People You Need to Know: Cora Scott

Cora Scott’s job is information: gathering it, verifying it and getting it out to the public.

It’s something that applies to her day job as director of public information and civic engagement for the city of Springfield, but it also applies to the work she does as chair of both the Missouri Route 66 Centennial Commission and the National Route 66 Centennial Kickoff Celebration.

Scott wants people to have access to the information they need, and that includes educational efforts about a proposed downtown convention and events center, as well as day-to-day operations of city government and on occasion crisis communications.

Scott considers transparency her gold standard.

“That’s really what good public information does anyway, and that’s always been my philosophy: zero spin,” Scott says.

That’s a challenge today, she says.

“On the one hand, we have more communication modalities than we’ve ever had in the history of humankind, but on the other hand, we have the most divided attention spans that humans have ever had,” she says. “It’s harder than ever to make sure that facts and straightforward information reach people you’re engaging with – but I love a challenge.”

Scott says she also loves getting out among people.

“It sounds trite, but we really do have more in common than we have differences,” she says. “It’s just getting above the rhetoric on all sides and try to actually listen and come to collaborative solutions.”

Scott says parades, concerts and other special events open the door to allow people to access their local government in a non-threatening way.

“The things that happen at the national level do cast a pallor on the local level, but we work tirelessly to make sure that people have access to their local government and are able to see it for its good parts, its challenges, everything,” she said. “Everything comes down to trust and what you can do to build it, and it’s so easy to lose.”

Every year, 65,000-70,000 people come to Springfield for the August Birthplace of Route 66 Festival, and they hail from almost every state and multiple countries, Scott says.

She expects an even more robust turnout for the National Route 66 Kickoff Celebration, an event headquartered in the Queen City but geared toward recognizing the significance of the entire 2,500-mile Mother Road.

As chair of the state’s Route 66 Centennial Commission, Scott was able to rise to the chair of the national celebration. One of her goals, she says, is to leverage the event for smaller cities.

“I said if we get this and we have it in Springfield, I want to make sure that all of these cities along Route 66 in Missouri are a part of it,” she says. “For them to have faith in me to be able to do that means a lot to me.”

But Scott still loves to promote Springfield.

“We’re used to being the third-largest city in the state of Missouri, and we have a lot to prove,” she says. “I was talking to ‘The Today Show’ producers and trying to entice them to come here, and by the end of the conversation, they literally said to me, ‘What do you have in the water in Springfield, Missouri?’

“I said, ‘Come taste it.’”