QUALITIES OF LIFE, CAPE GIRARDEAU; STUDY FOCUSES ON CAPE LIFE: GOOD, BAD POINTS SHOWN IN NUMBERS

Editor's Note: The Southeast Missourian begins a week-long special report today that will analyze the Quality of Life Report. The daily reports will run through June 1.

A report released last week by the Cape Girardeau Chamber of Commerce is intended to be an insightful and sometimes painfully honest look at the quality of life in Cape Girardeau.

The report, titled "Quality Of Life," evaluates eight different areas of life in Cape Girardeau, said Chamber President John Mehner. The report not only points out strengths in the community, but also its weaknesses.

The report shows good news: Job growth and property values are up, for example. But the report also has some disappointing news: The number of public high school graduates has decreased while the response times of the police and fire departments have climbed.

Over the past year, a special committee of 16 community leaders gathered statistics in eight areas showing trends from 1990-1995. The areas are education, economics, public safety, natural environment, health, social environment, government/politics and culture/recreation.

The report addresses the most important issues in each area, Mehner said.

"It's a self-measuring, self-bench marking, self-gauging evaluation of where we are to help us get where we want to be," Mehner said. "It is laying the cards on the table, rather than giving blanket statements about how great we are that do nothing but make false promises.

"These are hard, cold facts and truths about where we're going in terms of trends."

Co-chair of the committee, Kim Kurka McDowell, discovered that Jacksonville, Fla., was doing a similar project called Quality Indicators for Progress.

McDowell presented it to the Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors. She says many other cities are doing similar projects.

Mehner said the board loved the idea and wanted to get on board immediately. A committee was formed within months.

The committee is also chaired by Doug Groesbeck, district manager at Union Electric and Keith Russell, an accounting professor at Southeast Missouri State University.

The committee went to various groups to gather information from their particular fields. For example, information on public safety came from the police department and voter information came from the county clerk's office.

But some of the information in the report may be incorrect, a point that Mehner concedes.

"This is the first production of the document," Mehner said. "So there are probably numbers that don't jive. But there are no figures in this report that we just grabbed out of the air."

The committee plans to review the information in the report and offer recommendations to the board about ways to improve city weaknesses and how to build upon strengths, said Russell.

"We're going to make some recommendations for the board to consider how we think it needs to move forward," Russell said. "The board directive will then proceed."

Russell said that they based the report on the Jacksonville, Fla., study, but tried to customize it to benefit Cape Girardeau. He admits there were problems in reporting the data.

"Some data didn't fit," Russell said. "Some of it is county and city data and when you start bringing in state data, that's where you start getting real problems."

It's all in an effort to purify the report, Russell said, in hopes to improve the document next year.

Mehner said that new reports will be released annually. The report was formed to take a more aggressive role about community betterment and committing it to paper.

Mehner said his goal is to have copies of this report at the chamber office and at libraries and possibly on the Internet.

"This is step one," Mehner said. "We know where to go for sources, we now are finding out the cracks that were there that we need to fix. But we're going to build on this process and be able to give a document to people that means something."

This week, the Southeast Missourian takes an in-depth look at a different area of life in Cape Girardeau.

*Today: Government and Politics

*Tuesday: Economics

*Wednesday: Education

*Thursday: Social/natural environment

*Friday: Cultural/recreation

*Saturday: Health

*Sunday: Public safety