Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

An Editorial Opinion of The Demopolis Times

On Monday, Demopolis got some great news that will help alleviate any heartburn that was caused by not getting the West Alabama Highway to come through town.

The city is getting an investment from the Alabama Department of Transportation and Brasfield & Gorrie that will bring at least 120 jobs to the area for the duration of the highway construction. They are converting the vacant parts of the shopping center where Marvin’s currently sits and turning into offices and meeting spaces for the two entities to focus solely on coordinating the construction of the highway.

There will be engineers from both ALDOT and the contractor, which was selected to do the progressive design build project, working at this 40,000 square-foot field office five days a week for as many as seven years.

Not only that, but a peak of 700 construction workers will be assigned to this project, and the field office will serve as a home base for those workers as well.

Sure, it was disappointing for city leaders and business leaders who would have loved to see more traffic come downtown. Mayor Woody Collins understood that while it would have been nice to have the highway closer to town, it likely would not have come downtown at all.

“In reality, it would have bypassed us anyway,” Collins said at the big announcement Monday. “I think we got the best end of the deal because we are having over 100 new people moving to Demopolis to live here for the next three, five or maybe seven years. And the highway is still only about five to six miles away from us here.

“We still have to figure out a way to get people off the highway to visit us, and we would have still had that problem even if it was only a mile away from us.”

That is true. But for the short term, the city is going to get an injection of good-paying engineering and construction jobs that will bring more people and more families to the area.

And once the project is completed, the city will have a renovated complex that could be marketed to future businesses.

It seems like a win-win situation. We thank Gov. Kay Ivey for keeping Demopolis in mind with the highway and the field office.