I am delighted to finally be writing my first column for the new City of Parsons newsletter. When I came to Parsons almost a year and a half ago, it was my goal to improve our communication with the public. The last year was spent making major improvements to our computer systems so that we could provide quality information and good service to our citizens. One of the improvements that you may have already notices is our vastly improved City website www.parsonsks.com. The website has improved information about services and programs and about the community in general. It also serves as a good resource for individuals or companies wanting to find out more about Parsons. Over the next few months we will be unveiling some new features available to the public, such as on-line work requests (such as bulk pick-up), on-line agendas, and on-line ticket purchasing for major Municipal Auditorium events. 

 

One of the major benefits of the new website is our ability to provide this newsletter to you in both electronic and standard mail formats. We will be mailing the first two editions of this quarterly newsletter to all of our business and utility customers. After this, we will be encouraging all of our newsletter recipients to subscribe to our electronic version of the newsletter instead of receiving our printed version. This electronic version is much cheaper to distribute and can help us reduce our costs by saving almost 50 cents for each copy we don't have to print and mail. With over 4,000 utility customers, it would save us $4,000 a year if we have half of them as electronic subscribers.

 

I would also like to mention one other important project we are undertaking as a City over the next several months. Our citizen's survey issued last spring told us many important things about our community, but none more important than your desire to see us improve our planning for the future of this community. We are embarking on a several month process to develop a Comprehensive Plan for Parsons. The goal of this planning is to involve all parts of the community along with our elected officials to have an understandable, usable plan to guide the actions of both the City Commission and City staff. The plan will have specific goals and actions for us to take in order to achieve those goals. We already understand the major obstacles and concerns in this community and it is time we develop a plan to achieve them.

 

However, it is also important to understand that planning has a long-term vision. Time, money and other factors make it impossible to improve our community overnight. This process will lay out a roadmap for us to follow in making our community what we all desire it to be - a community in which we all want to live and raise our families, and a community that we are proud to call home.