the day....or Pontoon Beach. Hell, Granite should have annexed that back in the day too.
How Edwardsville got their hands on that and robbed this area of future growth is an outrage. It's already an insult that all was built with Granite money basically, then they come to take whatever potential for future money is available. At least those warehouses give our residents prospects for jobs.....but their tax dollars will pay for a yoga gym for Edwardsville HS - not help the crumbling schools in the Granite City area.
So I am not sure what is left to make Great again, and from a distance, I commend the current mayor for doing all he can to think outside of the box and create opportunities.
I am not so blind to think there shouldn't be change in the county or that such system needs change.
Whisker in his one dimensional view would have never agreed --- but it's not that Madison County needs change because of the Democrats being liberal, but it's because their establishment has been in power too long and are comfortable with that power. They need to go, and when new ones come back, they're held accountable. I live in an area where new Democrats are giving a Republican establishment a formidable challenge and that's also a good thing.
Anything else left unsaid? If so, you know I'll someday find my way back.