My fellow residents of Marion County, the economic events of 2009 have placed a severe challenge upon our nation, state, county, city and most particularly our Neighborhood Communities.

The fabric of our Neighborhood Communities is composed of four instrumental and cohesively intertwining parts: our residents, churches and faith based institutions, businesses and our schools. The community fabric of Marion County is what makes us unique and instills within our community values which are worth protecting and sustaining, therein rests our challenge as citizens of Marion County.

Currently, our Neighborhood Communities are facing some very negative and extremely aggressive encroachments upon our "quality of life". The encroachments of which I speak are within every Neighborhood Community throughout Marion County and others pound viciously on the borders of our Neighborhood Communities.

Some of the negative factors that are affecting our Neighborhood Communities are:

Are all or any of these things present within in your Neighborhood Community?

The answer to the question might be yes and no but regardless of your answer, they all have an effect upon your Neighborhood Community because no neighborhood is an island unto itself. In other words, what happens in one Neighborhood Community can and will happen in yours if the negatives in one Neighborhood go unresolved.

Therefore, it is imperative and indeed the charge of your Neighborhood Community to:

This is the charge for every citizen in Marion County.

The overall success of every Neighborhood Community is determined by level of citizen support within each Neighborhood Community, all households within a Neighborhood Community must contribute to the sustainability of its community e.g. watching out for our neighbors, reporting suspicious persons in the neighborhood, reporting negative incidents, being neighborhood observant, volunteering your services, becoming jogging crime watchers, joining community watch, giving an hour of your time, helping a senior citizen, picking up litter and so on and so forth.

This is where Civic Revival within Marion County begins.

Ed Potts

MPSC (Midnorth Public Safety Committee)