‘Spruce Up Sallisaw’ kicks off Monday

Sallisaw City Manager Brian Heverly is not one to drag things out, especially when projects can be completed in a matter of days when there is a focus on achievement.

That’s why Sallisaw’s annual citywide cleanup emphasis is no longer a spring fling, but a laser-focused five days beginning Monday to “Spruce Up Sallisaw.”

“In the past, there’s been a lot of different things that the city’s done spread out over the spring, whether it’s Chunk Your Junk, whether it’s Keep Oklahoma Beautiful, we’re trying to put it all in one week,” Heverly recently told the Sallisaw Main Street Board of Directors. “We’re going to start the week off by exposing some of these sidewalks that have been grown over and/or ignored. We’re going to expose some of these sidewalks going down Wheeler, and then on Choctaw and Chickasaw as well.

“Really, the plan there is just to clean them off,” he explained about the sidewalk reveal. “The city has, in its ordinance, that it’s the homeowner’s responsibility to keep those sidewalks clean, but it’s been ignored, hasn’t been enforced, hasn’t been kept up for probably well over a decade, looking at some of these sidewalks. So we’re going to go in there with a skid steer, clean them off, identify what needs to be fixed, we’ll fix them and then it will be the homeowner’s responsibility to maintain them from there on out. Kind of a reset — our bad, you’re bad — moving forward. Here we go.

“The whole point of ‘Spruce Up Sallisaw’ is at the end of the week, we’re clean and we look probably as good as we’re going to look without putting a ton of money into something. So if Main Street is going to clean up the pocket park, that would be the week to do it. We’re going to plant flowers, whatever you all are going to do. I know there’s talk about the flowers, the hanging baskets from last year. I know those were intensive to maintain,” Heverly said.

In addition, the city will make things as easy as it can for senior citizens, participate in Keep Oklahoma Beautiful projects and end the weeklong emphasis with the “Chunk Your Junk” on Saturday.

“We’re also going to do Curbie for senior citizens and the disabled that week. You’ll be able to sign up for Curbie to get one pick up per household, per address. We’re not going to clean up your entire family’s crap if they can get it to you. So Curbie will be around that week,” Heverly said. “It’s first come, first served for those 65 and older.

“We’re going to do Keep Oklahoma Beautiful on Tuesday. What we’re asking for is for businesses, organizations to sign up through Katie at City Hall (918-790-7125). We’re focusing on Business I-40, so Cherokee Avenue down to Kerr Boulevard. If we get more folks, hey that’s great, but I figure it’s the first year, we’ll go conservative and just focus on the Business 40,” he said.

Heverly said city crews “may actually have a work day on Saturday.”

“We’ve got to get Rock Branch cleaned up,” Heverly said of the WPA drainage project that runs through Sallisaw. “If you look at pictures from 2008 of Rock Branch, it was nice and clean with some grass growing in it. Now we’ve got trees and you wouldn’t even know where Rock Branch is. So we’re doing some work there, getting that cleaned up, hopefully move some water out of town a little faster.”

But volunteers are essential to achieve what Heverly hopes to accomplish.

Then “Chuck Your Junk” will serve as the week’s finale.

“Chuck Your Junk is where if you have couches or furniture, we do it right in front of the city building across the [railroad] tracks,” Heverly said. There are some items the city will not accept for “Chuck Your Junk,” which include:

• Brush, construction debris, shingles or commercial trash

• Hazardous waste or free flowing liquids, batteries, paint, oil, cooking oil, fuel, chemicals, pesticides, fertilizers, cleaning products, pharmaceuticals and butane/propane tanks

• Appliances with coolant/ refrigerant systems still connected

• Tires or other heavy rubber type materials.

The unpolished diamond

In addition to the focus on Sallisaw, Heverly said the city will also do some work at Brushy Lake.

“One of the pieces of vision that I have is that I think Brushy is an unpolished diamond right now. We have a great asset up there that is under-utilized, under-advertised and there’s a lot of unrealized potential up there that we could take advantage of and actually turn it into a revenue-producing area, a place you want to visit,” the city manager said. “As more people come into the area, as more people immigrate from the coasts, they’re looking for quiet recreation. If you want to jump on a Jet Ski, hey, Tenkiller’s just up the road. We’re not going to compete with Tenkiller. If that’s where you want to go, knock yourself out, and have a great time doing it. But if you want a quiet place to go, that’s not rowdy, that’s not spring break, that’s not ‘fill in the blank,’ where you can actually listen to nature and see the stars in the sky at night, then you want to come to our place.

“Right now, we charge a third of what the KOA Campground charges. So in my mind, if we can, pardon the pun, spruce the place up a little bit and we charge half … the sky’s the limit really. We actually had a call this morning about getting some kayak rental kiosks, so go up and rent kayaks or paddle boards and have at it, and just have a good time on the quiet, calm Brushy Lake that we have,” Heverly told the Main Street board.

Then the fledgling city manager allowed himself to voice his vision for the city.

“As far as Main Street and where we’re looking at the town, we’re actually looking at making Elm and Oak one-way streets all the way to Chickasaw. Everybody’s driven through Fort Smith — I know they’re not one-way streets, but you’ve got angle parking on the sides, nice little jut-outs as you make the turn — so that’s what we’re looking at, doing something like that, so it’s angle parking on both sides and not the flat (parallel) parking that we have. We’ll increase parking in downtown,” Heverly said.

The only possible snag: “ODOT owns Cherokee. I can’t do anything on Cherokee without ODOT’s permission, most of the time, without ODOT doing it.”

Heverly continued his vision, which illicited an unsolicited “Like it used to be” remark from one of the Main Street board members.

“What I’d like to do is move those two roads, the two-way traffic, move that north, get rid of the parking along the north side, so up against the library, that flat (parallel) parking there. Get rid of that and make angle parking up against the businesses. That’s what I’d like to do. With losing that parking, it only gains about six spots, give or take, because we are going to lose several spots regardless when they redo [U.S.] 59.

“It’s not a lot of bang for our buck, but if we can get angle parking, maybe it helps, makes it easier for people to get in and out,” he prophesied, with a nod to the past.