By Mary Stewart | The Selma Times-Journal

Main Street Selma hopes the community will come out to support their efforts to beautify downtown Saturday, July 15 at 8 a.m. The volunteers will meet at 207 Broad Street, and coffee will be provided.

President of the Main Street board Clay Carmichael said he is hoping for 50 volunteers.

“It’s kind of just a volunteer day, and we want to kind of try to help beautify downtown Selma,” Carmichael said. “So, we are working to clean up the streets, the trash and just kind of do a little window washing on some of the empty buildings.”

Main Street will also be putting up a banner in the window of an empty building downtown.

“We’ve got some window clings that we are going to kind of show off there, and we want to see if other building owners, who don’t have anything in their buildings, would like to put these window clings in their buildings,” he said. “We’d like to fill all of downtown with them so when people drive through here, it doesn’t look so much like empty buildings.”

Carmichael hopes that by putting up the first window clings, it will show other building and business owners how important the presentation of downtown is.

“We feel like that if everybody were to do these things, then it would make a pretty big impact on how people perceive downtown,” he said. “That’s a pretty big thing, changing the image and changing how people perceive downtown. So we want to try to work to do that.”

Main Street’s mission is to drive business to downtown and to bring businesses to Selma.

“It’s just important that downtown looks clean. Downtown is the heart of Selma, and so if we don’t have a great downtown then we can’t have a great Selma,” Carmichael said.

“So downtown is just a good focal point. We can work to get the existing businesses there doing well and work to maybe get some new business down there and fill those buildings.”

For more information, contact Carmichael at (334) 410-0582.