I very much respect you J. Mitchell! Someday we all be working for you!

Ronnie, you made my day! I hope you live in District D and you’re correct! $450,000 dollars was spent on city employee bonuses with some part time workers receiving nearly a 50% annual salary increase in one swoop. And not all employees are Exeter citizens. Thank you for caring!

Not sure what to say here but you made my day!

OMG after reading the entire article I am wondering just what “Red State Economic Development, for free” was smoking while typing out this comment. lol Talk about mental tripping! lol Nothing of Red’s concerns really fit anything thing mention in the article.

Dear 00855abd,
Why don’t you take your idea to the City Council meeting and speak about it?
Exeter has no say in the National Park- So your idea, although it makes my skin crawl as a daughter of an immigrant, should probably be presented to them.
Vicki makes very good points and as a resident of Area D, I can see that she is really hitting the nail on the head when it comes to the crime rates, and Covid funding that could’ve been used for Housing, Food, and Utilities assistance. If you lived in our neighborhoods you would probably feel the same way….ooooor maybe not…but a good discussion based on the feedback from tax payers is of one hundred percent importance.

What you’ve described is not what makes for a “Gateway to the Sequoias”. In fact, liberal minded people from around the world travel to the park to see one of the world’s special monuments, a Federal paradise to the liberal idea that some lands must never be developed.

What would be a better approach to branding is to say that at the same time people go to the Park, they can stay in and see a living and working museum that demonstrates the history and present of the Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, the Carey McWilliams’ Factories in the Fields, and the Mark Arax Dreamt Land.

I’m envisioning something like a cross between Colonial Williamsburg where locals dress and perform the parts of historical workers such as slaves and braceros and illegal immigrants for hourly wages and Kentucky’s Creationist Ark with its fantastical explanations for everything.

Nothing draws conservatives like performative history of oppressed workers by actual oppressed workers with more than a little credit provided to Jesus!

This is the kind of branding that can really put Exeter on the map as the must-stay destination for conservative-minded visitors to the park, and if Vicki Riddle really has a vision and really believed half the cr*p she says drives her, she would run with this idea and make it hers.