Those who have walked along Center Street in downtown Statesville over the last six weeks or so have likely noticed a number of large pots. Those same folks have, no doubt, have also made note of the fact that those pots are empty.
That will all likely change in the reasonable future as the Statesville City Council will vote on Monday on whether to approve spending $20,000 on the plants, trees and fill material for the pots.
The pots and plants -- which are all part of the first phase of the city’s streetscape project -- were discussed during Thursday's pre-agenda meeting.
“Now that the streetscape is nearly complete and the pots are all in place, we need something to put in them,” said Recreation and Parks Director Brent Cornelison, whose department will oversee this portion of the project.
Mayor Costi Kutteh asked Assistant City Manager Larry Pressley if, after some time has passed, the pots and other project accessories – such as benches, trash receptacle and bicycle racks – could be moved around for aesthetic or other purposes.
“Oh, certainly,” Pressley answered. “We have stuck mostly to the plan with the project, but it has also been kind of a work in progress.”
Councilman Cecil Stallard referred to some of the plants the city has chosen as “ugly” and added, “Hopefully we’ll do a better job this time than we did before.”
Note: There will actually be two city council meetings on Monday. At Thursday’s meeting, the council approved the calling of a special meeting on that day that will begin at 6:30 p.m. – 30 minutes prior to the start of the regular meeting – to hold a ribbon-cutting and grand opening ceremony for the City Hall building.
The facility will host its first bit official business Monday following 13 months – and more than $2 million – of renovations.Sunday, beginning at 2 p.m., a three-hour open house event will be held to allow visitors to take tours of the building. City Manager Rob Hites said that in the course of doing research on the 120-year-old building, it was discovered that there had never been any kind of ceremony celebrating its opening.
“They never held a grand-opening in 1892,” Hites said and added that this was also true for any of the other years during which it had major work done or changed hands or purposes. “When it first opened there were a few newspaper articles about it,” he said. “And they weren’t even on the front page. So this will be the grand opening it never had.”
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