I love Fort Payne by John Dersham

Wow! We have so many good projects in the works here in Fort Payne. Those include: Main Street Fort Payne, the Lookout Mountain Gateway Trial, and the Shugarts One World Adventure restoration of the Beck Building into the Beck Discovery Center. Every one of these helps us redevelop our downtown area and also each will increase tourism to the area. Tourists love revived downtowns because they like to visit a town and find local mom and pop businesses that they won't find anywhere else. They like to visit the things that will make Fort Payne different from every other town. They like boutique shopping, art and craft oriented stores, restaurants/bars, brew pubs, antiques, walking and biking trails, parks and the list goes on. If you visit some of the towns successful and redevelopment through becoming a Main Street community or via other means you will find a great mix of tourists mixed in with the locals that are fueling the economy of these revived downtowns. This redevelopment of our downtown is economic development at its best, jobs will be created and more dollars will be spent locally by residents and by tourists. All of this money provides an increase in tax revenue collected by our city. This growth will provide the city and county more money to do more things that will help our city and in fact will help provide revenue for the entire county as visitors come and spread the money at our attractions and local venues and eating and shopping throughout our entire area.

Last Saturday, my wife, Kyle, our granddaughters, Tristan and Aris, and I attended Third Saturday Sunset in Fort Payne. We almost always go to this. I think we have missed only once this year. As I was walking around downtown enjoying myself, I was thinking how fortunate we are to have such a wonderful homey town to hold events like this. Everywhere we walked we ran into friends. My 9th grade granddaughter, Tristan, saw some high school friends to talk to and hang out with. The girls played games at The Spot, we looked at a large array of classic cars, we listened to Leah Seawright perform, we shopped in the stores, we played in the park. My six year old granddaughter, Aris, just learned to swing without being pushed and now she can't stop swinging. You remember that feeling of freedom as the breeze blows in your face as you swing up and down feeling the thrill. Oh my, if we could just keep that feeling as adults that we had when so much of what we did and experienced was for the first time. I guess it is the repetition in life that takes some of that sparkle away. None the less, we as a family really enjoy Third Saturday events. They are fun, but also evoke an enjoyment of thinking about our future in Fort Payne, which is getting more and more exciting and giving us more and more to look forward to.