Okay, here goes: I want to know if you have any ideas of boosting regional enthusiasm, particularly that in your own single-digit population Midwest.
The traditional midwestern remedy used to be to recruit additional residents from other regions. We may have to resort to that again sometime soon when we can't fill a position locally once again.
Or we propose to annex everything to the Midwest.
Basically, having a federal structure (or really, especially at the time we started: pretending to do so) was a mistake from the start, but it was vain telling people so back in 2004. I tried. It's probably impossible to remedy that now, but that doesn't change the fact that it would be the sensible thing to do.