Just a few minutes into the third and final public forum on regionalism this past week, the jealousy appeared.

An audience question read before the panel asked (I’m paraphrasing a bit), “Why would Natchez and Adams County want to work with Vidalia on regional projects when Vidalia has been building competing projects such as a convention center and has plans to build a port?

Vidalia Mayor Hyram Copeland did his best to answer the question from his perspective, but the real attitude at play here is a much bigger problem: Some Natchez residents think they’re better than Vidalia residents.

That silly notion clouds their ability to see the benefits of working together.

Increasingly, however, the question might best be flipped around: Why would Vidalia want to work with Natchez?

Perhaps Vidalia’s recent successes have made a few Natchez people jealous with frustration.

Unfortunately, this arrogant minority may have effectively caused the duplication of services that they now point to with disdain.

Simply not being on the same page — for decades — has done little but foster such animosity on both sides of the river.

Perhaps if all sides of our community had been talking together about common wants and needs, some of these petty complaints of “competition” wouldn’t be an issue at all.

But despite the question asked Thursday, which seemed to indicate at least a few people wish the communities would continue to work separately, pulling and tugging in different directions, a growing majority of business people see just the opposite.

For our community to succeed, we must work together on projects that make sense to do so.

We’ll also compete with one another sometimes, too, but that spirit of competition needs to be a productive one, not a destructive one.

Looking around the room at Thursday’s public forum, a couple of things were obvious.

First, no one ever said that working together was going to be easy.

It’s not.

Regionalism is going to mean that everyone involved gets a little dirty because we’ll have to work at it.

Working together isn’t simple or always fun. It’s going to be work.

For regionalism to truly work, we’ll all have to give up some territory, either physical territory or territory of perception. Something will have to give on each side of the river.

But the greater goal — not personal gain — has to be at the heart of what’s driving this.

Ultimately, regionalism isn’t something that can be accomplished by a handful of people — particularly a handful of mostly elected officials.

Sure, they have a role to play, but ultimately if something is to get done, it will be by individuals who simply have a passion for some segment of the work that’s to be done.

Maybe that passion is in improving education or maybe it’s housing concerns.

Regardless of the specific area of interest, the important factor is to simply become involved and to help be a solution to some of our community’s problems.

The sooner we can all realize that Natchez cannot survive without Vidalia and Ferriday and vice versa, the better of we’ll all be.

If you don’t believe that, look at our area’s history. We’ve been interdependent upon one another for decades.

Once we get that down, we’ll have fewer questions about competition among us and more questions about cooperation.

Kevin Cooper is publisher of The Natchez Democrat. He can be reached at 601-445-3539 or kevin.cooper@natchezdemocrat.com.