City of Selma hosting town halls through month of August

Published 10:34 pm Wednesday, August 12, 2015

A series of town hall meetings for the city of Selma started Monday night and will continue tonight at Sophia P. Kingston Elementary School.

The meeting, which is designed to inform citizens about what is going on in Selma, will start at 6 p.m.

“The idea is to give citizens of Selma more feedback about what is going on in city government, what we’ve accomplished and what we plan to accomplish and getting feedback from them as to asking them to give us more insight on how we can do our job better,” said Selma Mayor George Evans.

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Each department head, which includes public works, both fire and police departments, the landfill, tax and licensing, planning and development, building inspector, information technology, property management, personnel, finance, code enforcement, legal, cemetery, recreation and the city clerk will be present.

“All of the department heads will be there, and I’ll do a presentation of every department based on what’s going on in every department, what we’re trying to do, what we haven’t been able to do and what we plan to do as we go into this next fiscal year beginning October 1,” Evans said.

The first meeting, which was held Monday at Byrd School, wasn’t very well attended, according to Evans, but he hopes more people will attend the remaining seven meetings.

“The department heads were there, but we didn’t have a good number of citizens to report.,” Evans said.

“It is important that every citizen tries to make at least one of the meetings because it is in one ward or another doesn’t make any difference. The same presentation will be given at every town hall meeting.”

After the presentation from each department, Evans said there will be a question and answer session to allow citizens to give feedback.

“Based on the information that is shared with them, we want them to tell us some things through a question and answer session,” Evans said. “We would like to know when talking about what we’ve accomplished what else we can do and if there is something else they can tell us we can do to better the quality of life in our neighborhoods and our community.”

Whether the feedback is good or bad, Evans said he wants to hear what the people have to say about city government.

“I think it is very helpful because it can almost give us a grade on what we do,” Evans said. ”Either we’re doing grade A work or we’re doing F work.”

The other meetings are Aug. 17 at Cedar Park Elementary, Aug. 19 at Edgewood Elementary, Aug. 24 at School of Discovery, Aug. 26 at Selma High, Aug. 27 at R.B. Hudson and Aug. 31 at Morgan Academy. All meetings start at 6 p.m.

For more information, call the Mayor’s Office at 874-2101 or email his office at mayoroffice@selma-al.gov.