City should be applauded for cleanup weeks in advance of busy March

Published 8:23 pm Wednesday, January 21, 2015

With the Bridge Crossing Jubilee only weeks away, the city of Selma is asking everyone to join together in an effort to cleanup the city before it welcomes guests from around the globe.

The community cleanup starts Jan. 26 and runs through Jan. 29.

The Public Works Department is adding two wards each day in addition to the wards that are regularly scheduled for trash pickup each day.

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We applaud the city for making the effort to start the cleanup process now.

With all of the attention Selma is getting after John Legend and Oprah Winfrey took the city by storm this past weekend, it would be easy to sit back and bask in the limelight for a few days before getting back to business.

That’s hardly the case. President Barack Obama made the announcement Tuesday that he will be in Selma the weekend of the Bridge Crossing Jubilee, but cleanup efforts were planned well in advance of that.

All of the extra garbage pickups add incentive for people to tidy up their yards and get them into the kind of shape we’d like our esteemed visitors to see in March.

The city is also planning to have a similar event in February to again help with preparation for the Jubilee.

Because of “Selma”, the movie, much of the world is seeing Selma for the first time.

Many of those same moviegoers will plan to visit Selma in 2015, with the jubilee being the peak of that interest.

Selma is known as the Queen City of the Blackbelt. Collectively our goal should be to make sure it shines brightly when the world comes calling.