Bryan Vogt: Welcome back to Ready, Set, Sold. I’m your host Bryan Vogt, and we have been discussing the city of O’Fallon, and quite frankly, the amazing things that O’Fallon has going on. And Mayor Herb Roach is with us today, and just got done talking about so many great things about the city, things that I had no idea about.
Again, I lived in the area all my life and have no idea they have ten parks. As far as the baseball and soccer fields and all those things, some of that was coming up, but that was amazing stuff. That’s great for families, and for everyone, for that matter. Whether you have children or you don’t.
With that said, one of the things that you mentioned in the last segment that I really want to highlight is this, and I mentioned that the military presence, but the fact is that the amount of people that come here and retire here from the military says so much about what you guys have to offer. The military people, the military life and I’ve gotten to work with war veterans or people in the military, they can literally live almost anywhere. And they don’t necessarily have to have started here in O’Fallon. They’ve been to Pennsylvania, Washington DC, they may be originally from all parts of the country. But they find O’Fallon as a home. Don’t you agree, Mayor?
Mayor Roach: Totally, and the other better half of my family was born at Scott Air Force Base, and her father and grandfather are retired Air Force. So, yes, totally, totally agree. People find our community, because of our excellent schools, because of the safe environment we’ve got, because of the top flight healthcare that we have, and only being 15 minutes from downtown St. Louis, where they can take in the major league sports, the zoo and the many other amenities that are offered in the St. Louis area.
The fact that we have three different exits and entrance ramps here in our community to aid in the movement of traffic, to keep things moving. These are the things that have helped build O’Fallon and make it the type of community it is, and the fact is too that we’re not resting on our laurels. We’re wanting to be more aggressive. We want to diversify further, but within our community too. Keep our economy growing, because the more diversified we can be, the better off for everybody because not all parts of the economy, when you have dips in the economy, not all parts go down at the same time.
Our developers build some of the best homes and quality homes, and that is a very attractive thing. That people know when they build a home here, when they buy a home here, it’s of good quality.
I can go on and on, I’m so proud to boast of the assets of our city, especially since I was born here, I should mention. But one of the best things to be able to prove is what do the citizens of your community think of your community. What do they say about your community. And we do a survey. We have it totally done independent, every two years. And I’m going to just share a few things.
94% of our residents would recommend O’Fallon as an excellent place to live. 95% of our residents rated O’Fallon good or excellent place to live. 96% of our residents rated O’Fallon good or excellent place to raise kids. 95% of our residents said that our EMS, our fire department was good to excellent. And 97% of our residents rated O’Fallon as good or excellent as a safe community to live in.
These are type of things that are just so very important, and these are what I call the bread and butter things for having a good community and a good quality of life, where people want to raise their families, and in turn, where people want to have their businesses.
Bryan Vogt: That’s amazing. That’s truly amazing. One thing I actually love with anything is the fact that you reach out to the citizens, and so that says there’s a connection between the city government and also through the community. That’s really important when people are deciding where to live, where to put roots down. Those types of numbers are amazing.
Mayor Roach: We tried to even, I’ve tried to even strengthen that. Our council members get out there and they’re in the community. They get feedback. But to me, communications is extremely important. As an alderman, I walked to every home in my ward every year. I did that for six years. But some of the things that I’ve tried to do since been elected was try to open up our communications more.
I personally have evening hours once a month, and I also have Saturday hours. We’re holding quarterly town hall meetings to just invite the community in, to listen to what’s going on, to ask any questions, give us suggestions on how we can make improvements, so that we can keep this the state-of-the-art community that it has been developed into.
We have online systems available for our citizens to give us direct input, and we’ve just launched a brand new mobile app that will make it easier for citizens to give us feedback on things, or if they see a problem in a street or on a highway, to give us instantaneous feedback so that we can take care of that and maintain those facilities for them.
Bryan Vogt: That’s absolutely awesome, and Mayor, we basically ran out of time. Thank you so much for sharing this insight that I think is, again, amazing what’s going on in O’Fallon, why it’s such a great place to live. And I think again, I always say this, but it starts with the top and it goes with the sincere love and commitment that just shines through that you have for the city. And I think that’s an important factor when people are deciding where to live in the metro east, and you’ve got that in spades.
Ready Set Sold with Bryan Vogt #23-03: Herb Roach, Mayor of O’Fallon Il: Mayor Herb Roach’s top reasons to live in O’Fallon Il Part 2
October 28, 2017