By Mary Owen
City Administrator Ron Harding is putting together an ad hoc committee to help formulate and update Aumsville’s planning goals.
“I believe the plan is to begin meeting within the next month or two,” said Mayor Derek Clevenger. “The committee will have two city council members, several community members, and some of our small business owners.”
Lack of funding is the largest issue currently facing Aumsville, and many other small cities across the state, Clevenger said.
“Aumsville has rapidly aging infrastructure and lacks the funds to complete all of the necessary projects to fix this,” he said. “Several solutions have been posed for multiple issues, but the solution that would have the greatest impact at this time would be attracting new commercial entities. Unfortunately, we are very limited in our ability to do that due to our current commercial zoning footprint and the inability to develop the interchange development area.”
Harding told the city council at its January meeting that the committee will work on an overall vision statement.
“Once the vision statement has been created, we will give it to John Morgan to begin the Code updates,” Harding told the council.
Several community visioning meetings have already taken place. Harding’s next step is to set up the ad hoc committee to help ensure that the city council stays on target with its community goals and help provide residents with more effective communication about the process, which could last several months.
“In the next few years, I think the biggest change that will occur will be in how the city communicates with the community,” Clevenger said. “In the past, the level of communication with the community has been lacking.”
Clevenger said city leaders have discussed recording video of city council meetings to be posted online, “cultivating a better social media following on the city’s official page and updating the city’s website.”
Also discussed is translating the city’s newsletter into Spanish, and possible in the future, all city publications, he added.
In the coming months, Harding will explore options to form another committee to focus on Main Street beautification and outreach to small businesses. Since growth is inevitable for Aumsville, Harding told councilors city government must help manage growth in a way that is in keeping with community values and ensures community needs are met.
Although not a part of the city visioning or of city council initiatives, Clevenger posted on his Facebook page a discussion about putting a measure to put the marijuana moratorium back on the ballot to allow Aumsville to have a dispensary.
“The issue was only brought up by me as a poll put to the community on Facebook due to the fact I have had a large number or residents reach out to me about marijuana issues as a whole,” he said.
“The financial impact of this would not solve all our problems or budgetary woes, but the city does have a responsibility to look at all revenue sources.”
Since this avenue of income is unavailable at this time, Clevenger plans to explore with council members all available sources of revenue to the city that “don’t require an additional burden to the community.”
“All discussions about the dispensary and marijuana were done in an effort to further gauge community interest in the issue and to get feedback from community members,” Clevenger said. “At present, neither the city council nor the city government has any plans or initiatives pending that relate to marijuana.”
