Patrick Smathers Mayor, Canton,NC

Question 1:

Andrea Sumner:
Tell me about your six year plan. How did you, when you first became mayor, how did you decide this needs to happen?

Patrick Smathers:
Andrea you know, I'm not going to take credit for that. I like to think I had a small part in it but it's really the outcome of meeting with the town board and our town manager and people here in the community and saying, hey, we need to look to the future here. As we were talking previously, and I think a lot of towns and counties are going through a visioning process and they do the vision talk and they do the plan, but there's not a lot of follow through on it. And so we wanted to, as I say, we're past the talking stage, we're into the "let's go do something" stage of doing. So we took the studies that have been done here in town in the past both on economic development quality of life, financial studies, transportation patterns, and amongst the aldermen and myself and town board and using those studies, we put together a plan that said all right, over the next six years these are things we want to accomplish, I mean, one to two year plan, one to four, one to six, and it takes in a lot of areas. It takes in commercial development, housing stock, recreation needs, transportation needs, all where we saw the town going. And not that it can't be adjusted based on finances or on how things change, but it was just putting it together, say hey, these are the objective things that we want to do and start. Once you get that done, you know you get past the, you know, this would be nice or this would be nice, to saying hey, we're going to do this. And then you give the plan to the town manager and the town staff and let the people know where we're going and say, now, this is what we want to do, so let's figure out how we're going to do it. And we have an excellent town manager; Bill Stamey's been here 35 years. He knows a lot of people and has a tremendous amount of experience and you're sitting in one of the facilities as a result of that. And as soon as we said, hey, we're not going to start, we're not going to talk about renovating the Colonial Theater, we're going to go ahead and do it. And so we started looking at how to finance it. You know, how much we could afford, what type of facility we wanted and moved on. So, we've had a lot of success of doing that, saying, let's see where we're going to go, and letting our staff do their job. And of course, they come back and say, hey, Pat, from a political standpoint, you know, this is who we need to contact in state government or in the agencies on the Federal level and say hey, what kind of assistance can you give us? Go to the Southwest Planning Commission, you know what kind of guidance can you folks give us, and they've been very helpful to us, saying you know, let's work on this project and let's go see if you can get some help over here financially or guidance wise. And so that's how we've done it. And we've still got a lot more to do. We're not, I don't want you to think that we're finished. We're still a work in progress.

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