Good evening, friends⦠It is an honor to be here. As many of you know, I was asked to be the keynote speaker at the th anniversary celebration for New Bremen and Wapakoneta held at the county courthouse.
It was an especially enjoyable afternoon. I tried to speak on that occasion about the economic future of New Bremen and towns like New Bremen across America. In this century, towns like New Bremen will be great places to raise families and companies, and great places for lives and careers.
All of us have friends who live in larger cities. The tax rates are difficult, the commute times to work are punishing, the cost of living is excessive, and it is not a life where you can even let a kid ride a bicycle around town.
If you think about new inventions in just the last 25 years - inventions like the fax machine, cell phones, overnight mail, and computer assistance for information, shopping, and communications, the changes are staggering and they work in favor of small-town life, taking away what used to be the advantages of larger cities. The economic health of an area most surely does have its consequences. The prices of property, the care of the physical infrastructure of the community, a welcoming tax climate⦠All of these things find their place in the ability of a town to be successful; and success can build upon success, just as failures can also compound.
No community can ever stay the same. Each day, every community is in the process of getting better or getting worse. It happens in tiny and subtle ways we do not notice at the moment; but over a decade, one sees the consequences. No future is assured. New Bremen as a town, and all of us individually, are a work in progress each year.
