Mountain City: still recovering

Sept. 27, 2024, was a day to remember for sure. No one will ever forget that day and many more to follow. The town residents and city employees, along with many outside volunteers, worked extremely hard to remove all the broken trees and limbs from their homes and property. This was a very lengthy task. It was a blessing to see neighbors helping neighbors and all the outside volunteers from many different organizations, church groups from all over the country worked many hours, days, weeks and months to repair all the storm damage to many homes and businesses. We are still working to recover from Helene every day. Our sewer plant had the most damage done dollar wise. We continue to work with FEMA every week on reports with the status of work completed and mitigation plans to get our plant back to where it was. This is a very long process, Cannon and Cannon are our engineers, which helped us to determine estimate cost and engineering work that is required. This will be a several year project to complete. We just approved a bid to fix water lines on seven roads in the county and streets. We had made temporary fixes to all these locations to get the water flowing but it was only a temporary fix, and these lines will be permanently replaced by an outside contractor. Some of these have creek crossings which drove the cost up for them. Our street department continues to make repairs to storm drains and culverts. We have awarded contracts to replace culverts that were damaged. The USDA completed waterway damage to our streams in the city. We have a contractor scheduled to tear down four old barns located on town property. This will eliminate unsafe conditions with them and help with the appearance of the city property. Chris Hook is our project coordinator who's overseeing 31 current projects being done at present and or schedule to begin this year. This requires much attention to do inspections, daily activity logs, signage and photos. We continue to strengthen our assets and improve the processes of service. Our department heads are working together better than ever before to ensure the town moves forward regardless of who's department it is. They are all on the same page. The Mountain City / Johnson County community Center Director Joey Beth Souder has been working very hard to develop lots of new events, please view the Facebook page to keep up with these new offerings. Our recreation committee continues to work on new ideas for all ages. Movies at Ralph Stout Park will be starting in late spring. Our new playground equipment is a blessing and is being well used. I appreciate Hometown Service Coalition partnering with the town and the State of Tennessee parks and rec to fund this project.