Does the Future Belong to Baseball Bats?

PRESS RELEASE - December 5, 2012 - Mount Horeb, Wisconsin

Does the Future Belong to Baseball Bats?

Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin resident Paul Rux, Ph.D., gave a short talk on how to apply trend forecasting to economic development for the City Council of Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin at its December 5, 2012 meeting.  Dr. Rux is an active member of the World Future Society.  He attended its annual three-day international conference in Toronto in July of 2012.  At the conference, Rux attended a special panel on trends in economic development, which featured a panel of experts from Rhode Island, North Carolina, and Iowa.  The panel’s message boiled down to one word:  safety.  As we move into the future, more and more, public safety, and perceptions of it, will become the competitive advantage in economic development - not the standard jabber about lower taxes, infrastructure, workforce readiness, and schools.  More and more, people will live and invest where they are safe and feel safe.  If we want people to live and invest in our communities we must make public safety - real, perceived, and felt - our top priority to get and grow jobs.  Rux underscored his message with the example of a recent drug deal in Mt. Horeb in which one guy beat the other guy to death with a baseball bat – two block’s, in fact, from Dr. Rux’s home.  The media coverage of this murder with a baseball bat in the street in a “good” section of town is poison to public perception of public safety in Mt. Horeb.  Moreover, this murder is part of a growing trend of other scary events in the town like heroin users overdosing in local convenience stores, one of which Dr. Rux observed with his own eyes as police wheeled an unconscious addict out of the rest room of one of the local stores.  Rux advised the members of the Town Council to be aware of the damage that this is doing to all of the financial and personal investments of stakeholders in the Mt. Horeb community as the town risks public perception of it as unsafe to live, shop, or do business.  If Mt. Horeb, and any other community today, want a bright economic future, it must demand law, order, and public safety.  Safety must be the first order of business now if communities want to survive and thrive in the future.