Mayor wants city cleaned up before summer holidays
Bryant asks council members to help pinpoint problem areas in city’s wards
Forrest City Mayor Larry Bryant has set a summer deadline for having the city cleaned up, telling council members during their meeting this week that some hard decisions may have to be made in order to enforce the city’s current laws.
“I need the council to help me enforce the rules if we intend to have a clean city,” said Bryant. “If y’all don’t mind people getting mad at you, I don’t mind because I’m not up here to get reelected. I’m up here to try to make Forrest City better. We can’t make it better with people throwing trash all over the place and filling garbage cans over the lids.”
Bryant said there are already numerous laws on the books that would help improve the city’s appearance if the laws were enforced.
“We have regulations on these things. When I start enforcing them, I don’t need the council coming to tell me to leave these people alone,” said Bryant. “If we want our city to move forward, we’re going to have to put our feet down and enforce the laws we already have on the books. If we don’t want to enforce them, then we need to take them off the books.”
Bryant said the city’s code enforcement officer is working to map the entire city.
“We’re going down each street, and everywhere there are burnouts or bad conditions, we’re taking pictures and putting them in a book. We’ll compare these with the ones we already have condemned and try to get back on track again,” said Bryant. “If the law allows it, we’re going to try to start trying to tear down a house every other week.
“Once we finish the mapping, with your permission, we’re going to move forward with trying to clean up everything by Memorial Day or the Fourth of July,” Bryant continued. “We need to be well ahead of the game so when people come to Forrest City and we drive them around to show them the city, we want it to look great. When Alderman (Justin) Reeves (economic developer) is trying to tell people what a great place we have, we want it to look great so that if there are some jobs out there they come to Forrest City. We don’t need them going somewhere else because it’s dirty here. There are some things we can fix pretty quickly and some things we can’t.”
Bryant also said he would like for the two council members from each ward to ride around their wards with him to look at problem areas and help develop a plan for cleaning those areas.
“I appreciate your interest in all of us working together to try to clean up the city,” said councilman Danny Capps. “I agree with you.”