Vernon: Steady government, steady growth
VERNON, Ala. (WCBI) – “When things are going well, you don’t fix what’s not broken,” said Vernon City Clerk Don Dollar.
That saying goes for city officials in the town of Vernon, as they haven’t held a municipal election in 13 years.
Vernon Mayor Glenn Crawford said the state of Alabama has a process when it comes to municipal elections.
There’s a qualifying time, which is about a month long, and anyone can sign up to run for any office available at the time. Then you go through the election process.
But in Vernon, there hasn’t been a municipal election since 2012 because there hasn’t been any opposition to the current leadership.
“Myself and the current city council, minus one position, and I had one gentleman pass away, and we’ve replaced that,” said Crawford. “But we feel like we’ve gone out and done enough economic development. We’ve brought businesses in, we’ve increased employment in town, we’ve filled empty buildings that haven’t been used in years.”
The “shop at home” program is something Crawford came up with to keep citizens shopping local.
“Out of the four weeks a month, shop one in Vernon,” said Crawford. “One weekend, spend your money here, whatever you buy, buy your groceries, your clothes, whatever. Spend it here for one weekend and then the other three, if you need to go out and feel like you need to buy it somewhere else, go buy it.”
“Shop Vernon first,” Dollar said. “Shop at home. And I think people figure it out – you know what we can do just as well by staying at home and buying our goods and our products. And when people shop here, the tax dollar stays here. And the tax dollars, what it’s all about.”
This caught on, and all of a sudden, the city started to generate revenue, hire more people, and help the growth in the city’s population.
“I think the internet has helped a lot because people now can advertise on the internet and somebody may be living in another part of the United States or, you know, we’ve had one family come from Florida up here and buy 110 acres and build a home and say ‘I like the environment.’ We’re still small. We’re not trying to outgrow what we do. We’re trying to perfect it so that what is here is done right,” Crawford said.
Crawford says in a small community, there are always challenges like money for paving projects, which he says can be hard to come by. But they’ve finally settled in on their big economic development area – County Road 9.
“Instead of taking on the whole city, we picked out little projects and we made those work. And as they came in, they helped us increase our revenue and that way we could eventually work our way up to securing now, what’s going to be about $1,000,000 repaving project for the city,” Crawford said.
Crawford said they have tried to build an economy around the vision of enjoying where you are.
City Clerk Don Dollar said Vernon focuses on the small things, and that makes a big difference.
Accountability, economic development, community events, and infrastructure all play a role in helping a city. But what’s the key for Vernon?
“We have low crime,” Crawford said. “We have been beginning to develop a younger population that’s coming up in the city, and we’re beginning to have enough jobs that they can stay here instead of going off somewhere. We have probably created more than 400 jobs in the city of Vernon over the last few years,” Crawford said.
“I’ve been here my whole life, and there’s just that camaraderie that it’s all a family kind of thing,” Dollar said. “You know everybody, and everybody knows you. Sometimes that’s a good thing, sometimes it’s not. But we have to take the good with the bad and just continue to move forward. When I came to work for the city in 1999, there were times when we didn’t have funds to meet just the routine monthly bills, and we don’t have to worry about that anymore. We all work together, and it’s all for the common good of the people of the city of Vernon.”
Municipal elections in Alabama will be on Tuesday, August 26.
