Letter to the editor

A couple of days ago my wife Brenda and I had a meeting in Aberdeen so we traveled north on highway 281 towards our destination. The landscape along this way is pretty flat with not much to see except lots of farm land. After 98 miles of driving time we came to the town of Wolsey. We joked about how many people in South Dakota probably have no idea where Wolsey even is. We joked about it for awhile and then we saw it had a population of about 459 people. I commented on what was probably not happening in Wolsey on a typical day, when all of a sudden we saw 9-10 fairly new houses on the edge of town. We were surprised with what we saw and then we felt like we needed to stop and ask some people how this happened, but we had not extra time to stop. We clearly changed our joking and started talking rather serious about what they were doing to promote housing growth that we were not. Since this was not the case, we drove on and talked some more about what kind of people must live there and what kind of leadership they must have to help make this growth happen. We tried to think about the last time we saw a new house go up in the city limits of Wagner and why it is so hard to come up with the answer. Do you know the answer to this basic question? If you do, you have a better memory than we did. We wondered what was standing in our way when we know it has been talked about a lot, but no action ever takes place. What kind of leaders need to be leading to help change this story? What ever the answer is it seems to elude us year after year. When will this change and what will it take to change the road we seem to be on?