By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
St. Joseph Mayor John Josendale sees an attitude change in St. Joseph.
Josendale says he has heard the old drumbeat that St. Joseph as a community has a negative attitude.
“Well, you can actually say that about anywhere,” Josendale tells host Barry Birr on the KFEQ Hotline, “because anytime you go in to a location there are going to be pluses and minuses.”
Josendale, who won election in April of last year, perceives a change in attitude due to several new faces in key leadership roles, from president of Missouri Western State University, Elizabeth Kennedy, to the work of Natalie Redmond as the new president of the St. Joseph Chamber of Commerce.
Josendale also praises the work of City Manager Bryan Carter and the staff at City Hall, who he says are taking on the challenges facing the city.
Josendale says St. Joseph doesn’t face any unsolvable problems.
“There’s always a solution,” according to Josendale. “In some cases, it may not be the perfect solution to everything, but what you want to try to do is work through and remember the goal is to do what’s best for the majority of the people and not necessarily the small group.”
Josendale points to passage of the police sales tax as an indication of a changing attitude among St. Joseph residents. He says that signals residents see a problem and seek to address it. Josendale adds it doesn’t really matter whether perception is reality when it comes to crime.
“The crime rate seemed (high), whether it did or didn’t, I mean you can look at statistics and people will say one thing, you can look at the other and say it’s absolutely worse,” Josendale says. “The point is we’ve got to fix whatever it was that was there, because it wasn’t working. And I feel like we’ve got a better attitude, we’ve got the right direction moving forward.”
Josendale says voter approval of the police sales tax gives the city council the money needed to raise police officer salaries in the fight against crime.
The St. Joseph Police Department has had trouble filling more than 20 vacancies on the force.