Hello Ball Ground:
From each of us at City Hall, we wish you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. We certainly hope that 2021 brings some much-needed relief on the COVID-19 front. As difficult as it is, especially this time of year, the extra efforts we put in right now to help prevent the spread of this virus will pay dividends in the months ahead. As we look around our City over the past few weeks, we have seen a much greater effort, especially in the areas of social distancing and face coverings, when appropriate. We at the City greatly appreciate these efforts by our community to keep us safer. And as COVID vaccinations have finally begun, we have registered our Community Center and Senior Center with the State for consideration as possible long term vaccination sites, and have offered them at no charge in an effort to encourage the State to establish a site that is convenient and accessible for our community. We should know by late January if our site is selected.
For our upcoming January council meeting, to provide better public access to meetings than Facebook Live has provided during these COVID times, we are setting up live streaming through YouTube. The specifics about accessing our meetings through YouTube will communicated in the near future.
After two excellent meetings with our local railroad this week, the rough Depot Street rail crossing is now scheduled for improvements in July 2021. Although planned railroad improvements are often delayed, hopefully this one won’t be and will be completed as planned. As always, the railroad expects the City to pay a large portion of the improvements and we are willing to do that. But by law, we simply aren’t allowed to touch anything within their crossing without them standing right there handling the project, and for safety reasons, we certainly understand that.
Our contractor for the A.W. Roberts Drive Water Line relocation project just finished their last project and planned on starting work Monday………we have delayed them because we didn’t want to begin digging in our customers front yards the week of Christmas. So hopefully, this will start immediately at the beginning of the new year. Once the relocation is done, it will allow extensive road repair by the State to permanently fix one of the worst roadways in the City.
Our final sidewalk project of the year is now taking place on Old Canton Road, right behind City Hall and will fill in the sidewalk gap on Old Canton Road between Beck Street an Depot Street. We have a lot of pedestrians in this area and hopefully this will provide a much safer environment for them.
If you haven’t visited our website recently, please take a few minutes to do so to see two new items we have added that provide a wealth of information about Ball Ground. First at the bottom of the front page, click on “City Map”. Here you will find a map of the City with multiple layers you can turn on and off. This contains information on everything from zoning to addresses to lot ownership and property values. The next thing to check out is the tab at the top of the page that says “Our Community”. After clicking on that tab, select “Demographics and Statistics”. The information located at this tab is extensive and really gives you some insight into the makeup of our city
Have a great Christmas and holiday season Ball Ground!
Eric
