What will it take to spark a renaissance on Butler’s Main Street? The question suddenly becomes more than a rhetorical exercise.

The Butler County Tourism and Convention Bureau has created a new position, director of downtown revitalization. It has hired a Butler native, Mary Tate, to carry out the mission.

The tourism bureau has both a successful track record and a reputation for launching commercially successful projects that rapidly become self-sustaining and profitable. The Bantam Jeep Festival is a prime example. The tourism bureau would not take on a project if the project didn’t have a very good chance of commercial success.

The disclosure comes of the heels of a recent report that Butler County Community College might be interested in establishing a downtown presence. The combination of such focused resources, added to a recent influx of merchant activity, bodes well for Butler’s business district in the years to come.

Tate says a big part of her mission will be “to find a way to facilitate a collaboration amongst the different entities so we aren’t duplicating energy, time and money and try to direct it into one solid plan.”

To get to that point — that is, to align everyone behind one solid plan — requires everyone involved to get behind the same vision. All of us should consider the most fundamental ideas about community:

n What is it about Butler that makes us a community: ethnicity, geographic location, the culture, history, resources, faith — or all of that? What brought us here? What keeps us here?

n What hardships do we endure in common? What blessings do we share jointly?

n What do we celebrate as community?

n What parts of our community should we change, and at what expense?

This type of speculation always includes a paradox. A city is basically organic — it grows haphazardly, despite efforts to manage and steer its growth. Success is fleeting. It can’t be replicated, sustained or repeated indefinitely.

Often it’s the vision of a community that keeps it going. In other words, if a town wants to improve itself, it first must envision the improved version of itself.

Could something as elusive as community development boil down to such a simple formula? Why couldn’t it? Maybe the task ahead of our new director of downtown revitalization is to gather up the jigsaw puzzle pieces of our downtown vision and assemble them into the bigger picture that we all know exists.