I live in Sheffield and have a dog in this race - unless the grant said Sheffield must use it to erect a sign on the river, this was a waste of money. This money could have been used elsewhere, and my tax dollars that it offset could have been put to better use. Not to mention the cost of electricity, however small, to light the thing.
As if i didn't have enough reasons to question how my tax dollars are spent by the city.
And I gave up on getting anywhere with the council when they couldn't understand why it was more important to encourage traffic on Jackson Highway instead of Hatch Super-speedway.
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I own property in Sheffield, and 2 of my 3 kids live there, so I have a stick in this fire as well. My third one did live there, but moved because as he puts it he "didn't want to live in the ghetto anymore".
I would love to see downtown Sheffield prosper, and to some degree it is beginning to come back , one improved building at a time.
I doubt if it will ever again be a shopping mecca, but it does have a great potential to be a night time entertainment center, and development of the river front could really help making it a place people would want to move to.
I'm not too sure what has happened to improving Second St, it is the same rough bumpy street I remember when I first went over it about 60 years ago. Seems to me that is long enough to have made some improvements.