Thursday was quite a day, what with the announcement that over $800,000 will be coming to Vincennes and Bicknell to pay for tearing down abandoned houses that blight the streetscapes of neighborhoods in the county's two cities.
Add in the quarter of a million dollars that Bicknell will also receive through the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority for home repairs and improvements and that's over $1 million coming into Knox County.
And, really, that's just a drop in the bucket of the outside grant money that's poured into the county in recent years, money that has been or will be used for street improvements and levee repairs, neighborhood stabilization and downtown renovation.
It's all money that requires some form of local match, and it's all money that comes with strings attached — requirements and guidelines that, while perhaps onerous in their application, nonetheless are the necessary cost of community enrichment.
Without this money, Knox County would be so much the poorer and that, to us, puts any negative comments about the extra work involved in using federal funds into proper perspective.
In the end, is the community better off with the money or without it?
We'd answer better off, much better off, with the money than without it.
Much of this federal money being funneled through the state to come back here represents taxes paid by local workers, and it's our opinion that we want to bring as many of those dollars back home again to Indiana as we can, regardless of any potential extra work.
There have been many officials, in both Vincennes and Bicknell, who have already put in additional hours in preparing the applications for the grant money that was awarded Thursday. City attorney Mike Edwards in Bicknell and city inspector Phil Cooper in Vincennes in particular come to mind.
But in end, the responsibility for deciding to move forward rested with the respective mayors, Joe Yochum and Jon Flickinger, community leaders who measured their own particular ideological qualms against what could be accomplished if their cities received the money, and chose to move forward.
They chose to provide their constituents with a better future.
We wish the kind of leadership we're seeing on the local level as exemplified by Messrs. Flickinger and Yochum could be emulated on the state level.
We wish that the governor could have set aside his ideology (and his own quest for national office) just long enough to understand that it's what's better for the state that matters, and that if federal funding (attached strings and all) could have helped another 5,700 Hoosier children get into a pre-school program, then ideology and political ambition be damned, it would have been better for the future of Indiana to have accepted the money.
And, too, we'd rather see that $80 million being spent here, helping Hoosier kids, than spent somewhere else.