Residents look at the possibilities for Seven Springs
By Steve Herring
Published in News on October 15, 2017 1:45 AM
News-Argus/STEVE HERRING
Adam Walters, right, a student in the School of Design at N.C. State University, explains some of the rebuilding options that Seven Springs residents can vote for to town Commissioner Ronda Hughes, center, and Mike Avery with the Eastern Carolina Council. About 20 residents attended the interactive disaster recovery workshop Saturday morning at Seven Springs Baptist Church.
News-Argus/STEVE HERRING
Seven Springs Mayor Stephen Potter, right, asks planner Sadie Walters about some of possible options open to the town as it struggles to recover from the devastating flood in the wake of Hurricane Matthew.
News-Argus/STEVE HERRING
Town leaders and community members come together Saturday for a workshop on how to improve the flood-ravaged town of Seven Springs. Mayor Stephen Potter refutes the idea that the town is going to fold up and die after record flooding from Matthew devastated the town in October 2016.
SEVEN SPRINGS -- A few local residents left Saturday morning's interactive disaster recovery workshop early, clearly disappointed the meeting wasn't about dollars and cents.
But for most of the 20 or so in attendance, the meeting offered an opportunity to express ideas as to what they think could help their flood-devastated town recover and survive.
Mary Wallace Vickory was there for her 96-year-old aunt, Eleanor Gibbs, who was flooded out by Hurricane Matthew in October 2016.
"I just wanted to see what the future of Seven Springs, what the people are talking about and hopefully that people are wanting to bring it back," she said. "I like some of the ideas. My main purpose is to do what is best for the people that it affected directly. I hate just to see the town fold up, but we have got to put something here that will bring people who want to be in Seven Springs.
"I'd love to see a beautiful waterfront. I don't want the same thing to happen us that happened to Princeville where you put a lot of money into a levee, and then it doesn't work. I think the river itself is kind of tourist-historical attraction. Hopefully what damaged Seven Springs can bring it back as well."
The workshop was conducted by officials with the Hurricane Matthew Disaster Recovery and Resilience Initiative working with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and N.C. State University.
Residents were asked to vote on options for the town, including developing bed and breakfast inns, making the town a waterfront destination, building a riverside retirement home and developing a craft guild center and sports fields.
Residents were encouraged to visit the several display boards set up around the Seven Springs Baptist Church fellowship. There also were maps where residents could use overlays to write down suggestions or draw what they would like to see.
They were asked as well to submit their own ideas, some of which included construction of a pavilion where town events could be held, revamping the town park, bringing back the Old Timey Days Festival, playing on the town's history and even saving one of the damaged houses to use as a haunted house.
"There are a lot of great ideas there," Mayor Stephen Potter said. "Time will tell. I think that until we know what the buyouts are going to look like then we will know what the geographic lay of the land will be. But until that happen it is just a waiting game. When we know what we have got, then we can start some long-term planning.
"I don't know who is going to sell, what kind of space we are going to have. We have talked about the RV and camper sites. We can checkerboard them around town, but if you are going to do a sports complex, you are going to need enough room together to do that."
This process will take years, and the town board is girded for a long-term recovery, Potter said.
Over time people on the outside forget about the floods and their aftermath except for those living it, Potter said.
"I appreciate you all coming here this morning to be a part of the process as we begin planning for future resiliency and how we are going to move forward," he said.
Barry Hokanson, a consultant with the Hurricane Matthew Disaster Recovery and Resilience, said the workshop was not tied to any disaster recovery funding.
Rather, it is a long-term approach that will inform different choices going forward for grants, loan programs, different initiatives from foundations and state and federal government, he said.
Having a plan helps to make recovery an organized process, Hokanson said.
"What is presented here in the different boards or displays are choices for the future, and there are no answers per say, because the objective is to trigger people's thinking on what the future could hold," he said. "Then we ask for not our ideas, but the public's ideas and the town's ideas what those choices might be.
"Then our job is to go back and digest that, summarize it into different reports and try to create planning alternatives that hang together to make sense of those different choices."
The goal is to have the reports finished by the end of December, he said.
That would be followed up with a more structured, but still interactive presentation to town residents.
For example there could be three major alternatives with the presentation showing the typical features of each, Hokanson said.
"We will be taking their initial comments from today and working with those ideas bringing them back as a package or several packages and asking for reactions and challenges -- what is wrong with those ideas.
"Maybe they are not well liked. Maybe one is not preferred."
Hokanson said the turnout provided "intense involvement" as residents drew on maps marking what they saw as important for the town.
Also, they asked the difficult questions about what they can do with their property or family property under the circumstances that they face, he said.
"We don't have quick answers to that, but we want to pull the people together who can help to advise on the choices that they face," Hokanson said.