By Kyle Poplin • Members of two statewide organizations have concluded that Mt. Gilead “can become a destination town for vacationing and permanent residency” if it markets itself correctly and takes advantage of current resources, including a downtown area that could be turned into a “24-hour city.”
Ron Leeper of R.J. Leeper Construction in Charlotte talks with town citizens and officials about the future of Mt. Gilead Tuesday night.
Ron Leeper of R.J. Leeper Construction in Charlotte led a team from the Construction Professionals Network Institute and NCGrowth that visited Mt. Gilead on April 12 and 13 as part of their volunteer effort to help small towns in the state plan for their future. Leeper, representing CPNI, and Olachi Anaemereibe of NCGrowth met with town officials and interested citizens at Speckled Paw Coffee on Tuesday to present the groups’ findings. The tone was optimistic: “We’ve gone to a lot of small towns,” Leeper said, “and most don’t have the benefits you have.”
He said the town’s main goal should be to hire a third party to help develop a master plan for the future. That would require, he said, the development of a local task force composed of a cross-section of the community.
Leeper said the visiting groups identified three parts of town that have unique potential:
- The Highland Community Center. The facility is totally underutilized currently, Leeper said, but with some refurbishment – hopefully with the help of grant money that NCGrowth could help find – could “be a jewel for this community.”
- The Russell-Harvell Hosiery Mill. It’s been offered to the town as a donation, and “we think there’s some potential there for this property,” Leeper said. He again stressed that NCGrowth might be able to help the town access grants and resources to help renovate the old mill.
- The town center. “All of the buildings appear to be in good structural shape,” Leeper said. “All of them have upstairs spaces that could be renovated and rented to teachers and students. You have to figure out how to get those spaces habitable.”
Copies of the 15-page “Draft CPNI Workshop Summary Report” are available at Speckled Paw Coffee.
I recommend that if you want to live in a 24/7 city, then move to one. These developers will take over your town that you love and turn it into a money maker for them, with little no real benefit to you. Your wages will remain stagnant while the housing prices sour from development.
Your small roads won’t be able to keep up with traffic and you will be in a traffic nightmare.
Everything you like about the town you live in will be gone.
If you don’t like where you live, move. If you do like where you live, protect it. And if you want some growth than you the people take control over that. Decide what you want as far as growth goes. It may be very different from what developers will do to you and your beloved town.
I live in Moore County: the developers have taken over. Every empty lot they are buying, clear-cutting and regurgitating the same tasteless, boring, poor quality homes. And our taxes are starting to show the impacts of fast growth: a $130 million dollar bond just got passed to build more schools. We’ll be paying that off for many years. And when I asked when it’s paid off will the tax go away, I got blank stares. There’s no intention to stop that tax, but they will keep asking for more, and more, and more.
If you do allow this development/growth, first pursue an “impact tax” on the developers, requiring them to pay $10k/housing unit (apartment, condo, townhouse or house) and $100k for any stripmalls/commercial properties. Put that money from the impact tax in a separate account to pay for the soon-to-be-needed schools, roads, bridges and tunnels that will be needed to offset the growth.
And start out right away not allowing any stripmalls/shopping on your highways and main transportation roads, or they will soon be covered with traffic lights and the traffic they create. Require any such stores to be built about 1 mile off the highway, with ways to cross over or under the highway so traffic doesn’t need to stop for shoppers: they will easily cross over as needed and merge onto the highway without stopping the traffic.
Make the develops responsible for all costs of creating and maintaining such infrastructiure. They’re making out like bandits destroying our nice places to live. Kinda like modern day Carpetbaggers. PROTECT WHAT YOU HAVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!