If Monday is any indication, the Town of Hillsville’s newly-elected mayor and councilman don’t mind getting a little dirty working for the town.
On Monday morning, Mayor Greg Crowder and Pipers Gap Ward Councilman David Young hopped aboard the town’s trash pick-up truck and rode with the crew all morning picking up trash from Hillsville businesses. In fact, Crowder and Young picked up the trash themselves as the crew drove them along the Hillsville route. The two planned to do the same thing the next day, riding with the trash pick-up crew during its weekly residential trash pick-up run.
“The whole reason we are doing this is so we can learn everything about the town from top to bottom,” Crowder said. “When I started with Ford I had to start at the bottom and when I was running the dealership I understood everything from A to Z. That is why I recommended to David we do this and cover every job within the town. We also have a code book and we are studying it and trying to learn it, to know anything we need to know it if a situation arises.”
Young and Crowder also visited the town’s sewage plant Monday. He said the town’s two newest municipal officers would also spend time visiting the town’s water plant. In just a half an hour Monday, he said they had already learned way more than they knew about the town.
“I’ve already found out in 30 minutes that they have a rough job,” Young said of the trash crew. “But we just want to learn more about the services the town offers and what these guys go through. We also are looking at any place we can cut. For instance, we can buy the tires for these trucks locally instead of getting them from North Carolina like the town currently does. We’ve also learned that they take a lot of cardboard from businesses to the landfill. We can recycle that and get better rates on our recycle fees. It’s just a matter of us working together and letting the community know little things like that.”
Basically, the two are interested in talking to everybody in town to find out what their needs are, and to see how the town can best serve them to get things moving as quickly as possible.
“We are trying to do the right thing and trying to do everything we can to make this thing work. My biggest thing is to not go up on the water for the citizens. We are in a hole right now, but we have several different plans to try to get out of it,” Crowder said. “And we learned today things we could do to save, such as buying our truck tires local and getting the word out about recycling the cardboard. That is something we dump a lot of and something we really need to work at.”
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