Greenwood is a relatively small town of around 100,000 people, and though we seem small our spirit makes up for it. We are best known for our high school football team and most of our other extracurricular activities excel as well. Being a small city to the west of Fort Smith, Arkansas, we aren’t well-known and one might say that we’re more of a backwater place. We only have two community events a year and traffic can be bad at times. Our town square is in fact a circle, and we have several problems that should be attended to.

If I were mayor of my town, I would solve a few of these problems. For instance, we have one main road, Center Street, that runs all the way through the main part of town. It’s where our fast food restaurants and most of our daily lives tend to be. The problem here is that we don’t have enough crosswalks on Center Street. One can only cross West Center Street when it is intersected by another road and has a stoplight at that intersection, but there are only about two or three stoplights and that makes it harder for pedestrians to cross the road because they have to walk all the way to the stoplight to wait for a red light to cross, or they have to make a dash across the street and risk being hit. It is a rather long walk from our local McDonalds’ to the crosswalk at the intersection of Denver and West Center Street and some people don’t have many options. I propose that we paint more crosswalks like the one by East Hills Middle School where there is no stoplight and drivers have to stop to let kids cross the road on their way to and from school with the aid of a traffic officer. We need to add more places for pedestrians to cross the road safely in our town. We should select a few places along West Center to place crosswalks, gather a fund to pay some road painters, and have crosswalks installed along with a traffic officer or a traffic light to help direct the traffic.

I also propose that we upgrade our Sebastian County Library here in town. Compared to the Fort Smith Libraries, the one we have here in Greenwood is a bit of a disappointment. It constantly has an old mildew scent hanging in the air and limited space and selection of titles. The library hasn’t been updated in quite a while and hardly compares to the vast selection of the Fort Smith branches, the run-down building isn’t very welcoming and when you walk in, not very many people are there. I want to make the library a more open and welcoming place for the community. We could gather a fund to relocate the library to a better location with lots of room for more books, give the library funding for new books and new computers, and give everyone in Greenwood a better learning experience by having a brand new library. We could host a town event to raise money and even bring local sponsors in to help us with our project for an updated learning center.

Greenwood does have many problems, but I think that we should address the library and the crosswalk issues the most. It would benefit the city most to paint crosswalks and update our ancient library. If I were mayor of my city, I could help make this happen and it could benefit the community as a whole.