Here’s something Ashe County residents can celebrate and take pride in. The town of West Jefferson has won Strong Towns award for the Strongest Infrastructure Project for 2016. This honor was awarded to West Jefferson for its highly successful downtown redesign efforts.
Strong Towns is a national media nonprofit whose mission is “to support the belief that a nation full of towns that take on small, incremental projects to improve their neighborhoods is a much better model than a nation where the federal government goes trillions of dollars in debt in the hopes of growing the economy through megaprojects.”
West Jefferson’s revitalization involved removing overheard power-lines and replacing traffic lights with stop signs, bumping out curbs for increased pedestrian traffic and doing landscaping along Jefferson Avenue. Strong Towns readers and members who voted for this project gave high marks to West Jefferson for making this street safer, more walkable and more attractive overall.
To understand the significance of West Jefferson’s revitalization, it’s important to look at the town’s history over the past few decades. After the railroad left in the 1970's, West Jefferson was a crossroads for employees going to work in the town's manufacturing facilities. Between 2001 & 2008 most of these facilities closed leaving the downtown with many building vacancies, an unappealing street front, and infrastructure that was unfriendly to pedestrians.
In 2002, the Ashe Revitalization Committee (now the West Jefferson Community Partnership) worked with NC State University and developed a downtown charrette visioning many new design plans for the Town.
Today Jefferson Avenue is a thriving street that brims with pedestrian-friendly activity such as the Art Crawl that takes place several times a year, where gallery
To read the entire article, go here: http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/10/31/announcing-the-strongest-infrastructure-project
