I’ve been traveling for the holidays and I’m currently staying with family members in Toledo, Ohio, my hometown. Toledo epitomizes many other midwestern cities. Long a center for rail transportation and for the auto industry, Toledo has struggled mightily with the transformational challenges of a 21st century economy.

The city houses some incredible gems including the Toledo Museum of Art, a truly world-class institution that includes one of the most remarkable performance facilities around (the Peristyle). It also is home to the Mud Hens baseball team, made famous by Jamie Farr in the long-running television series M*A*S*H, along with Tony Packo’s Hungarian Hot Dogs.

On the other hand, comparing Toledo with Salt Lake City reveals some sharp contrasts that suggest Utah’s signature metropolis is running many leagues ahead of a struggling midwestern city. Let’s start with the matter of municipal governance. The advantage is clearly in the hands of Salt Lake City. On all levels – mayoral, city council, and central administrative – SLC clearly leads in terms of vision, competence, and sincere commitment to meaningful public service. Toledo’s mayor Carty Finkbeiner consistently has been a recalcitrant, defensive, backward-looking public official who has failed to consolidate a realistic vision of how a city’s business base needs to be updated for a complex, interdependent economy.

The city once housed at least seven high-ranking Fortune 500 companies and has put all of its business development eggs literally into one basket in sustaining Jeep’s presence in Toledo. Add to the mix a contentious array of bickering economic development agencies which fail to see the value of supporting creative independent entrepreneurs (e.g. a noticeable brain drain that has all but removed a young, innovative segment from the city business scene) and one can readily see an urban center that remains intractably focused more on survival than on business growth.

The city public school system, despite the incredulously rose-colored veneer promulgated by local education officials, is a disaster with far worse performance dynamics than witnessed here in Utah.

The city’s counterpart to Salt Lake City’s Downtown Alliance has collapsed in a pile of overdrawn checks and unpaid obligations. The venture had included a local market that should have been akin to the popular Farmer’s Market held from June to October in Pioneer Park.

A local hands-on science center, long criticized for its stubborn resistance to updating exhibits to reflect contemporary technological advancements, will close at the end of the month after voters rejected additional taxes to sustain the project. Incidentally, the museum was located in a failed downtown marketplace. At one point, the science museum’s proponents promised that the center would attract retail and entertainment spots to a dead downtown area. And, the city’s main library, which has been renovated extensively, never enjoys the same level of patronage or visibility that Salt Lake City’s main library has.

As a downtown resident of Salt Lake City, I could never envision living in downtown Toledo that continues to resemble an extraordinarily depressing venue. And, disturbingly so, I find little improvement on each annual visit to Toledo.

The point of this commentary is that there truly is much to celebrate in Salt Lake City. On mood alone, there is considerable energy in many sectors – public, private, and quasi-public – that indicates the city continues to takes it role as innovator seriously. We have learned a great deal after the 2002 Winter Olympics. In fact, as welcome as the prestigious honor was to host these games, the Olympics did not materialize themselves to be the key to the city’s economic, cultural, and commercial strengths.

Instead, we are gradually acknowledging that our capacity for leadership and innovation is part of our local character, increasingly manifested in the wonderful enterprises that have been established throughout the valley by individuals who are the vanguard of a remarkable 21st century movement of entrepreneurship.