Readers have, on occasion, gently chastised me for being less than upbeat about our fair city.

“Hey moron, if you don’t like it here, why don’t you leave?”

Little comments like that.

My response has always been twofold: I do like it here, I just see room for improvements; and, I’m pretty much unemployable anywhere else, so where would I go?

I never thought a little honest self-examination hurts, whether it’s taking stock of yourself or your community. Often, we can’t or won’t change anyway, but sometimes we do.

With that in mind I’d like to hear from you on things you see wrong with greater Mankato. Not the Big Ones, like wishing the flood walls would go away or wanting property taxes to drop 30 percent.

We want to focus on the smaller, repairable, but still nagging problems that can drive us batty: yards overgrown with weeds, horrible street signs, shrubs blocking intersection views and stop signs, shabby and/or abandoned buildings, hazards, ugliness and other issues that make the area less than it could be.

The cities have had their share of unsightly properties. The most horrific may have been a rental housing complex near the university that was fondly called Tornado Towers. It was a collection of antiquated mobile homes stacked atop one another and held together with concrete pillars. The private market mercifully made the property so valuable the dark brown trailers were razed.

There was the Viking Motel, on the way up the Madison Avenue hill, that in its late years exuded a touch of Skid Row. The new Boy Scouts office that now sits on the site is a definite improvement.

The old hip-roofed machine shed that served as a welding shop on Range Street in North Mankato was not the kind of edifice city planners would have wished for on a busy intersection. It fell to fire and a nice-looking strip mall replaced it.

Speaking of ugly, I’d be remiss not to walk out the office door and take a gander at The Free Press building.

It’s not a bad building, but the cheap siding put on by a cheap publisher several years ago looked shoddy the day it was installed. (Hey, it’s a former publisher with a company that doesn’t own us anymore. He can’t fire me now.)

Light breezes peeled back the flimsy siding, which, at least, diverted attention from the black roofing tar that seeped down the front of the building.

I always thought the siding made the building look like a small-town grain elevator, but with less class.

Still, I have to tip my hat to our new publisher (who can fire me) for spiffing things up as he can, including a remodel of the shabby entrance to the office, hiring a water-pressure cleaning of the black goo from the Kasota Stone facade of the building, and having the back loading dock rebuilt.