Mountain View To Close; Demands Reimbursement
The council's decision to cancel the lease on a children's home has come back to financially haunt this municipality, according to information at Monday evening's council session.
In the work session prior to the regular business meeting, Mayor Charlie Fagan read a letter from Mountain View that charged the council with creating an "obstacle" to their operation that left no alternative than that of canceling the lease after only one year. The letter further said the city's action had prevented the company from recouping the money it had spent on upgrading the old Southside School building. The firm demanded that all expenditures be repaid.
In the letter, the city was charged with misleading the company, and all plans for expansion had been cancelled.
Fagan told the council that the issue had been forwarded to the city attorney who would "try to establish our side. Where it goes from here, I do not know."
The mayor asked the council for more money in the budget to maintain the building. "We've got to heat it, protect it and insure it," Fagan said. "We're going to be left with a vacant building, a loss of rent and a loss of jobs."
He asked the council if they had any suggestions where the additional funding could be found. After there was no response, he added, "I hope we can get through this without a lawsuit."
While the Mountain View letter could pose a financial setback, all the new at the meeting was not gloomy. Fagan said Calhoun county and the Economic Development Council had agreed to bear two-thirds of the cost to improve 20 acres in Nances Creek Industrial Park. Fagan noted that an unidentified industrial prospect was "still on board," and that three of the 20-acres were earmarked for that company.
The original estimate for preparing the industrial site was about $90,000, but the mayor explained the local share would partially come from furnishing equipment and employees. He said it would not be necessary for the city to write a check for its $30,000 share, and told the panel that the National Guard would be asked to help with the work.
If you're used to driving east on Ladiga Street and parking on the north side of the street in the downtown area, you may get a parking ticket in the near future. The council unanimously adopted an ordinance governing parking and traffic in the four-block downtown area. The ordinance sets the speed limit at 20 miles per hour, states that parking must agree with the flow of traffic, bans large truck from using Center Avenue and Ladiga Street and limits parking to two hours.
The ordinance will become effective after being published in next week's Journal-Independent.
Turning to other issues, Fagan told the council that the city was considering buying the dental office adjacent to the doctor's office on Rome Avenue. He said the equipment would be purchased by Dr. Ben Ingram and the land and property may be bought by the city. He also discussed purchasing some of the equipment in the former Sam Crawford Medical Clinic building.
For the 15th year, the city declared Feb. 24 as Arbor Day. The proclamation is a part of the Tree City program.
The council made several board appointments in the 30-minute session. Rick Freeman, Tim Cowan, Bobbie Beavers and Terry Kiser were named to terms on the Piedmont Area Siren System Board, while Ronnie Kirkpatrick and Eddy Minton were appointed to the Tree Committee.
Both Keith Word and Fagan talked of the plans for the coming week. There will be special services and music each night in the downtown mini-park, and the activities will be highlighted by the Christmas Parade Dec. 8. Word and Fagan said it will be the largest parade in Piedmont's history.
Councilman Ed Hanson invited everyone to the ribbon cutting to officially open the Piedmont Elementary School Gymnasium. The ceremony is set for Friday at 1 p.m.
The council approved payment of $256,310.22 in monthly municipal bills. Of that amount, $205,794.01 was for the operation of the water, gas and sewer utilities.

Local Family Wins Large Grand Prize In Sweepstakes
Christmas came a bit early this year for a Piedmont family. No, Santa didn't leave the North Pole early and come down the chimney too soon, but the city's police chief will get a $100,000 Yule gift.
The Do-It-Yourself Network jumped the gun on the man in red and gave the Paslay family the gift everyone can use.
Cash.
And plenty of it.
Paslay was notified in early November that he was the grand prize winner of the DIY Ultimate Kitchen & Bath Giveaway. He had entered the sweepstakes on-line after discovering DIYnetwork.com through the sister site HGTV.com.
The DIY Network is a television source for any type of do-it-yourself projects. It presents 90 percent of original programming across a broad range of categories including home building, home improvement, crafts, gardening, hobbies, and woodworking.
The web site, DIYnetwork.com, features step-by-step instructions for more than 15,000 projects and consistently receives nearly two million visitors per month.
The chances of winning the DIY Network's sweepstakes were slim but perseverance paid off for them. Paslay entered the sweepstakes 25 times, a small number compared to the 4.3 million entries received by the network.
"I had gone home to get my private vehicle to pick up my daughter at school," he said. "The phone rang, I looked at the caller-id and saw it was someone from Tennessee. I figured it was some salesperson but I answered it anyway,"'
When the caller asked Paslay if he had a minute to spare, he quickly told her that he only had about five minutes before he was due at the school.
"She told me that she thought it would be worth my while to listen," Paslay said.
And it was.
Paslay was told he was the winning entry of the grand prize. As the winner, Paslay was awarded $100,000 in cash to remodel his kitchen and bath.
After filling out forms and affidavits to confirm his identity, he was awarded the prize money.
Paslay and his wife, Wendy, plan to give 10 percent of his winnings to his church and use the remainder on appliances and furnishings for their home.

Strictly Personal
Fighting Holiday Shopping Crowds...
Well, I did it. I did it for my first and last time, but I was there. It was the Friday after Thanksgiving, the sun had not risen, but I was at Quintard Mall with a few thousand other shoppers. It was an experience.
I had only ventured out one time before to take advantage of an advertised price. That was before I learned that the super bargains aren't that great. Your chances of getting one are slim. The items that are really marked down are in very small quantities, and are usually gone in the first minutes of the sale...or before.
A few years back, I intended to get my wife a TV set for the office, and the Jacksonville Wal Mart had one advertised for less than a hundred bucks. It was before TVs could be bought for less than $50, and I wanted to take advantage of the deal.
As I recall the sale began at 5 a.m., and a 4:55 on that day I was inside the store and asked a clerk in the electronics department where the specially priced TVs were. She curtly informed me they were all gone. I checked my watch and told her the sale did not start for a few minutes, but I was told the employees had bought the meager supply of the TVs before any customer was allowed to take advantage of the bargain.
The same was true at the big stores in the mall. This time, however, I was accompanied by my daughter, Missie, who has both a doctorate and a black-belt in shopping. We arrived in the mall's north parking lot about 5:40 a.m., and the line to the entrance to Sears was nearly a block long. We opted to wait in the warm car until the doors opened at 6. As we watched the line continued to grow, spilling out of the small parking area into one of the main access roads to the huge parking areas. Traffic was unbelievable. Cars had to drive around shoppers to hunt parking spaces that were becoming scarce.
When the magic time arrived, the doors opened and the people poured into the stores.
I need to stop here and explain the magnitude of this situation. I was observing one entrance to one mall. Similar scenes were taking place at all the other entrances of all the other malls and discount stores across the region. On that morning, I'm quite confident that there were nearly a million north Alabama shoppers in a buying frenzy, and it wasn't even sunrise.
If you are familiar with the Sears store in Oxford, the north entrance goes directly into the tool department. When we made it in the store, the people were grabbing everything in sight. I was only casually interested in a couple of items. I went to see what it was like, but Missie plowed through the crowd.
I should mention that I didn't here any "ho-ho-hos" coming from this group of shoppers. There were few smiles. The majority wore a determined expression on their faces as they prepared to do battle for chosen bargains.
I was impressed by the price of a shelf-system stereo, but was not surprised to find out there were none. I heard a clerk tell another shopper that one could be ordered in time for Christmas. I'll get back to this in a moment.
Missie told me the price on a comforter set was good, but when we made our way to that section, all the king-size sets were gone. One shopper returned a queen-size that Missie liked, so she got the bargain. I found a set of sheets for a reduced price, and that was my single Sears purchase.
Now to the checkout procedure. The nearest checkout facility had four registers and three very young and very inexperienced girls working only three of them. There were two young men with some sort of radios who talked in muffled tones and pointed in every direction. Finally, when the three lines were growing by the minute, this two-person brain trust decided to find someone to operate the fourth register. She was an experienced woman and things finally began to move in the line.
Another store presented the same scenario, with the exception of the quantity of merchandise. I got a bargain on three shirts.
Missie was still at it, so I took the larger packages to the car and moved it to a mall entrance close to the store where she was shopping. The problem I encountered was parking. There were no spaces. It was before 8 a.m., and I couldn't find a spot anywhere.
The topic of Christmas toys will be in another column, but I'm not through with the shoppers. Some say Christmas is too commercial. I am not as worried about the Yule season being de-commercialized as I am about it being de-criminalized.
I saw reports of people being trampled at Friday's early morning sales, and after being among the mob, I'm not surprised. Many of the shoppers completely disregarded the meaning of peace on earth and good will toward men. It was more like, "Get out of my way or I'll bust you in the chops."
Time puts me in the position of having seen more Christmases than I will see in the future. That's only natural, and it's probably best for me. I remember the Christmas shopping when the stores were crowded with happy shoppers. Most of the shopping was done at night, because the retailers stayed open until 9 p.m. to accommodate their customers. It was a fun, magical time, and there is a lot of warmth in those memories.
Friday, however, bore no resemblance of Christmases past. Due to a recent loss, this Christmas will be a great deal different for me, but after Friday, I think I'll reserve my shopping to smaller stores where there is no bargain battle raging and crowds numbering in the tens rather than the thousands. I might pay a few cents more, but it will seem more like the Christmases to which I am accustomed.