A Series in Two Parts--Part Two
SENIOM SED--You wouldn't call it a new city--not yet, despite the rhetoric coming out of the mayor's office in downtown Seniom Sed. But it would also be wrong to say anything other than that Seniom Sed is doing everything possible to turn things around for the better.
"There's no doubt that we've earned our bad reputations," mayor's assistant Burlingame Balloon said. "Seniom Sed polluted unabashedly, showed no respect for the health and wellbeing of its residents, and was the biggest example of corporate greed triumphing over the human. We're all guilty."
Seniom Sed paid for that reputation on the backs of its blue collar population, men and women who lived hard, short lives in the smelting plants and industrial factories that made up the bulk of the city. They lived with compromised water and air, and still do, in many cases. In our previous article in the series, we interviewed Finney Fiornstern, a career smelter who worked in numerous plants to make enough money to raise his family of seven. Fiornstern, a frail man who wheezed as he spoke of his years in the center of Seniom Sed's 'industrial hell', passed away recently at the age of 63.
But also in the heart of the city, reformers were plotting to change the minds of city leaders.
Arranging a meeting between the city's mayor, Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, and the man who would start the change that would begin to bring Seniom Sed out of the depths was a task that fell to a young lawyer by the name of Frito.
Frito was not someone we would call smart. But he liked money, and it was his destiny to bring Joe "Not Sure" Bauers and his girlfriend Rita to the very pinnacle of the hierarchy of Seniom Sed while trying to locate the city's fabled Time Masheen.
Of course, that story will have to be told another day. But it was "Not Sure" who convinced Mayor Camacho that change needed to take place in Seniom Sed. Camacho announced the bold new changes at a citywide press conference recently:
"Now I understand everyone's shit's emotional right now. But I got a three-point plan that's going to fix EVERYTHING," Camacho said.
"Break it down, Camacho!" a city councilman replied.
"Number one: We've got this guy Not Sure. Number two: He's got a higher IQ than ANY MAN ALIVE. And Number three: He's going to fix EVERYTHING," Camacho said.
And so it was that Seniom Sed began to turn a corner. Nobody in Midlandia believed it would be possible, considering the city's leaders had the lowest IQs of anyone in the region. But, in rapid succession, the city built the new Transcendent Isle, and invested heavily in education, building Nikita Khrushchev University, Spasibo Academy, and a host of new libraries.
In addition to the needed improvements in education, and an investment in health care that was desperately needed, Seniom Sed appears to have changed its views regarding unrestrained industrial development, a dangerous proposition considering the powerful interests behind the development of industry in SS.
"Seniom Sed has a major problem, and that is Industry Haven," development studies professor Hale Julien at Jupiter University said. "Unlike other Midlandia cities that have gotten away with wholesale dismantling of their industrial districts, Seniom Sed and Industry Haven have a cooperative, symbiotic relationship. Simply put, if Seniom Sed killed its industry, not only would the effects be felt for the residents of that city, but job loss would severely impact Industry Haven, and possibly the entire region.
"Seniom Sed is, for all the derision, the tail that wags the dog," Julien said.
But city leaders appear to be sensitive to this relationship, and they have been taking a careful approach to modifying industry in Seniom Sed without eliminating it. Assistant Balloon noted that the city has been courting High Tech industrial firms with gusto, as well as remaking industrial blocks to encourage nonpolluting industry to take the place of dirty industry. The city started by lowering High Tech Industry taxes to 7%, one of the lowest rates in the region.
"The results have been making themselves slowly evident. As commercial firms increase their commitment to the city, we see increasing services that benefit the community at large," Julien said.
Two of the more prominent signals of positive change in the city are the new Fleur Marina on the city's west side, and the city's first television station, Super Seniom TV, located at the edge of the newly created New City neighborhood in the southwest.
And the city itself seems to have the beginning of an understanding of how to heal from the scars of its past, by invoking the spirit of its blue collar heritage. City managers just recently cut the ribbon on Seniom Sed's commuter airport, with the family of Finney Fiornstern on hand. There, they unveiled the name of the new airport: The Finney Fiornstern Memorial Airport.
"This city has growing hope," Juliet Fiornstern, daughter of the late Finney, said at the ribbon cutting ceremony. "And if it continues to commit itself to change, then we will be happy to stay and call Seniom Sed home."
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