Maintaining an infrastructure that can keep pace with growth, moving forward with new community projects, and doing it all safely while keeping costs under control topped the long list of priorities facing the Limestone County Commission as chairman Collin Daly delivered the annual State of the County address this week in Athens. 

Hosted by the Athens-Limestone Chamber of Commerce and held Thursday, July 10, on the campus of Athens State University, Daly’s back-and-forth Q&A session with Weston Coleman, the Chamber Civic & Governmental Vice Chair, touched lightly on a broad range of growth-related topics and the challenges the commission faces in bringing some of them from concept to completion. 

The consensus and will is in place for some of the county’s wish-list items, including a new public swimming facility and the addition, at some point, of a third judge’s seat for the area’s 39th Judicial Circuit. But while those still require funding and partnerships that may yet take some time, Daly was more optimistic about the county’s progress toward completing its new recycling center. 

“We’re hoping to be up and going here in the future,” said Daly. “…[T]he bid is let; they’re already working now, and they’ve got so many working days to do it… [A]s long as they can build it up and get everything plumbed in, I would say [the center will be completed in] five months, somewhere in that range.”

While the county’s rapid pace of development poses challenges for government services, Daly told the News-Courier after the event that maintaining public safety will be key to the commission’s approach to the area’s ongoing economic and population boom. 

“The number-one growth issue you always run into is keeping the community safe,” he said. “Addressing the criminal side is one of our biggest things. Every [county] department that we have has grown and is growing — but the biggest growth for us is going to be keeping a safe community.”