In his State of the City speech Tuesday evening from the stage of Statesboro High School’s auditorium, Mayor Jonathan McCollar made improving the lives of Statesboro’s youth not the first, but the most emphasized, concern he talked about.

About 70 people sat, spacing themselves among the auditorium’s 1,200 seats as the 7 p.m. program began. It was also livestreamed and remains available for viewing on the “City of Statesboro Government” Facebook page.

“Four and a half years ago when we were campaigning for this office we laid out a very ambitious plan to address some very tough issues that our community were facing and is still facing today,” McCollar said.

Even before he took office at the beginning of 2018, he and supporters had formed a transition team that worked with city staff “to get a better understanding  of  what  were some  of the current priorities of the city” and merge the best elements of differing visions, he said.

“It was our belief that this office and the city was an organization that could be used for more than just the proverbial digging of ditches and filling of potholes,” the mayor continued.  “It was our belief that if the city was going to meet its greatest potential, whatever that may be, then it must be willing to begin to make the great investments into the people that it serves.”

The catalyst for this thinking, he said, was an understanding “that poverty was the greatest issue we were facing within our  community.”

“Over time we watched as many of our older neighborhoods began to decline and our newspaper ran story after story of young people getting into types of trouble that were seemingly foreign to this community,” McCollar said.  “We normalized out outdated parks and even gave excuses as to why we should not invest into their return to glory.”

Park upgrades

But last year, contractors hired by the city completed major renovations with additions of new features, at a total cost of nearly $4.5 million, to Luetta Moore Park on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and the Rev. W.D. Kent Park on West Grady Street.

This followed initial five-year commitments of $1.1 million by City Council and $1 million by the Bulloch County Board of Commissioners from their shares of the current Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax, or SPLOST. The city borrowed the full $4.5 million in the form of a single-bank bond.  

All the while the mayor spoke, a rolling slide slow appeared on the screen behind him, including about 190 photos from projects the city government has participated in during his tenure and of city employees at work. Pictures from last year’s park projects and re-openings, with the pool and splash pads at Luetta Moore Park and the basketball pavilion on Grady Street, figured prominently.

Jobs and SPLOST

McCollar traced the current level of city-county cooperation to negotiations soon after he took office for renewal of the multipurpose SPLOST and the creation of a countywide sales tax for transportation projects, or T-SPLOST. Both were approved by voters in 2018.

“What we understood about addressing the matter of poverty is that you cannot lift any people out of poverty without jobs, and good-paying jobs do not come unless there is a strong infrastructure system that can support their needs,” he said.

The SPLOST and T-SPLOST have helped supply “historic investment into the infrastructure of this city and county,” McCollar said. “As you travel across the city, it is not uncommon to see orange barrels and men at work repairing our streets and drainage systems.”

Further plans and projects he hailed as progress include the Creek on the Blue Mile plan, which he said “will provide the city with a new business district,” the Downtown Master Plan, and the city’s small-bus transit system, now fully planned but still awaiting delivery of the buses.

On the social capital side, he hailed the work of the OneBoro Commission, a community panel that combines the missions of both the diversity and inclusion commission and the workforce commission that were created out of proposals from his 2017-2018 transition team.

Housing improvement

Later in his speech, he noted City Council’s recent commitment of $5 million to a housing improvement program and of another $6 million to extend the city’s sewer system into neighborhoods not previously connected. Statesboro’s $12.3 million share of federal funding under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 is the source of both of these amounts.

But the city’s active interest in housing rehabilitation extends back to Statesboro’s 2019-2020 entry into the Georgia Initiative for Community Housing, as he noted. McCollar also talked about the city’s ongoing efforts to have dilapidated structures removed “and hold accountable the owners that have left their properties in disarray.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, there is something morally wrong when our children have normalized playing in neighborhoods with dilapidated properties and unhealthy conditions,” he said.

Investment in youth

After hints like that, he intensified the focus on children and youth in the last 10 minutes of a more than half-hour speech.

“Statesboro, if we are truly going to work to build a better day for the future of this city, then there is one key investment that we must make, and that is into our young people,” McCollar said.

He called for the creation of “Children Zones” to provide support services in neighborhoods with the highest number of at-risk children and of community learning centers where children and their parents, who may have dropped out of school, can learn together.

He said the time has come “to develop a comprehensive youth mentorship initiative” that provides guidance and exposes middle and high school students to career possibilities. Unless the community presents activities and pathways, youth gangs will, he suggested.

“It must be the vision of our community that every child that calls our city home must return home to a safe, healthy and economically sound neighborhood,” McCollar said.

A further story will examine the mayor’s remarks about support for both the Statesboro Police Department and youth programs, which paralleled a debate he has been having with some City Council members.