Progress: Education, awareness key to city's growth

Two things stand out.  After pursuing the PPG expansion for years, we finally landed the project when Vitro took over.  It could have gone to any of their plants, but the company chose Wichita Falls. Last year Vitro opened their new $55 million expansion, which was the biggest private capital investment here in quite some time.  In addition, we wrapped up development of our new community-wide plan to grow Wichita Falls.  You’ll see lots of activity from that plan starting to take shape this year. Education and awareness are the key to progress, whether we’re talking about an election or not.  For any entity to get a bond passed in Wichita Falls, they’ll have to do a much better job of educating the public in advance and being available to answer questions.  Let’s hope WFISD is ready.In addition, we confirmed that younger people don’t vote in near the numbers that older voters do, even when it’s an issue they favor.  We’ve looked at the numbers, and we have plenty of younger people registered to vote.  They just don’t do it. During the campaign we saw lots of social media support for initiatives that younger people typically like, including downtown, parks and trails.  That obviously didn’t translate to votes.  As our population gets older and we develop a greater need to cater to a younger workforce, we have to figure this out.