Mount Olive can ill afford to allow distractions to impede infrastructure improvements and efforts to enhance the quality of life while promoting retail health and growth, town Commissioner Barbara Kornegay said.

The town is in the preliminary stage of launching $14 million in upgrades and improvements to its wastewater treatment plant and water collection system in hopes of getting out from under the economic stranglehold of a state-mandated moratorium that prohibits the addition of new sewer hookups.

And recently, the Mount Olive Community Development Corp. was one of 20 nonprofits statewide awarded a $25,000 grant through Duke Energy Foundation — funds then awarded by the nonprofit as microgrants to individuals who own businesses in the Center Street area.The grants could be used to aid the businesses in their ongoing recovery from economic challenges initially driven by the COVID pandemic.

It is important that the town maintain its focus on promoting retail growth in order to see an increase in revenue from retail, Kornegay stressed during a recent interview.

It also would help satisfy people so that they would shop and eat at restaurants in town, she said.“And give us more traffic in town so that existing businesses can live,” she attested.

But the trick is how does the town ensure that it does not lose focus on that while it waits for the moratorium to be lifted giving it more sewer flow.

“We have worked hard to get some grants to help us do that,” Kornegay said.

The town has a grant search committee that meets on a regular basis to help find ways to push things forward, she said.

“We did the Duke grant. We also have a downtown revitalization planning grant from the (N.C.) Department of Commerce for $175,000 and that grant is supposed to give us the capability to make a plan.”

The grant is for the downtown area only, and a company has been interviewed that will probably be able to help, Kornegay said.

A lot more needs to be done around the downtown area, but it has to be done in steps, the commissioner pointed out.

The first step is to make a plan, and the town will hire a professional planner to help with that.

“They’ll get input from all the constituents, and we’ll talk — where are vacant buildings; what can we can do to expand the retail space because they’ve already got sewer hookups.

“What can we do to beautify the downtown area more? Do we need to do anything with the sidewalks” Can we talk about landscaping?”

The plan also will look at how to get people downtown and signs that direct people downtown, Kornegay said.

“We need some destination signs,” she pointed out. “What can we do to improve the facades of buildings so that when a real estate person comes to town and they’re looking for a place to put a business (they say) ‘Oh, that looks really cool, or no that building’s falling apart. You know work with the owners to do that kind of thing.”

There are some historic buildings in the downtown area, too.“So the (N.C.) Department of Cultural Resources right now is looking at our plan to make sure that we’re not going to do anything to disturb the historic part of the downtown,” Kornegay said.

“We’re kind of waiting until they get through with their review before we get on to getting a plan, getting the plan started, but we interviewed the planner last week.”

The planner has a lot of experience working with towns that have colleges in them, she continued. “We feel really good about that. That will be the next big thing we’ll do to concentrate on economic development going forward.That’s a biggie right now for us to just get that rocking and rolling and move forward and that is about a year and maybe a couple of years as follow up to help us stay on track with one firm.”

Farmer’s Market

Another piece that plays into downtown development is a farmer’s market.

“We would really like to get a farmer’s market because we have the land and we have a plan,” Kornegay said.

The town-owned land is at the intersection of Pollock and South Center streets.The area already has some history with being used as a farmer’s market. Years ago, a vendor, known locally as the “apple man” set up near the spot through the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays to sell apples, oranges and other fruits.

And hard candy, Town Manager Jammie Royall said.

The town is looking at applying for funding through the N.C. Tobacco Trust Fund because it does farmer’s markets, Kornegay added.

“Their deadline is sometime between January and March, and I got a file I’m working on,” she said. “I wrote the grant for Duke Energy, and I wrote the grant for Department of Commerce. These are kind of things I can do with help from Jammie, (administrative assistant) Sherry Davis and other people.

“But anyway we’re waiting right now to just get an estimate on how much we think that it would cost to build it.”

Old DMV site

The town is also looking for a buyer for the two-story building on North Chestnut Street that once housed the state DMV office.

“It’s in a prime location,” Kornegay said. “We need a buyer because we are not able to keep up that building. That’s why the DMV people left; we could not maintain it.The state used it for years, didn’t do anything to maintain it and got upset when we wouldn’t even bring them toilet paper.”

Also, DMV paid no rent, Royall said.

“I’m sure somebody in the past was really thinking how great it would be for us to have a DMV,” Kornegay said. “But the town was not equipped to handle a deteriorating building, but it has some good bones; it’s just that inside it is a mess.”

Prior to being used by the DMV, the building was home to Steele Memorial Library.

“I mean, you know it’s a building that could be probably be repurposed for all kinds of things, but we need a buyer,” Kornegay said.

Building improvements

Downtown revitalization is not limited to the town’s efforts. Residents can help, too, the town commissioner and planning committee member said.

For example, Ryan Roberts, owner of R&R Brewing, has purchased three downtown buildings — the old Center Theater, the Kraft building and a neighboring building, Kornegay pointed out.

Roberts is working to do some things to improve the buildings, she said.

He recently participated in a classroom session with a University of Mount Olive marketing class. The class assignment was to work with him to design a marketing plan for those three buildings.

One of them came up with a bowling alley to go in the theater.

“It is modified bowling of some type because it’s a slanted floor and put a sports bar on top,” Kornegay said. “Now this is just their idea. Then another one was to do a bakery over in one of those buildings, and another one was to do a big sports bar and use the upstairs like an atrium or something.

“It was a very interesting class, and it’s kind of a nice partnership between Ryan, an entrepreneur in our town, a young man who has good ideas and what’s going on at the university. Those are the kinds of partnerships that we ought to be fostering with young people who have ideas, and if we can get young people involved in our downtown, then they’ll come shop in our downtown.”

For the most part, UMO students don’t go past the campus, other than maybe going to Piggly Wiggly or Food Lion or to fast food places, but they don’t even know where downtown is, Kornegay said.

“There’s not much downtown expect maybe Up North Pizzeria that’s even going to appeal to them,” she said. “So getting those three buildings into operational status in some way would be a dream for the town. That theater building is just sitting there and has been a real eyesore.”

Roberts is a hometown boy, who is the third generations of his family to work in their Roberts Machine Shop business, she said.

He’s a bit controversial currently because of noise complaints about his R&R Brewing business, Kornegay said.

However, he’s trying hard to figure out a way to entertain people, she said.

It’s difficult when people live in mixed-use neighborhoods, Kornegay said.

“I’ve not done an exhaustive study, but if you look at what’s going on in neighborhoods, where you’ve got businesses right next to residential, you’re gong to have issues, and you have to learn to get along,” she said

Roberts has a vision and if not nurtured, it will be lost, she said.

Land expansion

Land is a concern for the town as well, Kornegay said.

“We need land for expansion of the sewer plant spray field,” she said. “Right now we have 110 acres of spray fields.”

The town is nearing completion of improvements to the sewer plant’s spray field. Having the land to expand the spray field would help the town not have to put treated water into the headwaters of the Northeast Cape Fear River.

The town currently has a permit for discharging up to 1 million gallons of treated wastewater daily into the creek, Royall said.

“So if we have more spray fields, we can spray more, and we can keep from having to put it into the creek,” Kornegay said. “We’ve identified some land that we would like to purchase, but it’s very expensive and we have no funding.

“We have two properties we’re looking at. It’s prime and is located nearby so we wouldn’t have to do a whole lot of construction of pipes going there.”

It is agriculture land so it’s governed differently from municipal properties, she said.

As such the land would not require prepping since it already is used for agriculture, Royall said.

The town would be able to go in and use it right off, he said.

It could continue to be used as farmland, Kornegay said.

“Anyway, so I guess the important thing is, we would like to get that land, but we don’t have the money to buy the land,” Kornegay said. “If you do not think about the future for wastewater treatment, it will come back and get you because this is what happened here with a failed project.

“We had an environmental nightmare we had to clean up before we could even start putting the spray fields together.”