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Show Ordinary citizens fuel bid for Ail-American Cities honor by RICK BROUGH Record staff writer Park City's citizens made the town a finalist in the All-America Cities competition and they will carry the ; city's message to the contest finals in Cincinnati, Nov. 15-17, said Jess Reid. Reid and Jack Turner are co-chairmen co-chairmen of the All-America Cities Task Force, which is putting together the city's presentation to the contest judges. Reid said the task force is "a small group of people peo-ple putting in an incredible amount ofhours." Each of the 20 towns in the finals will give a 10-minute presentation to the contest judges on Nov. 17. Reid said Park City's case will be made by locals Jim Santy and Joan Peets. "We're sending back citizens, rather than a professional speaker," Reid said. The campaign will strike a middle ground, he said not too slick, but also "not too homey or down-in-the-country . " t' Locals will have an opportunity to see the city's presentation. Dress rehearsal will be at the Marsac Building on Tuesday, Nov. 12, at 7 p.m. The public is invited. Two speakers will represent different dif-ferent segements of Park City's population the old and the new. Santy is a longtime resident and a commissioner in the Park City Fire District. Reid said Peets, a newer resident, "made a conscious commitment com-mitment to move here because of the community, not because of a job here, for instance." She was an organizer of the International Winter Special Olympics Games last spring. The town's delegation includes only on-ly a few of the people who could represent it well, Reid said. The All-America Cities contest has been sponsored for each of the last 35 years by the Citizens Forum on Self-Government Self-Government of the National Municipal League. It also is sponsored spon-sored by the USA Today newspaper. The 20 finalists were winnowed from 93 entries. The Park City delegation also plans to set up an exhibit in a booth constructed from facsimile mine timbers. Delegates will distribute a tabloid, modeled after the Park Record, to describe the activities of Park City citizens. Reid said the exhibit will illustrate three projects that made Park City a finalist. First, citizens and landowners in the Prospector Square area took the initiative to cover and landscape the area after it appeared old mine tailings tail-ings there posed a possible health hazard. ' "This was a good way to turn a negative into a positive," said Reid. And it turned a complimentary national na-tional spotlight on the Prospector area. Second, residents improved Park City education by choosing to increase in-crease their own taxes through a voted leeway, he said. As a result, the district has gone from 34th to first in the state for teacher salaries. It is near the top in quality of physical facilities and Scholastic Aptitude Test scores and has one of the lowest pupilteacher ratios in the state, Reid said. Finally, he said, the town hosted the International Special Olympics, after some observers said the town was too small to stage such an event. Of the 5,000 volunteers who helped to stage the Olympic event, 1,000 were from Park City nearly a third of the town's population. The judges' job in Cincinnati is to evaluate these and other aspects of the community. They then will make unannounced field visits to the nominated cities and towns in December or January to take a firsthand first-hand look at the communities. Reid said the final decision naming nam-ing up to seven ail-American cities will come later this winter. He said it was impressive for Park City to make it this far in the competition. com-petition. "We're an unusually small town to have achieved the things we're talking about' |