Small Town Feelings

Last night I watched the final episode in a special HGTV series called “Home Town Takeover.” In it, the small, spunky, but struggling small town of Wetumpka, Alabama receives a makeover courtesy of renovation experts Ben and Erin Napier. (An impressive array of additional Discovery Channel notables assist.)  

Throughout the series I kept feeling as though something was missing. Last night I realized what it was: complaining. Controversy. How could one town undergo so much change with nary a peep from the naysayers? Here in Columbia such a scenario would be impossible. We can’t even redo a Village Center without protests, committees, and mediation. Oh, and don’t forget meetings. Numerous meetings, contentious meetings, interminable meetings.

Of course none of that kind of behavior would make for the kind of television that HGTV is after. And I suspect that plenty of legal documents were signed to make sure that Wetumpkians behaved themselves and were suitably grateful. At least in public. But you know there’s got to be folks behind closed doors who don’t think much of those sherbet-colored business facades or that new hoity-toity farmers market down by the Coosa River. They liked the atmosphere better at Coaches Corner before those out-of-towners got their hands on it.

It’s human nature. Some people have a hard time with change. Some people truly enjoy complaining.

I laughed at myself a bit as I made the comparison between Columbia and Wetumpka as “small towns.” Wikipedia set me straight.

Columbia, a census-designated place, had a population of 99,615 at the 2010 United States Census. It is the second most populous community in Maryland after Baltimore. More recent estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey put the population at approximately 103,467 as of 2015.

At the 2010 census the population of Wetumpka was 6,528.

Okay, we’re not a small town, even though I often feel that we are. 

I wonder though, if there is a generally known percentage of people who are involved in their communities that remains constant whether the population is six thousand or a hundred thousand. What about complainers? Does every place have about the same percentage, or are some locations just more prone to it?

We’ll never know if there were any hot words exchanged at City Council meetings in Wetumpka over the months-long transformation. That’s not part of the HGTV “concept.” But, here in Columbia, well, we can just imagine.