Rethinking the rules. Reworking the formula. Knocking down walls. Finding new paths.
When Knox Ross was elected Mayor of Pelahatchie 10 years ago, he was determined to make the town attractive again to current citizens and outsiders alike.
“We needed to make our town a place where someone wants to live, a place with opportunity,” says Knox. He got involved with Central Mississippi Planning and Development District and the Mississippi Municipal League. His involvement with these two organizations eventually led him to meet with the Mississippi Development Authority (MDA) to learn how he could acquire the funding and resources he needed to improve his town.
Pelahatchie was one of the first towns to go through asset mapping, a program of MDA’s Asset Development Division headed by Joy Foy. When a community contacts MDA about asset mapping, Foy’s division organizes four teams comprised of people from different divisions within MDA, Mississippi Arts Commission, Mississippi Main Street Association, Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, state universities and other organizations. Armed with cameras, maps and GPS devices, the teams divide the town and make notes about everything from museums, artists, schools, industry, local businesses, natural resources and historical assets.
“At the end of the day, the team members compare notes of their findings, brainstorm opportunities for underutilized assets in the community and draft a report summarizing their suggestions,” Foy explains. She notes that identifying a community’s assets and offering advice on possible improvement projects given those unique assets helps community leaders focus on what they have and identify firm steps they can take to improve their communities.
By 2007, when the asset mapping process began in Pelahatchie, Mayor Ross and the Board of Aldermen had made significant improvements to their town, but he adds that the outsider view provided by the mapping team was very helpful.
“Their main goal is to find the things that are unique to your community and find that story that you need to tell. Every community has a story to tell,” he says.
For example, after the mapping team had pinpointed the strengths and weaknesses of Pelahatchie, the town leaders were inspired to incorporate their long-running Muscadine Jubilee into an official logo. They used the muscadine vine and colors to create a consistent image and branding campaign for the town.
One of the mayor’s main goals had been to restore the downtown area. Through the use of GO Zone bonds, Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Self-Help grants and other MDA programs, Pelahatchie officials have renovated the town center, city hall and the police station and repaired sidewalks along GoForth and Second Streets. They revitalized an old building and its surroundings, creating what is now a library located in a downtown park, by utilizing their local prison labor. The city took creative approaches, such as selling memorial bricks and benches, to help raise money from local residents and businesses to provide the local funding match required by the CDBG Self Help grant.
The city government’s projects, in turn, inspired private citizens to make their own improvements to existing buildings and storefronts. “Almost every building downtown has had some sort of cosmetic work done,” says Mayor Ross. As a result, the downtown area has welcomed new life recently, such as a dentist’s office and a recently redone historic home.
Mayor Ross also sought to annex a nearby section of the I-20 right-of-way, effectively expanding the city’s limits, and Rankin First, Rankin County’s economic development foundation, helped the city get affordable Wi-Fi access. Not only is the city’s wireless Internet service benefiting residents, it is also available to travelers who stop at the Pelahatchie Interstate exit, and it played a role in helping to attract one of Pelahatchie’s largest tourism assets, the Yogi Bear Jellystone Park Camp-Resorts.
Now the focus is on completing a 3-mile biking trail that will link the town to Jellystone Park – a strong tourist attraction and major accomplishment for the city – and on a 35-acre sports complex, which includes a lighted walking trail, playground, amphitheatre, tennis courts, and baseball, softball, T-ball and soccer fields. The biking trail and the sports complex, in particular, were ideas sparked by the asset mapping team’s suggestions. Mayor Ross hopes that these sites will attract more young people to Pelahatchie.
In early December 2010, Pelahatchie hosted the first Asset Development Year-End Celebration as a way to showcase asset development across the state, as well as in the small town of Pelahatchie. The event included an overview of the MDA programs and resources available to communities as they work to capitalize on their existing assets and also featured presentations on asset development projects in Columbia and Philadelphia, both of which demonstrated how sometimes things that don’t appear to be assets on the surface can become advantages for an area. Following the program, the economic development leaders and city and county officials from around the state who attended the event toured the town to view its improvements first-hand.
“The concept of asset development is so new that this is the first year we have been in a position to look back at our many accomplishments and celebrate them,” says Foy. “Hopefully this year-end program helped communities learn from each other on ways to utilize available state programs and think with a big-picture mindset when working to capitalize on existing local assets.”
“I would encourage communities to look at their existing assets, examine their potential, devise a formal plan to build on those assets, assign action items and get the whole community involved and busy working that plan,” Foy adds. “Without a plan in place, a community will miss opportunities to improve the quality of life for its residents and to become more competitive.”
“So many places in Mississippi could reap huge benefits from asset mapping,” says Mayor Ross. “The mapping process doesn’t just find assets for you to sell [your city] to outsiders, it finds things to celebrate in your community. That’s the biggest plus of the process because it gets locals interested again, and you find your story to tell.”
If your community is interested in beginning the mapping process with the Mississippi Development Authority’s Asset Development Division, call 601.359.2659 or email Joy Foy at jfoy@mississippi.org. Or, for more information on the asset mapping process, visit www.mississippi.org.
