Transcript
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From its industrial past to a future teeming with ecotourism and innovation.
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Canton's story is one of resilience and transformation.
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In this episode, I sit down with Nick Scheuer, canton's Town Manager, and we delve into the captivating story of Chestnut Mountain Park, which is a sprawling 450-acre sanctuary helping to reshape Canton's economic and recreational landscape.
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We navigate the currents of Chestnut Mountain's impact on local businesses and the town's identity, illuminating how embracing outdoor recreation is propelling Canton into a new era of prosperity and purpose.
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Our exploration doesn't stop there.
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We dissect the ambitious redevelopment plans for the iconic mill site and emphasize the importance of community engagement and cultural preservation.
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Canton is not just a picturesque destination but a beacon of community collaboration and innovative growth.
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This episode is a testimony to the power of resilience and adaptation in rewriting a town's narrative.
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Join us as we witness Canton's journey from past to present and we peek into the promising chapters of its future.
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I'll see you on the other side.
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You're listening to Exploration Local, a podcast designed to explore and celebrate the people and places that make the Blue Ridge and Southern Appalachian Mountains special and unique.
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My name is Mike Andrus, the host of Exploration Local.
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Join us on our journey to explore these mountains and discover how they fuel the spirit of adventure.
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We encourage you to wander far, but explore local.
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Let's go Well, nick, I cannot thank you enough for driving over today.
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Thanks for being here.
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Thanks for having me Happy to be here.
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You are the town manager, or at least as of last week you're the town manager.
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We're going to say a little bit more about that towards the end.
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But what does a town manager do?
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What's the function of a town manager?
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Yeah, great question.
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So my background is in planning and before I came to the town of Canton that was my work experience, so I think I asked those same questions prior to coming to this job.
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But it basically you're basically running the day to day operations of the town.
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So everything from police and fire operations to water production, wastewater treatment, tax collection, finance, sort of all the inner workings of the way a town works are under the purview of a town manager, and in North Carolina traditionally the setup is a kind of a manager council form of government.
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So I'm appointed and serve at the pleasure of my board, but then pretty much everyone under my position is then a hired position.
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Okay, and how long have you been in this role, Nick?
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I've been with the town of Canton since 2018.
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I've been town manager for the last three years.
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One of the things I love to sort of set the stage with, because some of our listeners many of our listeners are right here, but there's also many listeners that are in areas all around the country, the nation, the world, really, so they may not know your story.
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Just a quick rundown.
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I mean we're talking about in 04 and 05, the town of Canton had two major storms back to back.
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You had the.
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We've had the recession, covid, fred basically decimated in 2021.
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Then we have the mill closing in 2023.
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I mean, it's one thing for one thing to happen to a community, but we're talking about over the last 20 years, two decades, a lot has happened and yet the people seem resilient, and so I love to use that sort of as a backdrop and just talk about the resiliency of the people, the things that they've had to face, the things that you've had to do in terms of your providing leadership as you've moved through some of these, at least since 2018.
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Let's set it up there and then we'll kind of move into why this is so important that we're talking about today.
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Yeah, absolutely so, as I like to give this quote.
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My mayor is known for being able to give these anecdotal quotes.
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But after the mill closure announcement happened, there were some small earthquakes that happened in Haywood County and nothing very impactful, but enough to make the news make the news.
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And we were in a meeting talking about sort of how we transitioned from the mill closure and our mayor is on record as saying, after we found out about the earthquakes, that Canton is a locust plague away from a revelation bingo card.
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And as funny as that is, and you know, it's the truth, and Canton has seen a lot in the last 25 years and I think what makes this special story is just how resilient those people are and the fact that, despite all the things that you just listed of, you know culture and pride based around you know this town that's, you know, 15, 20 miles west of Asheville.
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Wow.
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So, you know something that you said really I was thinking about this even last night this morning, just kind of preparing for for this interview that it almost seems like your best days are ahead, like you're rewriting the story of Canton.
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But it really seems like, I mean, excuse me, your best days are definitely ahead, but it definitely seems like you're like we're in the middle of you writing the town of Canton, the people of Canton, rewriting the story of the town, which is amazing to be a part of, I would imagine.
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Yeah, it's very humbling, I think, when I actually step back and kind of take perspective on that and you'll hear me use some flowery language in the podcast, but I think you know we would consider it a manifest destiny moment.
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The town was formed exclusively around manufacturing and you had a mill that was created 115 years ago.
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It's the reason that we have our downtown sort of historic district.
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It's the reason why we have all the housing stock and all the density.
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I mean, the mill is the origin story for Canton and so now that that's gone we're pivoting and we've got to look elsewhere and figure out sort of what that Canton 2.0 is, and it's scary and exciting and interesting and unbelievably complex.
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But you're right, that's exactly where we are right now.
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Which is really a good segue into really what we're going to talk about for the lion's share of it today is how do you take the natural amenities, the natural assets around you that become the new place?
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So there's a new sense of place-based economics and it really started with a really phenomenal story that could have gone a couple of different directions with the property.
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So we're talking about Chestnut Mountain.
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There's a lot to unpack here.
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There is, but I think one thing that'd be really cool is like let's talk about what it could have been, what the direction it was going, because that would have been far different than where we are today.
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That's right, yeah, so this parcel is 450 acres.
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It's about a mile and a quarter from our downtown.
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Historically it was used for cattle grazing and agriculture.
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It was also a place I think you know I have got a lot of public work staff and people that work for the town that actually there was a time when you could pay $100 a year or some monetary number and basically be able to ride dirt bikes or hunt, or you know it's been used by the community in informal ways for a long time.
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In the early 2000s there were some investors that came in and it was slated to actually be a NASCAR training facility.
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That's crazy.
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So the Melodome was shutting down in Asheville, the dirt track there in the River Arts District so they were looking for a new location to be able to run NASCARs and so there were preliminary designs and engineering done.
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There were soil, roads cut, Property was clear, cut in a lot of places and timbered.
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There was a large multimillion dollar bridge that was built at the base of the mountain and then for various reasons that project was shuttered and it was kind of left basically high and dry and then a few years later there was the prospect of an indoor ski slope being built there.
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So there's been lots of different concepts and ideas about what the property could be, but none of those really came to fruition and so it sat for about 20 years.
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And it was through a wildlife corridor study done by the Wildlands Network that was looking at animals migrating from Sandy Mush to Pisgah National Forest that this was actually targeted by Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy as a potential property to acquire.
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So their model typically is to fundraise and acquire property and then turn that over to land managers such as the town of Canton to basically preserve and hold conservation easements on.
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So their model typically is more conservation-based and this was one of the first projects that they worked on that was that marriage of sort of conservation and recreation, which is the future, and really amazing, unbelievable partners to work with just from start to finish.
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Can't speak highly enough about them.
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Oh, that's great, and so this parcel of land was just gifted, right?
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That's right.
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To the town of Canton, I mean, and that's not an inexpensive proposition?
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four million and so they approached us in 2019.
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So I'd been with the town for about a year, I was serving as planning director, assistant town manager, and they basically Honey Meritor came to us through Southern Appalachian and asked hey, would you guys be interested in acquiring this property?
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And we looked at a map and realized it was a mile and a quarter from downtown and had really interesting terrain and good connectivity, good you know, basically sort of good infrastructure and assets already on the ground.
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So it was a no brainer for the town and so we very quickly agreed to that SAHC sort of set off to start the fundraising process.
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You had other people that started to come alongside you at the very same time.
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So we know Seth Alvo, and a lot of mountain bikers will know the name.
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They'll know Seth Bike Hacks, and now it's the Burn Peak, and so they'll know all of that in his channel.
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But there were other things that were sort of happening along the way of that too, and so the funding for this is really interesting because it's a lot of different sources.
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And so I wonder if you can kind of unpack that a little bit too.
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Of course.
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So, you know, as we started to move through process of working with SAHC, it was, you know, clear from the outset that we were going to need to do a lot of sort of high-level master planning to inform all the activities that were going to go on on the mountain, to inform, you know, to be informed by the conservation easements, to make sure that you know the end uses for the property were going to improve water quality and improve the natural amenities that were already there.
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So as we started to work through that master planning process, you know we knew that we wanted to create sort of a multi-use park, something that would accommodate all levels of hikers and bikers and families and just something that could really serve our community.
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So as we started to look at the master planning process, we were having some conversations with our local advocacy group, piscisorba, and they had been in conversation with Seth Alvo, and so, if you don't know Seth, he's got a huge social media, youtube presence and at that time he was looking to basically crowdfund a free public bike park in Western North Carolina and so, without throwing any other municipalities under the bus, he had gone to a number of cities and towns in the region and had sort of proposed this idea and, for varying reasons, they said no.
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And so when we were in conversation with Pisces Sorba, they made that connection with Seth.
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We actually met on the property and within a day had come to an agreement.
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So we were funding through some grants and some local partnerships.
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We were funding all the master planning and design, and so the agreement was we'll fund the design for Byrne Park and you crowdfund it.
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And that's exactly what happened, and you crowdfund it.
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And that's exactly what happened.
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And so as we're working through all the community engagement processes and working through the master planning and the trail master plans and going through the RFQs and identifying all these firms, he's in the background, crowdfunding basically the entirety of Byrne Park.
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That's amazing.
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And I think for us what made it even more amazing was that in the middle of all, that is when Tropical Storm Fred came, and so as a town manager, it would have been very difficult for me to make that justification to pay or to use tax dollars to fund something like Byrne Park when we're looking at $20, $30, $40 million worth of facility damage just in Canton alone.
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So to have him be able to incubate that first phase of the project was just.
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It's one of the primary reasons that Chestnut exists today, and so he was such a pleasure to work with and such an amazing process to go through.
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I'll never forget.
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As a planner, I'm more sensitive to some of these things, but in the typical planning process, you know, you do a lot of public input.
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You want your people to give input and talk about what they want, but it's pretty rare, and so the numbers are normally pretty low.
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For your normal public input survey, we'd be lucky to have, you know, 50, 100 survey responses.
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We had 4,000 people respond to the public survey process for Byrne Park and Chestnut Mountain and I think that's just reflective of A you know the need and desire for that in our region, but then also just the, the sort of the, the spread and influence that that Seth has um in the mountain bike community.
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Oh, that's huge, and I have to ask too as a follow-up so, of those 4,000 or so respondents, how many of those were people that were sort of in Canton?
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Um, I would say in our region it's probably 50, 50, but you know we had people chiming in from Eastern Europe.
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I mean it was everywhere.
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So you know, exciting, I think, for us to sort of understand.
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You know that this has potentially has some global implications and helped us understand.
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You know there are going to be people that are going to want to travel here and we can get into later sort of the economics of it.
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But that place-based economic development, especially in the mountains, with the amenities that we have, it's huge and so starting to leverage those opportunities is critical, especially considering everything that's going on for us.
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Yeah.
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So for people that aren't familiar, when we talk about Chestnut Mountain, we talk about it's multi-use.
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So we have not just mountain bikers that are out there, but there's hikers too.
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We have not just mountain bikers that are out there, but there's hikers too.
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The park itself I wonder if you could sort of break down, give us sort of this mental image of what this bike park is.
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The access road's up, the trail's coming down, and it really sounds like it's something for everybody.
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It's not just your most rad person out there just trying to send it to the next level.
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This is somebody who's just getting into this as well.
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Yeah, absolutely so.
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The larger park is the 450-acre park, is Chestnut Mountain, so that's the nature park and that includes all the hiking-only trails, all the single-direction mountain biking traditional kind of downhill trails.
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That includes Berm Park, which is sort of a mini bike park within Chestnut Mountain.
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The way it's set up is that there's a primary climbing trail.
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It's wide enough for families to take jogging strollers up.
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It's wide enough for accommodate adaptive cycles.
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It is very much just a multi-use single direction in areas where sort of user conflict would be a problem with a mountain biker going down and hikers going up.
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And it's a spine trail.
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So it starts at the bottom, at the parking lot right off 1923.
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And if you take that you'll take it all the way to the top of the mountain.
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So there's about 1100 foot elevation difference between top and bottom.
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So good, good elevation, good topo for for mountain bike trails and things like that.
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So you've got you basically have a three quarter mile pedal or push or walk or hike.
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That gets you up to berm park, gets you up to that plateau where that NASCAR training ring was going to be.
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When you're up there you can start to visualize it because you can see these areas that were clear cut and now have sort of these low jack pines growing.
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But berm park then is basically like I said, it's a mini bike park, so they would call it a stacked loop system.
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So you've got trails that are a quarter to maybe half mile at the most and basically varying difficulties, from a strider bike loop with no elevation loss and some skinnies and little features for kids that are on, you know, basically balance bikes to start out on All the way up to a double black trail that has a telephone pole just wedged in the ground and you know 20 plus foot jumps and big gaps and drops and all kinds of stuff.
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So you know kind of everything for everybody.
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And I jokingly say I've got an eight and 11 year old and obviously they were, you know, four and five and seven and eight when we were starting this thing, but I kind of just built it selfishly for them, because trying to teach kids how to mountain bike in Western North Carolina on our inherited horse and logging trails is not easy, and so creating a place where progression, safe progression, is built in is huge for our region, and I think that's one of the areas that makes Chestnut so special, because that same mentality goes towards the greater trail network as well.
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So there's, you know, greens, green mountain bike trails that are just, you know, flow trails that are easy and you know, safe and have long sight lines.
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You know, all the way to double black stuff off the top, wow, 50% of it's still above my pay grade, wow.
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So again, just having that progression built in, so it's about 18 miles total of trail.
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There are more mountain bike trails than hiking trails, but as far as distance goes, it's split almost in half, wow.
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So there's opportunities for to hike and bike together, but there's lots of opportunities to separate those users, and that's something that we see in DuPont, we see it in Bank Creek.
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Like user conflict is a real thing, and so one of the beauties of designing a park from scratch is you get to try to sort of accommodate those type of issues before they even exist, and you can see it when you're at the park.
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Try to sort of accommodate those type of issues before they even exist, and you can see it when you're at the park.
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Like, just interactions that you have with hikers and other bikers are very positive, just because I think people feel like everyone has a place there and feels comfortable.
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Oh, that's so good, wow, well, and with 2,000 people, 4,000 people all across the world that were chiming in on this to support it, and then 2,000 of those being just with Canton alone, I mean, imagine this mountain bike community, the hiking community, everybody have just really embraced it.
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So a moment ago you talked about the economic impact, and I'd love to kind of tap into that just a tiny bit, or actually more than a tiny bit.
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But before we do, you had this thinking just wasn't, it just didn't happen by chance.
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I mean, you had I think it was Equinox was kind of a part of the planning for this, and then you had some really experienced trail builders that also helped bridge the design into something that was reality too.
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Yes, yeah, I'm so thankful we had incredible partners, and that's a reoccurring theme, I think, just as part of the Canton story beyond just Chestnut Mountain in general, is there's no way that our small community would be able to make it through all this without being able to leverage those amazing partnerships and relationships, whether that's our legislators or philanthropic organizations like Dogwood, or conservation entities like SHC, our county partners.
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I mean, there's just been, it's been a huge collaboration, and so working with Equinox was absolutely incredible, and that was one of the things that we knew from the very beginning.
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Because of the relationship with the conservancy and because of the conservation easements A lot of the property was funded through land and water fund dollars we knew that we were going to have to be very careful and deliberate and cognizant of sort of those implications and impacts, and so, having a firm like Equinox who is in the business of doing these sort of master plans and master conservation plans or recreation plans, I think their experience level was comforting for SHC and subsequently for us, and so they did an incredible job of helping us navigate all that and vision what could be possible on the site, so that they handled the master trail or, excuse me, the master plan and then elevated trail design was who did our master trail plan and then who has built all the trails on the mountain up to date?
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And elevated trail design again unbelievable to work with.
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Peter Mills is the owner and the guys that work for him and the Calibor work that they do is pretty unparalleled.
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You know, sort of level of communication and even just the activation of these projects as we have brought new trails online, you know brought advocacy groups out for days and we're continuing to work on sort of creating kind of that local support group, the Friends of Chestnut Mountain or whatever that looks like.
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I think 2024 will be the year when we try to start to initiate that.
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But we've got Elevated is on contract even as of now to do trail maintenance there.
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So they're there six to seven days a month with many excavators and just keeping everything sort of in tip top shape.
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So can't, cannot speak highly enough of them and the caliber of their work.
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And you you mean you don't have to ride there very long to realize that the stuff they're doing is just kind of next level and so it's exciting to see that come, come to Western North Carolina.
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They've built amazing stuff all over, really all over the world but all over the country.
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So to see them get to execute at that level at Chestnut was such a pleasure and, you know, got to been able to be a part of all that for the last few years has been a huge joy for me, I bet.
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And for your whole family it sounds like, and the whole family, yeah, I mean, and for your whole family, it sounds like the whole family.
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Yeah, yeah, that's.
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That's an important piece.
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So the economic impact piece, before we sort of kind of move on what has this done, what do you see it doing?
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And just really, what is the overall impact the town of Canton, to the community of Canton and to this whole region economically?
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Well, I think, I mean, I think we've got to look at this at the state too.
00:21:50.042 --> 00:21:58.489
I mean, I throw out a lot of stats when we talk about outdoor recreation, but outdoor rec outpaces financial, valued at $3.5 billion a year.
00:21:58.489 --> 00:22:20.508
You know, I know that there was a study done on the economic impact of biking and climbing and maybe paddling in Pisgah and Anahala and that study needs to be redone.
00:22:20.508 --> 00:22:30.451
But I mean, I think the regional impact was, you know, $8 to $11 million a year or something like that, just for those activities within a very defined area.
00:22:30.451 --> 00:22:43.092
So I think, from the beginning, you know, we knew that the messaging and that's just the way it is, I think, with any of these projects is that you're, you know, your messaging can change for different audiences, right?
00:22:43.092 --> 00:22:54.492
Like some people are going to care more about quality of life, some people are going to care more about the economic impact, and so we have to make sure that we're able to speak to each of those, because they're all valid, they're all important.
00:22:54.492 --> 00:23:09.760
Like I said before, you know, one of the beautiful things of getting to build a brand new park from scratch you know, starting in 2020, 2021, is just that we get to look at what other places have done and learn from those.
00:23:09.760 --> 00:23:15.972
So one of the things that we said was we want to measure sort of economic impact from the very beginning.
00:23:15.972 --> 00:23:23.006
We don't want chestnut to become this really valuable popular thing and then, 10 years from now, we're like we should do an economic impact study.
00:23:23.567 --> 00:23:36.474
So we've had trail counters on the ground, kind of within the first two or three months of having the park open, and that's been really cool to be able to see as we add, you know, each trail, each piece, each amenity in the park.
00:23:36.819 --> 00:23:38.182
You know we can actually see this.
00:23:38.182 --> 00:23:42.653
You know, basically we can measure sort of the impact of each of those.
00:23:42.653 --> 00:23:50.693
And then at the same time, we've got sort of a community input study that you can do only if you're at the park.
00:23:50.693 --> 00:23:58.825
So we've got QR codes on yard signs kind of throughout the park basically, and so we've got trail counters and then we've got a user input study.
00:23:58.825 --> 00:24:03.950
And what we're doing now is we're taking that data and we're mirroring it and we're quantifying.
00:24:03.950 --> 00:24:20.734
You know what's the economic impact of Chestnut Mountain, and so we don't have any kind of firm numbers on there, including lodging, but right now we're seeing, you know, 50 to 60 unique users there every day and people are spending a significant amount of money.
00:24:20.734 --> 00:24:36.386
So I think we're comfortable sort of saying right now that, excluding lodging, people are spending three or four million million in Canton and in Haywood County after they visit Chestnut Mountain, and that's excluding the lodging portion of it.
00:24:36.386 --> 00:24:39.093
So the impact is significant.
00:24:40.182 --> 00:24:43.872
That is significant, so 50 to 60 unique users a day.
00:24:44.039 --> 00:24:46.867
Yeah, and that number continues to grow Again.
00:24:46.867 --> 00:25:03.868
It's like when the park opened, it was literally just Byrne Park, so much more of a novelty thing, whereas now, you know, we've got 18 miles of trails, we've got a couple more things to build out there as far as picnic pavilions, and we're doing a kid's bicycle playground at the bottom, but all the trail mileage and everything else is done.
00:25:03.868 --> 00:25:10.210
You know, we completed the last trail, I believe in November of 2023.
00:25:10.210 --> 00:25:11.132
And so we're.
00:25:11.132 --> 00:25:17.121
You know those numbers are going to only you know, increase.
00:25:17.161 --> 00:25:17.842
That is really incredible, nick.
00:25:17.842 --> 00:25:22.172
So if I have if I'm looking at the statistics right 50 to 60 unique people, so that's on a Monday, yet 50.
00:25:22.172 --> 00:25:25.647
Now if that same person comes back on a Thursday, are they counted in part of this unique?
00:25:26.269 --> 00:25:26.990
No, they're not.
00:25:26.990 --> 00:25:30.907
Yeah, that's what makes us even more incredible, I mean exponentially, that's.
00:25:31.368 --> 00:25:32.752
that is enormous, it's big.
00:25:32.752 --> 00:25:33.801
I mean.
00:25:33.801 --> 00:25:38.512
That is far beyond what I even thought of even coming into this interview to be honest with you.
00:25:39.299 --> 00:25:51.027
And then you start to think about how you extrapolate that out to the food, the lodging, the bike shops, the all the other stuff, the brewery trips, the breweries, everything you know, and I think that's one of the things that is helping.
00:25:51.027 --> 00:25:59.872
You know, as we you know we had that obviously the mill closure and we can we viewed sort of a lot of our retail downtown locations.
00:25:59.872 --> 00:26:10.057
Is potentially some of the canaries in the mine right, like they're going to be the ones you know you've got a thousand people less working a quarter mile from our you know mom and pop burger shop.
00:26:10.057 --> 00:26:11.317
What does that look like?
00:26:11.317 --> 00:26:13.121
What is it?
00:26:13.121 --> 00:26:14.124
What are the implications of that?
00:26:14.124 --> 00:26:24.551
And so I think having things like Chestnut, having people coming into town and visiting and patronizing those things, has sort of softened that blow a little bit.
00:26:24.551 --> 00:26:27.248
So exciting to see that continue to grow.
00:26:28.119 --> 00:26:30.090
Chestnut Mountain is a phenomenal facility.
00:26:30.090 --> 00:26:36.573
Obviously, we can see the economic impact that it's bringing in, but there's so much more around us and around you in there in Canton.
00:26:36.573 --> 00:26:47.401
Before we go there, though, the residents, the people because you're living amongst them, you're working amongst them, eating amongst them, recreating Are they seeing the economic impact of this?
00:26:47.401 --> 00:26:48.845
Like, do they really feel it?
00:26:48.845 --> 00:26:54.029
I mean, they probably notice there's more activity, but do they get a sense that there is economic benefit here?
00:26:54.839 --> 00:26:58.958
I would say yes, but I think you know at this point in time, for most people it is anecdotal.
00:26:59.259 --> 00:26:59.380
Okay.
00:26:59.599 --> 00:27:09.646
You know we've got our local brewery owners told us you know they've got a couple locations in Haywood County and the Maggie Valley location and the Canton location.
00:27:09.646 --> 00:27:19.313
Maggie Valley always outperformed Canton, kind of two to one, and then the weekend that Chestnut Mountain opened it sort of went one to one and has leveled off there since.
00:27:19.313 --> 00:27:25.053
So you see a lot of cars with bike racks, you know, and in parking lots and at restaurants around town.
00:27:25.053 --> 00:27:34.926
But I think we're excited to really be able to quantify this data, to start to say that you know and then start to inform our community about what's going on.
00:27:35.367 --> 00:27:38.061
I bet I mean that's the land planner in you, that's the planner.
00:27:38.462 --> 00:27:40.249
I mean you're not a free spirit kind of.
00:27:40.249 --> 00:27:44.289
I mean I'm sure you are when you're writing, but I mean you just come across as a very thoughtful, very methodical.
00:27:44.289 --> 00:27:45.000
You're a planner.
00:27:45.000 --> 00:27:55.796
That's where your background is, and so the data is going to speak volumes to you, I'm sure, and it's going to take a little bit of time to collect that data, but the initial data coming in says I mean gosh, if you could just talk about that one brewery as just a micro example.
00:27:56.480 --> 00:28:16.393
Two to one, one to one now holding off and however many people go to Catalucci and are probably right by there, I mean it's not just the skiing, but for four, or leverage that opportunity and open up, you know, amenities and shops and things like that that can.
00:28:16.393 --> 00:28:17.775
They can cater to that.
00:28:17.775 --> 00:28:20.237
So it's an exciting thing to watch.
00:28:20.237 --> 00:28:21.020
Oh, that's great.
00:28:21.602 --> 00:28:21.863
All right.
00:28:21.863 --> 00:28:24.468
So let's a little bit of a hard pivot, but it's all connected.
00:28:24.468 --> 00:28:27.094
You have a new role, that's right.
00:29:13.299 --> 00:29:15.144
Right Ever since last Thursday and let's set up your new role.
00:29:15.144 --> 00:29:20.013
And then I got a bunch of so excited to be transitioning into that, as you know sort of future financial implications, climate change implications.
00:29:20.013 --> 00:29:30.772
It's a huge opportunity and something that I'm really excited about and something that I think plays to my strengths but helps us, as a town, make sure that we are excelling in all areas.
00:29:31.759 --> 00:29:37.000
And in some ways you're already excelling because you talk about the environment, you talk about the impact you've shared with me.
00:29:37.000 --> 00:29:49.733
You know a couple of times, just when the plant closed down just how quickly I don't know if quickly is the right word, but just it's interesting how the river is sort of healing itself the Pigeon River is sort of running right through you and how much it's cleaning up.
00:29:49.733 --> 00:29:50.876
That's just a small example.
00:29:51.005 --> 00:29:51.527
I love to give.
00:29:51.527 --> 00:29:54.455
The Wildlife Resource Commission did a study.
00:29:54.455 --> 00:29:58.151
I think it was either, and I won't get all of it exactly right, but it was.
