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COLUMBUS, Ga. — The downtown area is in need of some basic infrastructural maintenance, and city councilors are starting to notice it themselves in their own daily lives.

According to councilors themselves, they feel as if the city only cares about reactively cleaning up the downtown area for big events, but doesn’t have a proactive maintenance plan to keep it that way for citizens all the time.

During the city council meeting held on July 11, 2023, Councilor Glenn Davis (District 2) described the conditions he witnessed during a recent evening outing downtown. After accidentally not parking in a marked parking space, he noticed how extremely faded the old parking lines were.

Davis then began to look around the area and noticed other things like hanging tree branches, trash, and poor landscaping that didn’t paint the picture of what the downtown area is supposed to be.

Though a previous effort had been made to have contractors clean the area and repaint the parking lines several months ago, the city was allegedly not able to find a vendor to do so.

After his recent experience downtown, Davis publicly brought the issue to city manager Isaiah Hugley’s attention again:

“Friday night I was out in the Uptown area — and I got a hard time from my wife , because she reminded me that you need to park correctly. And I'm like ‘I am, I'm in a parking space,’ and she said ‘No you're not.’ Anyway, I opened the door and looked out and I wasn't — and it hit me. I think we talked about this before, but it kind of hit me. I'm not sure if I remember the conversation right we talked about maybe some of the vendors not being able to do the work in a timely manner, and I think we talked about (if) we have the ability to reach out to other vendors that might be able to do it … my point is that I think we need a little TLC in some areas down there in uptown, because at night time — and maybe I'm just old, I don't know, I can't see anymore … but striping the lines and being able to delineate where the parking spaces are down there I think is real important. There are some places down there you can't. You just can't see. You really can't, especially at night time … and maybe some other areas, like limbing up trees and landscaping and things like that. I think it would go a long way, so I  just wanted to bring that up to you as a referral or maybe just put that on your to-do list or FYI.”

The area’s city councilor, Joanne Cogle of District 7, has campaigned for better upkeep throughout the uptown area since before she was even sworn in as a councilor back in January. Despite her efforts and those of her colleagues like Councilor Davis, the city manager’s office has yet to implement a maintenance plan to fix the issues as the area remains in an ever-increasing state of decay.

Here’s what Councilor Cogle had to say:

“I've addressed it several times with (the engineering department) and we've had a couple sidebar conversations about not having the people to stripe it. I think our last conversation was that the restriping was supposed to be taken care of in October prior to Rush South — but just for the record, once again — we can't just keep waiting for an event to happen in uptown in order to dress up our city. Like, this just has to be a continual effort of getting ahead of the game and being proactive rather than reactive. We highlight uptown and the riverwalk streetscape on every single piece of marketing material that we have in Columbus, and if we can't keep it pretty and pristine, then that's what our tourists and that's what our citizens who are using the uptown area are seeing, you know? … We just need to maybe tighten up just a little bit and just not wait for events to happen in order to to clean up those areas … I mean, I've been asking since January, so…”

In reply, city manager Isaiah Hugley made several excuses as to why his office has not been able to paint freaking parking lines in the seven months since January. Hugley blamed the size of the job, a lack of vendors, and the distribution of resources available — but made no effort to take responsibility for the lack of an existing maintenance plan in the first place.

All Hugley did was make excuses as to why he hasn’t done it and why it isn’t his fault.

If the city manager is incapable of organizing the painting of parking lines after seven months, then maybe it’s time to consider finding a city manager who can.

How aMaZiNg.

Facts are stubborn things — and we’ll keep publishing them, whether city officials like them or not.

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