Letters to the Editor: All mayors start fast. What will Karen Bass do differently?
In the past, each municipality has developed a development plan that defines the vision for the community; the future direction for the growth and development of the municipality. This process should be ongoing and involve all the stakeholders within the community. In an ideal world, the vision, the strategy and the action plan would be the same for every municipality, but there are sometimes important differences in each municipality.
As the mayor of the City of Huntsville I take this opportunity to share our vision for Huntsville and our vision statement. I will share our mission to make the city a world-class place to live, work, serve, play and raise a family.
This City of ours is growing. It has grown in population by an additional 1,000 residents since 1990. Most of our new residents tend to live in outlying areas with little to no connection to the core of the community and they often work in an outlying office park or retail center.
I remember when I thought the city was going through a tremendous change during the 1970’s and 1980’s. I believe we were going through a tremendous change. The city was getting smaller. There were fewer people and it was more fragmented. We had a city of two main city sections and two suburbs to the west and east. We started two new developments, the Piedmont and the North Central, that brought people into the new developments. But the problem we had was that we all had to drive to the core of the city where there was one grocery store, a department or two, a park and a little strip center. So, we had people moving out to the suburbs for grocery stores and to the core where there was a park.
One thing I want to see is a revitalization of the core of the city with a full range of retail and services so residents of the city can have access to anything they need.
Since we have only one grocery store in town, residents in the middle-ring of town should see a full range of