Welcome to another episode of Less People. I’m Jenny Russell. Last week we talked about Parks and Rec and all the implications that you can get from that TV show when it comes to economic development work.
And this week we’re going to take on another couple of episodes of Parks and Recreation and to see what we can learn from them. This first episode is a good one and it talks about people really not knowing where their food comes from. Take a listen.
So you’ve had soy milk and almond milk. Now try the hottest new craze, beef milk. It’s like almond milk that’s been squeezed through tiny holes in living cows.
It’s f***ing milk. No. No.
This whole clip from Parks and Recreation reminded me of another clip I had seen on YouTube Shorts about somebody going into Whole Foods and asking for a vegan steak with a bone in it. And that just shows not everybody knows where their food comes from and I guess that’s again why it’s so important to educate people who have maybe never lived in an agricultural area or a rural area about where their food comes from and what it actually entails and I guess what’s vegan and what’s not vegan. Take a listen.
What are you asking for? I need organic grass-fed steak with the bone in but vegan. Yeah, that there is no bone. I need the bone in it for this recipe to marinate with the That’s not how the vegan part works.
It defeats the whole purpose. But is there anything else? Okay, I could show you where the yeah, you have organic beer at least. No, just just like this.
You don’t have organic. This is Whole Foods. I know.
Okay.
Thank you. Thank you for nothing. Okay.
Okay, our next tip from Parks and Recreation again, the more superior show from the office in my humble opinion are about town riffs. Here we go. Leslie’s put together a presentation for financial recovery.
Great. You may find it very informative. Let’s get started with our first slide.
Well, well, well. You blew it. Super hard.
Complete buffoonery. It’s hilarious and you deserve it. Do you think you might want to take it easy on them a little bit? Oh, like they took it easy on us when they stole all our money and seceded from our town.
It was 200 years ago. Cool it. Fine.
I’ll skip ahead. Do you have a plan that will help us or not? Now this is a joking atmosphere, but this is actually a real thing in a lot of rural communities about different towns in the county, but also different counties against each other. They hold those riffs and those issues with each other for a very long time.
I know there’s a town where my brother-in-law is from. We get along pretty well with the town next to us up here and we share a school with them and we actually took my brother-in-law over to the restaurant in the adjacent town and he’s like, you actually come over here? I was like, well, yeah, why we come over here all the time?
And he’s like because we don’t go to that next town ever where we’re from and they don’t like each other. They fight with each other.
They actually have a school together and it’s built right in the middle of the two communities and they continue to hold this grudge with each other many years later. A lot of these hometown issues have sprung from somebody stealing the courthouse. Like we had the courthouse first.
Your town came in and you claimed the courthouse and now we don’t have the courthouse. Those type of feuds from probably a hundred years ago and they’re still holding on to them to date. And so that sounds funny, but it’s really a real thing for people.
So it’s really important to get to know each other. It’s really important to you know, not just go on assumptions that you know who somebody is but to actually take the time to get to know each other because once you get to know each other the more you understand each other and the more you realize that some of those feuds are a little bit silly. So it’s hard as somebody who’s coming in from outside that has never lived in these locations to understand why these people are fighting but knowing that it’s really real to them and acknowledging that but not letting it stop the work.
That’s super important and as we get into these smaller areas of these rural areas, we need to really be regionalized in terms of working together. Letting each town have its own personal identity, but being real regionalized in working together on grants and issues making your footprint bigger so that you can get grants and other access to funds on a state and federal level. That’s really important.
So being able to speak to your neighbor about what issues are out there and being able to have a civil conversation is a really important thing. But I laughed at this town rift from Parks and Rec where you know, it was very very real. You know, I’m gonna make it hard on this person because darn it they stole the town and they stole our money and all the way back then.
I know that there’s a lot of like I said of issues with people stealing the town seat. I know there’s a there’s a story out there from our county about there was actual gunfight in the streets. Back you know a while ago a long time ago about people didn’t like each other. They had a town feud about one of the bigger town seats or towns stealing the county seat and actually came to blows actual blows in the street. And I know that being on the railroad being a city center.
Really when all this stuff was first coming about when settlers first came out to these areas you wanted to be the biggest town and you wanted to be the county seat and you wanted to be the center of all the trade in the county. There’s a I believe I talked about this on one of the earlier episodes of Minersville it was a mining town.
It was a really pretty big thing and it’s no longer there. So, you know that that was important to become a city center because it meant survival. I know too that what if we talked about White Rock, Kansas it was a town of almost 800 people and they didn’t think they needed the railroad to come through and they kind of told them they didn’t want them and didn’t need them and they were going to survive on their own because they were big enough and they are no longer a town.
So I get it was a it was back in the day a sign of prestige and a sign of really going to be able to survive out here when you had the county seat but it’s interesting that all of those rifts continue. Okay, the next one let’s listen to this clip. I guess we can make a switch to Bermuda grass.
It’s only 80 cents more per square foot. What? Gimme, gimme, gimme. You want me to put Bermuda grass in a continental climate that’s a six on the Beaufort scale in a park with zero drainage? I want Kentucky bluegrass I want a 10% discount and I want you to apologize to my best friend Donna.
Yeah, hi. Is there and I’m just guessing here some kind of medication that you maybe need a lot of and have taken none of or maybe too much of today? Oh, I have I have a medical condition. All right, it’s called caring too much and it’s incurable.
I laughed at this because not just because the comedy related to this but because native plants and maintenance of those things come up a lot in this kind of work. One example is we went down to some of our friends in Greensburg, Kansas. For those of you that do not have a background on Greensburg, Kansas there was a tornado that went through I believe it’s been 15-20 years now and they just celebrated the anniversary of that but it took out the entire town.
It was like 90% of the town was just wiped off the face of the earth. It was blown away and it was an F5 tornado. EF5 and it was took everything down to basically the basements and the foundations of the houses.
A lot of their downtown was gone and they rebuilt they built back with green in mind. Their name was Greensburg. They built back with environmental efficiencies in mind.
They actually had a town hall that’s beautiful. It’s built beautifully and they you know, the architects and things were able to dream because it’s a blank slate and they put basically rooftop gardens on this building, but they put in plants that were impossible to keep alive. So now 15-20 years later, it’s basically dirt and weeds up on the top of their buildings.
So it’s always important to keep those things in mind as you go along what’s going to actually survive in this environment. What’s native to this area so that they’re hardy enough especially in the midwest where we have really extreme temperatures. We have a really extreme cold.
Sometimes we have really extreme warm sometimes and you have to have plants that are able to survive in a drought and survive a major flood every few years and it’s just a really challenging environment. So it’s really important to keep those things in mind when you’re choosing plants, especially new things. We were talking about a major downtown revitalization in one of the communities and the landscape architect intern that we had this past summer was talking about bioswales.
And so bioswales are basically kind of like flower beds, but they’re meant to take all the water, the drainage of the water and so that the water doesn’t go directly down the drain automatically that it is used to water the flower beds before and then if it gets up to a certain level there’s a release on those bioswales that then sends the excess water down to the sewer system. But there’s a lot of I knew right away when he actually proposed those that that was going to be an item of contention because the first the first question was going to be maintenance. He was going to maintenance this.
He was going to water this and his point was if you choose native grasses like prairie grasses, they’re meant to survive in our environment. They’re meant to have really long roots that soak in water and keep water and store water. Kind of not exactly like a cactus, but for a good example like a cactus in Arizona it’s able to survive in that environment because it needs very little water and it stores its own water those type of things.
So they talked a lot about bioswales as a new part of the downtown design and making a little more green areas and making the the concrete softer. We had Jeff Sigler come in from Revitalizer Dye last fall and one of his points was in that community that there is a lot of concrete between this downtown storefronts that then and lead to a sidewalk that then lead to a really wide street that lead to more parking that leads to a median that leads to inside of the square parking that leads to the front walkway, which is fairly large of the courthouse. So you’ve got a large mass of concrete and his point was soften that up, add some green spaces in, be able to break up that concrete maybe with different materials like brick and it’ll become a much more welcoming place.
But I laughed at this particular clip from the author from Parks and Rec. See I got the office on my mind now because they talked about the buffalo grass and the different the grasses how much cheaper they were and how they were going to get swindled out of that particular amount. But it does have everyday implications of the work that I do every day as a rural economic development person in terms of looking at things that are going to be sustainable that make sense for the area that are native to the location so that it can be maintenance because sometimes all of the work you did bringing that in that’s just one hurdle of the entire thing you have to be able then to maintenance it or it gets torn out.
There was a fountain in on the courthouse square in one of the locations that we serve and it was donated by a family many years ago. Well, it had fallen into disrepair because there was not a maintenance plan available for that fountain and the county commissioners just decided they didn’t want to maintenance it anymore and tore it out. The family members most of them were still living and had been long-time family members of the community and they were not happy with the fact that the memorial that was made to their family and the investment they had made in the downtown area was now being torn out.
So that’s a bad scenario and a worst case scenario but something that you always kind of then have to think about when you’re writing grants and developing plans as to how this is going to be financed and maintenance along the way so that is sustainable and it does make an impact for years to come and your work is not just wasted. All right. That’s our second episode of Parks and Rec and the analysis of how that actually can be translated to everyday life.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this take on this and we will hopefully talk to you next time on another episode of Less People.