By Mayor Jim Wright

When I was asked by the Tryon Daily Bulletin to write a monthly article, I agreed with its publisher, Betty Ramsey, there were two conditions for doing so. First, no politics would be covered and second, if the articles were bad, the Bulletin could ask me to stop.

So far I continue to get positive feedback from the articles and appreciate those of you who email or who catch me on the street with feedback, suggestions or questions.

I would like to cover several things this month and will start by answering a few questions from citizens.

Some of my answers involve issues that affect the budget. I promise this will be my last “guns or butter” budget article, but your council is moving through the 2015-2016 budget cycle and the questions and answers are an important part of that process.

I was asked by a lady why Tryon did not segregate plastic recyclables into five categories of plastic like the town where she used to live. The general answer is cost. It involves more big bins, more curbside bins and more processing labor costs. The same is true of the simpler issue of separating things like aluminum, when, depending on the price of aluminum, there is some price advantage to doing so.

The second thing I want to cover this month is the condition of our streets. Another lady stopped me coming out of the IGA the other day with the question, “When are we going to do something about our streets?” She’d had a run in with one of the “car eating holes” that we get from time to time. She escaped uninjured, but was not sure about her car.

After trying to calm her, I explained that it was budget season again and we are once again looking at what we can do with our resources to solve some street issues.

Our town manager is developing a plan that would borrow against future Powell Bill payments to the town to give us a lump sum big enough to do a portion of the needed paving. By the way, Peake Street in front of the Roseland Community Center is the best example of road patches on top of patches. The Landrum Quilters couldn’t do a better job of piecing patches together.

To give you a general idea of costs, the old quote we have for paving the section of East Howard between Trade and Grady (beside Stott’s Ford) was about $35,000 assuming there were no infrastructure issues like pipes under the street, etc. Since a $.01 cent tax increase raises between $15,000 and $16,000, you can see that without Powell Bill money it would take roughly a two cent increase in taxes to pave one block, if you wanted to pay the paving off in one year.

Our sidewalks in residential and business areas also need repair and expansion. Believe it or not, a square foot of simple sidewalk costs about $9.60. In complex areas where there are buried utilities or other complications, of course sidewalk costs escalate. Just think about how many square feet a block of sidewalk contains and you can see the expense of these repairs.

So, when you are working with a town budget (excluding sewer, water and Harmon Field) of about $2.5 million dollars there is not much wiggle room. Our budget each year is approximately 80 percent committed before the budget discussions start, to cover essential services like police and fire, the large departments like Public Works and the town’s other needed activities and departments.

On a more general subject, you will be reading this article around the April 11 weekend. That means the date for candidates wishing to file to run for office in Tryon is roughly two and one half months away. The filing period begins in early July. The actual dates for filing are available from the county election board.

Two council commission seats and the mayor position will be up for election.

Serving as an elected official is a good opportunity for you to give back to the community and to get a better understanding of how your town and its government work. There is even a modest amount of compensation.

Wouldn’t it be great to have about six folks run for council and about three run for mayor with about 1,500 turning out to vote in November?

And last for this article, you will be seeing the official notice for our April 21 council meeting soon. We will meet an hour early at 6 p.m. to ask for citizen input on our future water strategy. Please plan to attend and present your thoughts. In deference to what we hope will be a reasonable sized group of presenters, please be prepared to make a concise presentation.

As always, thank you for reading this article.