By Jim Sack

My friend, Andi Udris, has resigned from the Alliance. I will miss him.

Andi Udris

To be clear, the abrupt resignation, which he did not signal to me when we breakfasted last week, looks more like walking the plank at the point of cutlass.

Perhaps the people who gave him the choice between jumping or being pushed had a good reason, perhaps, as was reported, it was a clash of personalities. I doubt anyone will bother to tell me. People in these positions use silencers.

Andi, to his credit, worked hard for this area and had big dreams for economic development. He clearly had begun to set down roots and bubbled of how much he liked Fort Wayne.

Somebody, apparently, didn’t care much for Andi, his ideas or his personality. You can see the members listed here on their website. They include the high and the mighty in Fort Wayne, as well as a couple who are moving on in life. They include people who are hired guns who will vanish in their own time from the local scene leaving very little, indeed, behind.

Udris grew up, as mentioned, in Cleveland, he was the son of a Democratic father and a Republican mother. His father immigrated after WWII from West Germany after fleeing his native Latvia. The Soviets had killed thousands in Riga just before the war and would kill thousand more, deport tens of thousands of Latvians to Siberia and would stifle Latvia for a generation. The elder Udris, who had fought the Soviets, fled with the retreating Germans and eventually found his way to Cleveland and a solid, well paying union job that promised a future and security. His union job delivered on that promise in a way the Soviets never did, nor ever would.

So, Andi would talk of hearing his father and mother argue politics at home. They both wanted him to get a nice, safe, middle class job as an engineer, but his first years among the geeks told him that he would rather be in the more fluid and political arena of economic development. To the chagrin of his “play-it-safe” parents, Andi transferred credits and graduated into the more political, more controversial world of quasi-government community development. After stints in other towns, after successes and failures, he brought to Fort Wayne and to his job plenty of experience, plenty of ideas and a sensitivity to the Republican side and the Democratic side of arguments, thanks to hearing his mother and father debate. Andi was not only willing to listen, but he also heard and understood what you might say. When we breakfasted he told me his concerns with the Right-to-Work bill, but explained why he supported it. I offered my concerns which he accepted. There was no rancor, no hyperbole, just an analysis and discussion. I might suggest that willingness to hear sat him apart from so many “leaders” who hear nothing and are just waiting for your lips to stop moving so they can pronounce their loftier thoughts.

What was equally interesting during our many conversations was the way Udris explained the problems confronting Fort Wayne’s economic development future. He had big ideas that would require significant change in local thinking and for some people and institutions to think of the community as well as their parochial turf. The big ideas complimented the standard, Economic Development 101 projects such as “shovel-ready” factory sites.

Perhaps it was his willingness to push, to confront the sedentary and to propose big ideas to little minds that got him in trouble and led to “spend more time with my family,” as they say.

It would, indeed, be a sad thing if Mr. Udris were to leave Fort Wayne for other digs. He contributes much to our area and is not afraid to rattle a few cages. In economic developmental sleeping dogs should not be let lie.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 29th, 2012 at 11:08 am and is filed under City & County Government, Current Affairs, Fort Wayne. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.