Mayor seeks help to revitalize Morley, Mo.

MORLEY, Mo. -- Morley's mayor is hoping his town's city council will join him in pushing for some R and R. Mayor Jonathan McNeely introduced his idea during the council's regular July monthly meeting.

"I made a presentation before city council asking them to adopt a program called Restoration and Revitalization," McNeely said. "Ultimately the goal is to totally restore and revitalize our little town here."

Achieving that is going to take some creative thinking.

"The city's finances are very constricted and have been for some time," McNeely said. "This program will be one of the ways that we will be able to really offer a benefit to our community without having an additional financial burden on the city."

The idea is to get businesses in not only Morley but also from surrounding communities to donate a few materials and combine those with local efforts.

"A great example is this small landscaping project at city hall," McNeely said. He started by presenting his plan to dress up the city facility to Paula Diebold of Diebold Orchards in Benton, Mo.

"They willingly donated what we needed," McNeely said. "Once we had the landscaping materials donated, I got with a few volunteers from town and we donated our labor. It took just a few citizens donating their time to plant the landscaping."

The results are now there for everyone to see: landscaping in the two planters at the front steps of city hall along with a tree just to the right of the building.

"It's a showpiece to demonstrate for the city council what we can accomplish if we adopt this program," McNeely said. "The program is designed as really a plan and a structure of how we can go about achieving some of the projects we have really needed to do in our town for some time. It's designed to incorporate business leaders, church leaders and volunteers to complete a majority of these tasks."

He hopes to continue dressing up city hall by working with other area businesses and volunteers to put fresh sod around the building.

"This is just the first area that we have worked on," McNeely said. "That's where the first project started and it is really just the beginning."

McNeely said he has a whole list of small projects he would like to see accomplished over the next couple of years, each of which can be done separately.

For example, the ball field could use some work and there are plenty of areas downtown and in city parks that could use some landscaping features and playground equipment.

Some projects won't even need materials, but just some volunteers willing to pitch in and help.

"I'd like to clean up the debris in some of the parts of town that have become unsightly," McNeely said.

While they are looking for and applying for grants available to small communities, "we're not just going to wait for those," he said. "We will continue with grassroots efforts in the meantime."

McNeely said he wasn't looking for the city's board to take action last month but hopes that he has now shown them what is possible and get them on board when they meet again.

"I had just presented it to them then. I was hoping for feedback and then for them to take action in the month of August," he said. "I'm very confident they will accept this program now but until they approve it, I can't go full steam ahead with this."

Pertinent address:

Morley, Mo.