About 50 percent of Mankato kindergartners are not ready to start school. Unemployment rates in rural counties around Mankato remain some of the highest in the state. Violent crime appears to be showing up in the heart of normally safe communities.

The Greater Mankato community faces myriad social and economic problems, and yet, there is no comprehensive and centralized community assessment effort to define these problems and promote solutions.

Granted, Greater Mankato remains one of the best places to live. Schools are overall very sound. Employment and wages have been gaining in the core counties even during a recession. We are by no means a community that is spiraling downward. Still, there are slivers of bad news on the horizon, and the earlier we address them, the better.

The Free Press will aim to facilitate this effort, but stakeholders far and wide must be a part of the solution. The first step is to assess where we think we are at as a community and assess our future. Fortunately, a great volume of study and work has been done on community challenges by the Envision 2020 group, Greater Mankato Growth and individual cities, counties and other nonprofits. This effort will attempt to draw from those efforts, but keep community awareness at the forefront.

We have many reasons to feel like we can, if not rest on our laurels, at least take a breather. Mankato has been judged one of the best communities for youth from the prestigious America’s Promise organization founded by former Secretary of State Colin Powell. We are a community with several institutions of higher learning. We have an outstanding regional medical community. We’ve been judged among the best small cities to live. Our schools have received high marks from business organizations that give advice to companies on where to locate.

We are developing vibrant communities in some of our downtowns.

But we also must consider serious social issues that seem to be creeping up on us. Some of our local counties are ranked in the top 10 in the state for most driving-while-intoxicated arrests. Youth and even young adults seem to be prone to an evolving culture that enables them to abuse alcohol. Some of that problem exists at our institutions of higher education, but also in the community at large.

We pour a lot of resources and time into industrial and commercial development. But the success has been uneven. The regional centers of Mankato and North Mankato do well, while small towns languish and struggle to come up with tax base to repair crumbling schools.

Our schools graduate numerous National Merit Scholars and do well on statewide testing, mostly among the white population. The education we are providing to communities of colors, again, is more uneven.

Our local governments continue to face financial stress while the volume of social and economic problems they must address continues to grow.

The trends facing us will not make community development any easier. The aging population will bring tremendous responsibilities on each community. As people live longer, they require health care, activities and community support. A slowdown in industrial and commercial development will slow the growth of local tax bases at a time when state and federal fund sharing will be equally squeezed.

New ideas are needed, and existing good ideas may need to be implemented. The first step in this process is evaluation of the Greater Mankato community and its challenges. To this end, The Free Press will be conducting a survey in the next few weeks to get community feedback on problems of the future. Once we assess that, we will be able to start to focus on keeping these problems in the forefront of the public attention and tracking the success of our solutions. We ask you to participate as a community member in the common goal of making where we live a better place.