LEDC Update

Hello everyone! For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Christophe Trahan and I’m the current Executive Director of the Linden Economic Development Corporations. I was asked by Shawn Larson, Editor and Publisher of our beloved Cass County Sun, if I could contribute regular articles to the newspaper and I jumped at the chance! I’ve been with the LEDC for over a year now and in that time my job has afforded me the fantastic opportunity to work in my community in a plethora of different ways.

In fact, most of you may already know me through some of the organizations that I’m a part of, be it the Linden Lion’s Club, the Linden Area Chamber of Commerce, our downtown clean-up group Linden Pride, or just through my work with the LEDC itself.

However, I was very grateful when Shawn asked me to pen articles for the newspaper because it gives me another outlet to espouse our wonderful community organizations and because it gives me a golden opportunity to contribute to the immensely valuable local resource that is the Cass County Sun.

In short, I’m greatly looking forward to sharing worthwhile information with the Sun’s readers on everything from economic development strategies, to current events in Linden, and even taking some time to spotlight facets of our community that I find particularly important or interesting.

With that small introduction out of the way, I actually wanted to take this first week to talk a little bit about our local newspaper itself, what it means to our community, and what it means to me personally. I, like many of its readers, have always been familiar with the staff members at the Sun. I attribute that familiarity to the fact that the Sun (and its organization’s leadership) has always been very deliberate in finding staffers who have a proclivity for community involvement and very friendly natures. Our news isn’t “handed down to us from on high” from people that we don’t know and who don’t have a genuine investment in our community. Each one of the Sun’s articles is penned by a staff member or a community member with a deep investment in and love for our community, and when you look at the history of the Sun, this staffing decision makes perfect sense.

The Cass County Sun was established in 1876 and is itself the oldest business in Cass County. To contextualize that number of “1876” a little clearer, we’re talking about a time “before the West was tamed” so to speak—an era when gangs of bushwhacking outlaws still roamed across the country and the primary mode of transportation had four legs and a tail. With a history stretching back that far, it’s easy to understand how the history of the Cass County Sun is, in fact, our own history has citizens of Cass County.

And here we are now, almost a century and a half later, in a technological and economic landscape that is difficult to navigate for print media (to say the least). To see that we still have a genuine local newspaper filled with the stories that matter to our community is nothing short of a testament to the members of our community who send in pictures, contribute articles, and become staffers at the Sun. It’s my hope for you, readers of the Sun, that you don’t simply see this paper as a simple paper. It’s my hope that you see it as an opportunity for you yourself to contribute and play a part in creating the history of our community. I know that I’m excited for the part that I’ll play.