Local culture, recreation has soared

Like Jimmy Carter's malaise speech, your editorial upbraiding Augustans for failing to "invest in themselves" is completely off the mark ("What's wrong with Augusta?" July 14).

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Augustans have invested heavily in themselves over the past 20 years, with our money, our time and our energy. We have built an enviable downtown park on the Riverwalk, improved the Augusta Canal to be one of the premier urban recreation facilities in the South, built the Phinizy Swamp Park, built a new and critically acclaimed history museum and, in the Morris Museum, we have opened one of the most innovative art museums in the South.

While we have been busy improving our cultural and recreational facilities, we have maintained one of the best collections of professional arts organizations for a city of our size.

The "progressive" regional hubs to which your editorial compares Augusta unfavorably would love to have our symphony, our ballet, our opera and our theater companies, not to mention the renovated Imperial Theater and Sacred Heart Cultural Center, and John S. Davidson Fine Arts magnet School, the best arts school in the nation this year.

True, many of these accomplishments are the work of Augusta's vibrant civil society, not of city commissioners. The structure of our city government does lend itself to inertia, but to suggest that Augusta is somehow a regional slacker shows a dangerous lack of appreciation for all that the city has achieved over the past several years.

Christian Stracke
Augusta

--From the Thursday, July 29, 2004 printed edition of the Augusta Chronicle