I sent the following letter to Forbes magazine taking issue with its listing our city as the third-most miserable community in the nation.

Editor: Thank you very much for including Merced in your recent list placing us No. 3 in the nation. However, we feel obligated to point out a slight error in your list: It should have been titled the Opportunity Index, not the list of Most Miserable Cities.

Merced is a university community that is growing, vibrant, affordable and eager to attract new businesses and industries. We are poised for development and we appreciate your calling attention to our attributes.

As your list noted, Merced has lots of affordable homes, ranking it as one of the most affordable places to live in the state on another recent list. And we also have numerous business and industrial sites at an affordable rate.

You also noted that Merced has a large work force available to any new employer. These men and women have various levels of technical training, and we can always partner with the local community college to train workers in new techniques.

In examining your 10 criteria for selection to the Opportunity Index, you must have noted that half of our work force has a commute of 15 minutes or less.

We must have scored high in crime prevention, since we have reduced violent crimes for three years in a row.

Based on your criteria, our scores must have received a boost because we haven't had any public officials convicted of any crimes (except for maybe a parking ticket).

We checked our weather stats with those of your weather guru and we scored 10 points above the national average. Having 262 sunny days every year -- and zero snow days -- must have helped our ranking.

We were perplexed by the inclusion of our pro sports teams in your criteria, since we don't have any in Merced. The best we can figure is that the nearby San Francisco Giants winning the World Series helped push us up to the top of the list.

And you didn't even include some of our other selling points in your criteria:

We have a vibrant and growing faculty and student body at UC Merced, a leader in solar technology and stem cell research.

We are two hours from the natural beauty of Yosemite National Park and Carmel/Monterey Bay.

We have lowered our development and other fees to encourage businesses to come to Merced.

We foster an entrepreneurial spirit, with 39 new businesses opening up in our downtown in just the last two years.

We have a great K-12 educational system that each year sends students off to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Berkeley.

We continue to be one of the most ethnically diverse communities in the nation.

We don't have to shovel snow.

We appreciate your listing us third in the nation on the Opportunity Index. If Horace Greeley were still around, he would have said, "Go West, young man. Go West to Merced."

We invite the Forbes staff to come to Merced and write about the opportunities that abound in our community for businesses and industries.

Sincerely,

William Spriggs, mayor