You are a young professional. You come to Albert Lea for a job interview. You want the job and are good at what you do, but you want to make sure the community is the right fit for you and your wife. The two of you plan to have a family once you get established with jobs and a home.

It’s nighttime. The job interview is the next day. Before you go to the hotel, you plan to take a peek at the town.

You exit the freeway and enter Albert Lea on East Main Street. It has a grassy median with nice lighting. There are restaurants, hotels, gas stations. It looks fairly good. The area with Walgreens, Subway, McDonald’s, Goodyear and State Farm looks nice, too. Then you climb up the hill, go past Wells Fargo, then come to a halt at the stoplight with Broadway.

It’s your first impression of downtown Albert Lea. On the right, the view is limited by the buildings. So you look to your left where there is a clear view of a row of buildings, standing out like a giant billboard. This billboard screams: Ugly!

Most of the buildings are abandoned and somewhat dilapidated. The cafe is nonexistent. The Broadway Theater sign is missing letters. The existing businesses could have more welcoming facades. Even the law office looks boarded up. And the exterior streetscape of the block is mundane.

On top of it all, you’ve been sitting at this lousy stoplight and no one was coming from another direction. You are just sitting there, wasting gas, for nothing.

It finally turns green, and you head forward to the area near the YMCA, discover the city limits and turn around. You go back to the hotel by the freeway. You didn’t even notice how nice Broadway is between Main Street and Fountain Street. You didn’t find your way to scenic Lakeview Boulevard around Fountain Lake. You go to bed lukewarm about making Albert Lea the place to start a family.

Without a doubt, the junction of Main Street and Broadway and the first block to the south of it combine to be the worst eyesore in Albert Lea. Don’t believe us? Ask anyone hired from out of the city the impression of the city they had when they rolled up to that intersection.

The second-worst eyesore is farther down South Broadway all the way down to South Margaretha, from the vacant businesses and empty Elks Lodge along the four-lane route to how the route lacks trees to the odd mix of commerce and residential and, for about half of it, the lack of sidewalks.

Just imagine how much worse the impression would have been if the young professional in our tale would have come into the city on South Broadway. In fact, one new-to-town worker we know who entered Albert Lea the first time by driving up South Broadway said it reminded her of Saginaw, Michigan, a boarded-up city that lost 48 percent of its residents in 50 years. She later realized Albert Lea was nice, but the first impression was that it was a depressing place.

Dan Burden, a renowned transportation expert in Albert Lea this week with the Blue Zones Project, is right. We need to redo that intersection and that route.

Want jobs in the 21st century? It’s not simply about tax deductions anymore. That is a 1980s ways of thinking. Companies today want to be where talented young professionals desire to live. Bringing in talent and keeping that talent — for the existing Albert Lea companies as well as prospective ones — means the city and state need to care about quality of life. And that first impression is important. Albert Lea is competing with suburbs.

The work the Minnesota Department of Transportation plans to do this summer is most welcomed. The city feedback is key.

We encourage Albert Lea residents to be open-minded to a roundabout at Main Street and Broadway. The statistics for the improved safety roundabouts provide are well-defined. And our memory recalls semi trucks having problems making the tight turns the present junction requires. One ripped off the awning of the Wedge Jones Building (Midwest Antiques) in March 2011. A roundabout actually would be better for the truckers.

Besides, what kind of motorist wants to sit at stoplights? Roundabouts only slow motorists down but lets them drive right through. What’s more, because the turn of a roundabout changes the view of the driver, it likely would do a better job of getting out-of-town drivers on Main Street to turn right at that corner and go downtown — which is good for the local economy.

We also endorse making Broadway two lanes with a center-turn lane, rather than the gigantic four-lane nightmare that it is. There are many pedestrians in the blocks all the way down to Front Street — especially at the license center but even at Diana’s Diner and the Clark gas station — and the roadway needs to be more pedestrian-friendly, like how Broadway north of Main became good for foot traffic last year. The car should not be king. People should be.

We favor continuing the same Broadway streetscape used for Main to Fountain on the roadway down to Front Street, and we feel vegetation, walkways and rethinking the traffic paint on Broadway all the way down to Margaretha Avenue would be a good start on an area of the city that needs the most beautification.

Let’s fix this. There is no doubt a problem exists. There is no doubt solutions that work are at hand. What’s not to favor here? Opposition to these solutions remind us of the opposition to the downtown reconstruction — they like it after its all done and then quiet their tongues about being against it in the first place.