Anyone headed to Canton will need to book a little more drive time starting this fall, when a key downtown bridge is razed and replaced. A dog-legged detour around the construction is expected to seriously slow traffic on the town’s two busiest downtown streets, Park and Main.

The aging bridge was built in 1924. The total cost to replace it is about $3.5 million, with 80 percent of that coming from the federal government and the remaining 20 percent from state funds. The bridge has been on the DOT’s to-do list since 2000, said Brian Burch, division construction engineer for the N.C. Department of Transportation.

For businesses perched on the edges of the bridge, the 16-month project could be quite a change.

“Apparently, the whole front of our parking lot is going to be taken up,” said Jason Siske, general manager at Napa Auto Parts, which sits just past the bridge on Park Street in downtown. His store is looking for a new home anyway, so the lack of road leading to their current location might not affect them for long.

Next door, however, Tom Wilson at American Cleaners has no plans to move.

“When they close one artery, it’s going to affect everybody,” said Wilson, who owns the store. “We just have to bear through it though. We’ve known this has been coming for years.”

Traffic moves through downtown Canton on parallel, one-way streets — Main Street and Park Street. Both have bridges spanning the Pigeon River.

With the Park Street bridge out of commission, traffic will jog over to Main Street where the bridge there will be pressed into service to carry traffic in both directions.

“People can expect some delays,” said Burch. “I’m sure we’ll have some delays during our rush hours in the morning and also when schools are dismissing.”

At the other end of downtown, Charles Rathbone of Sign World WNC isn’t anticipating too much hassle.

“I might look at changing my signage if it [Main Street] does go to a two-way, but I don’t really see it affecting us at all,” said Rathbone. “We’re going to be here with or without the bridge.”

But when the hassle, such as it is, finally subsides, contractors Taylor and Murphy say that the town will be left with a better, wider bridge. The firm won a $2.9 million contract, beating out six other bidders.

The bridge is now two-lane, but when construction closes in December 2012, there will be three lanes and a turning lane as well as wider sidewalks on both sides.

As part of the deal, the town will also come away with a greenway running under the east side of the bridge, which will connect to the town’s current greenway and provide safe passage for pedestrians under the bridge and into what will be Sorrells Creek Park.

“The bridge itself is obsolete to the traffic flow and the plans are to bring it up to date,” said Chris Britton, vice president of Taylor and Murphy. “It’ll be a lot safer, it’ll allow traffic to flow a lot better.”

Taylor and Murphy isn’t new to bridge building in Canton. The firm was behind the revamp of Bridge Street’s namesake in downtown earlier this year, has just completed work on the structure passing over Interstate 40 on Newfound Road and has a bridge in Cruso underway.

For the most part, said Britton, this bridge will be demolished and replaced by local laborers. He expects to have around 30 workers on the project, and all but the most specialized will be from the region.

Around half of the rubble from the soon-to-be-destroyed bridge will be recycled or sold as scrap metal. The new version, said Project Manager John Herrin, will also hopefully prove healthier for the river running beneath it.

“We’ll be making the river wider and cleaner, because right now you have three piers in the river and when we’re finished you’ll only have two,” said Herrin.

Contractors will start pulling up utilities and getting the bridge ready to come down by the end of August. The transportation department has a traffic flow plan in place, but they’re unlikely to need it until November, when Britton expects the bridge to close.

The town expects some upheaval during the process, but like Wilson, has long been ready for the replacement.

“We’re excited,” said Town Manager Al Matthews. “It’s going to be an inconvenience, but it’ll be good when it’s completed.”

It’s unsurprising that in the mountain town of Sylva, the music scene is a pretty vibrant place to be. With a long and strong heritage of Appalachian music, it’s only natural that a community would grow up around that scene.

But alongside that long-standing bluegrass tradition is a lively music scene that is less public but still growing, offering the area’s younger crowd an alternative musical outlet that they can help create.

Jeremy Rose has spent years doing just that. As the guitarist and vocalist for Sylva indie band Total War, Rose is a strong member of the alternative, pseudo-underground music scene that has grown from the ground up in Sylva and the university community in Cullowhee.

Though he’s quick to point out that the grassroots groundswell is essentially leaderless —“it really is just a community of people just contributing in their own way” — Rose said he’s been actively cultivating it since coming to the town as a shy college student.

“I guess I just happened to run into a bunch of people that were determined to make something to do,” said Rose, explaining how he fell into the town’s musical world.

While Rose said the cultural experiences offered up by Western Carolina University and the town’s fairly active arts groups are excellent, there has always been plethora of people who are looking for something they can be more involved in. Without a venue springing up, they’ve started doing it themselves.

It’s hard, really, to get a concrete picture of how the whole thing started, nebulous as it is, or even a solid definition of what, exactly, constitutes an “underground music scene.”

But by most estimates, young musicians and music lovers of all kinds, from metal to folk to prog-rock to traditional bluegrass, were looking for a place to practice and enjoy the craft they love. From basements to skate parks to old storefronts, bands and their fans started getting together for performances. When one show was shut down, another sprung up in any place willing to hold it, spurred by online forums and homemade ‘zines produced by Rose, et al.

These days, it’s social networking that gets the word out, and when old supporters fade or move away, new ones always seem to spring up to take their place.

Rose thinks this is one of the endearing things about Sylva’s musical life — thanks to the high turnover provided mostly by WCU students, the town is a perpetual blank canvas, with a pretty steady stream of artists willing to paint it.

“One of the nice things about around here is that people tend to be really supportive because they’re just happy that somebody’s doing something,” said Rose. “If you’re doing anything, everyone will at least come check it out.”

Unlike other, larger markets like Asheville or Knoxville, there’s a multitude of engaged and interested potential fans, which can be hard to come by in a place where live music of all genres is abundant. The problem is usually space, and finding places to play can be difficult.

Recently, businesses like Guadalupe Cafe, Soul Infusion Tea House and Signature Brew Coffee have been offering musicians and their fans a place to perform, which helps keep the shows legal. But not having official hosting places hasn’t been a problem, said Rose.

“It’s really independent of venue,” he said. “Even if there’s nothing there, we’ve always found way — you know basements or somebody’s parents house — if people wanted to do it.”

For bands like Gamenight, a Knoxville-based group, that’s what makes Sylva such an enticing place to play.

The group’s drummer Brandon Manis said they’ve been coming to the town for years because it’s just such a welcoming atmosphere. Their first show there was back in 2003, and they’ve played eight to 10 shows there since, always eeking out time for the tiny mountain locale in their regional touring schedule.

“We love that place,” said Manis. “We’ve played in a lot of places and to a lot of people we didn’t really know and people [in Sylva] are just so receptive. People just really appreciate live music there and it’s not so much just a social event. People actually like seeing live music.”

Rose said he hopes that love of live music and desire to be a part of it will continue. He and his band intend to be in it as long as they’re around. Though he doesn’t know if the town is big enough to support a dedicated venue — over the years several have popped up and withered — his hope is that the town’s young people will always care enough to make art and music a part of their lives and their community, in all manner of genres and media.

“Everybody’s into their own thing in the Internet age — you can live in Cherokee or Sylva and still follow Norwegian metal or New York hipster music — and around here people will be open about things that normally wouldn’t be their thing,” said Rose, and the continued growth of that mindset is what he and others hope for the scene they love and have made.

“It would be great if I left for 20 years and came back and there was still a sign in a window that said ‘basement sale this Saturday,’” said Rose. “Because we want people to support us, so we know that we need to be there to support other people, too.”

A new tavern is set to make its debut this week in downtown Waynesville, featuring barbecue, beer, and a friendly, welcoming atmosphere in the Main Street space that was formerly Headlights Bar and Grill.

Tipping Point Tavern is a joint venture between Sweet Onion owners Dan Elliot and Doug and Jenny Weaver, along with now former manager Jon Bowman. He has left the restaurant to run Tipping Point full time.

The location is somewhat of a homecoming. Prior to Headlights occupying the space, it was Wildfire Restaurant. Wildfire was the first restaurant opened by Doug and Jenny Weaver in Waynesville, prior to the opening of the Sweet Onion.

The idea for the new restaurant has been taking shape for around three years, when Bowman came on at the Sweet Onion. The concept, he explained somewhat cryptically, “started with three men on a boat in Lake Santeetlah,” and has grown into an operation that will include house-made sausage, pastrami and, one day, their own beer-brewing operation.

At least that’s what Bowman said he’s looking towards.

“The word artisan is the way I like to describe it,” said Bowman of the menu, drink selection and overall atmosphere. “We felt like there was a need for it, that it would be hugely successful and that it was the right place at the right time.”

The tavern takes its name from the term popularized by writer and journalist Malcolm Gladwell in his book of the same name, the concept being the moment when an idea or trend becomes unstoppable.

Bowman said that he hopes the new restaurant will be just that, a tipping point for more family-friendly artisanal drinking and dining in the downtown area.

This venture will follow in the heels of the Weavers’ successful venture in Sweet Onion, which they opened after bidding farewell to Wildfire.

The menu will feature typical pub fare – fish and chips, wings, nachos and the like – as well as barbecue that they think will rival any in the area.

Bowman said the hope is to offer a diverse range of beer on tap, as well, with a mix of domestic, local and European brews up for sale that will be constantly tweaked and updated.

They’ve planned to open the doors on Wednesday, Dec. 22, and will be open Monday through Saturday from 11:30 a.m. until. Sundays, Bowman said, are still up in the air.

“We want people to come here and know that it’s going to be a relaxed, comfortable, friendly, just good-times place,” he said. “Families can come in here, we’ll have good beer and we’ll have the best barbecue in Western North Carolina.”

Three years ago, Holly Hooper and sister Heather Menacof had saved enough money to invest in new windows for the lower part of their popular outfitter store in Sylva, Blackrock Outdoor Company.

Then the economy tanked. The sisters were forced to put the money back into the business. They scrimped and saved once more, however, and are moving forward again with dressing up the part of the building that faces Mill Street, better known as back street.

Hooper hopes Black Rock’s individual attempts to aid this part of the downtown gets a significant boost in the form of a state grant being submitted by the Downtown Sylva Association. The grant application is due by Feb. 10. Meetings are being held, ideas have been solicited, and a number of Sylva businesses have expressed keen interest in participating in a general cleanup and refashioning of back street.

After years of neglect, back street actually has received some attention fairly recently in the form of landscaping and upkeep. Currently, there are few vacancies along the street, and the businesses located there generally seem to be holding their own.

But Julie Sylvester, head of the Downtown Sylva Association, decided more could be done. About 40 people turned out for a meeting a few months ago about fixing up back street.

The Downtown Sylva Association is a membership organization dedicated to bettering the business environment in downtown Sylva. It is tasked with helping businesses thrive and prosper.

“We had a good mix of people all wanting to see this project move forward,” Sylvester said.

Grant money is available through the state’s Main Street program. The grants are intended to provide direct financial benefit to towns, retain and create jobs and spur private investment.

Sylvester said an initial phase for back street renovation includes painting, pressure washing, disguising unsightly but necessary items using paint or other means of hiding them (air conditioning units, for example).

“The idea is we try to do something that will make a big difference without a lot of money,” Sylvester said.

Hooper said she hopes to see street lighting installed. And awnings, she added, to protect customers from rain. Eventually, Black Rock would like to open an entrance into the store on back street instead of just having one on Main Street.

That would mean hiring an additional employee, however, and the store needs to see more traffic and business via back street before doing that, Hooper said.

The inside of Waynesville’s 44 Church Street does not, today, bustle with life, warmth and the scintillating scent of food wafting through the air, as it once did. The former home of the storied Lomo Grill is cold and empty; the open wood oven is not fired up, and chairs and tables are stacked in a corner, across from an empty bar and a kitchen counter cluttered with what looks like detritus from a hardware-store explosion.

Downstairs, old water heaters sit forlorn and disused by the back door and small buckets catch dripping water.

But this is not the start of another sad story on small businesses shuttering. This is the opposite story, one of success leading, hopefully, to new success.

When Lomo Grill, a 16-year resident of downtown Waynesville, closed its doors and papered its windows in November, owners Ricardo and Suzanne Fernandez ended the restaurant’s prosperous run right in the midst of that success. They were juggling the restaurant with two other ventures – Chef Ricardo’s Sauce, a business that grew unexpectedly out of the chef’s famed tomato sauce, and a farm that specializes in peonies and fig trees. While they loved the restaurant, said Suzanne Fernandez, the sauce business was exploding. Their product was picked up by Earth Fare and Whole Foods, and the juggle, she said, became too much. It was time to choose, and when they decided to close the Lomo Grill chapter of their lives, all they needed was a buyer for the space.

Enter Kaighn Raymond, an Atlanta chef renowned for opening award-winning restaurants in the Southern metropolis. Raymond had long dreamed of opening his own place and his eye on Waynesville from the time his parents moved here. He and his wife, Tania even got married in Maggie Valley. But his culinary career required him to stay in Atlanta, building up enough experience and capital to branch out of the city and into his own venture.

“I’m able to finally get out of Atlanta and do what I really want to do, which is opening my own place in a small town,” said Raymond as he worked on repairs in the former Lomo Grill last week.

His new spot, which will be called Frog’s Leap Public House, will feature, he said, a local atmosphere with tasty, local food at affordable prices. He’s interested in serving farm-to-table fare that showcases local farmers as much as possible, offering a simple menu that captures the flavor of its location.

“When people leave, I want them to have a real sense of what Waynesville and Western North Carolina are about,” said Raymond.

But first, there is work to be done. Raymond is giving much of the restaurant an overhaul in anticipation of a spring opening. As he walked through the empty restaurant, he rattled off a laundry list of renovations and repairs, from floors and ceilings to new dishwashers and upgraded bathrooms. The drip buckets aren’t for leaks, but are catching the aftermath of an overall hose-down Raymond had given the kitchen with a pressure washer. The old water heaters had been replaced with new, and new coats of paint were starting to make their way up walls in the basement.

Although he concedes that it’s a massive undertaking in an economic climate that is less-than-friendly to new restaurants, he’s excited to be at last starting on his dream. And he thinks the combination of his culinary success and business knowledge — his father was a career banker — will give him and edge and maybe help him stay afloat.

For their part, the Fernandezes are pretty thrilled, as well, to have finally sold the property. Now they can devote their full attention to their new ventures.

“We are so grateful for the experience of being in downtown Waynesville for as long as we were, and we really love our customers and still keep in touch with many of them,” said Suzanne Fernandez. “We just decided that, after 16 years of the restaurant, that it’s time to devote more time to these two things.”

Ricardo Fernandez, the culinary creator that was behind Lomo Grill, said he won’t really miss the day-to-day life of a restaurateur; he’s got plenty of food-related fare to keep him busy.

“My hands are always here at the farm, working and propagating and also producing the sauces and going to food shows, so there’s always involvement in creating new things related to food,” said Fernandez, adding that he may even entertain a foray into cookbook writing. But, really, he said, the bottom line was that the sale was necessary to keep the other businesses thriving.

“We needed more time to develop this marketing and the only way to do it was through selling the restaurant,” he explained.

And with over 350 varieties of peonies in the ground at their farm and two new sauce varieties on the way, the couple thinks they will have their hands more than full for the foreseeable future. They’ve said they don’t intend to leave the area that has been their home for so long.

“We feel like we were very much a part of the evolution of Waynesville to what it is today,” said Suzanne Fernandez. “We believe in Waynesville.”

Her husband echoed those sentiments.

“We will continue trying to expand what we have here,” he said. “We have 36 acres and we’re pretty happy where we are.”

Kaighn Raymond isn’t complaining, either. Once a visual artist who left the craft to pursue artistry in food, Raymond believes in making beautiful, affordable food, and he’s ready to be doing it in his own place.

“I told my father, ‘when I’m 40, I’ll be ready to open my own place.’ Well, I’m 41 now,” Raymond says, laughing. “Although it will be tough, by doing things the best we can, we’ll succeed.”

Transportation experts and town leaders plan to meet this week in Franklin to consider whether it’s feasible to turn one-way Main and Palmer streets into two-way roads.

As in many small mountain towns, visitors to Franklin find themselves motoring around a large roundabout of sorts. That’s a problem in Sylva, too, and for storeowners in these towns who feel they only get one shot at attracting potential new customers.

There is a significant difference, however, about this Macon County town that sets it apart from its neighbors: downtown Franklin saddles a steep hill. Given the limited parking, motorists are sometimes forced to hike a fair distance to their destinations. Only the truly determined are usually willing to hike uphill to get there.

Do something please, but just don’t add parallel parking to the problem, said Ellen Jenkins, the new owner of Primrose Lane, a gift store on Main Street. Jenkins fears parallel parking would reduce the number of already-limited spaces available in front of her store.

“But I would love to see it two way,” the shop owner said.

A fix won’t be easy, Franklin Town Planner Mike Grubberman said last week.

“There’s quite a bit involved,” he said.

Such as feeding the traffic into the main highway corridors of U.S. 441, U.S. 64 and N.C. 28. The Little Tennessee River also bounds the town, limiting how and where traffic could be siphoned in and out of Franklin.

“You can’t just concentrate on Main Street,” Grubberman said.

The town planner also recognizes parallel parking probably isn’t in Franklin’s future, even though it would only reduce the number of spaces available by one, he said.

“But that seems to be a go-to-guns issue,” Grubberman said.

Suzanne Harouff, who has lived in Macon County since the late 1970s and owns Books Unlimited on East Main Street, said the road in front has been one way as long as she can remember.

In Franklin, both Main and Palmer streets are one way but two lanes. Additionally, parking is available on either side of Main Street, though large vehicles actually jut into the road.

Harouff said she would like to see the town explore options. She did express concern about the large hill that marks the climb into downtown. In winter, Harouff said the hill often becomes dangerously slick, a safety problem that could be compounded in bad weather.

Sheryl Rudd, just that morning, said she had fussed at her husband, Dieter Kuhn, for leaving a vehicle parked for too long outside their Sylva business. The loading of 150-pound kegs was finished, and Rudd wanted him to move the vehicle promptly so customers could make their way inside.

If, however, the couple had gotten a $50 citation for parking more than the 30 minutes allowed outside Heinzelmannchen Brewery on Mill Street, Rudd told town commissioners last week she’d have paid willingly. The new parking ordinance is working great, and should continue and, possibly, even be extended to include other streets in Sylva, Rudd said.

Rudd’s comments come a couple of weeks before commissioners will hold an official public hearing to get feedback such as this on the town’s parking ordinance. They plan to go back into the original ordinance as passed this summer and add key language inadvertently left out that rendered it unenforceable, and include East Jackson Street in the sections of town it covers.

Parking spillover from the ban has created problems for City Lights Bookstore on East Jackson Street.

The ordinance was originally designed to ban business owners on Main and Mill streets from taking up precious parking spaces in front of downtown businesses. Loading and unloading is OK.

R.O. Vance, a longtime hardware owner on Main Street, almost was included in the proposed revised ordinance by name as commissioners tried to ferret out the best method of allowing him come and go freely on appliance-repair calls.

As the clock ticked and the board continued dissecting the matter in ever-increasing detail and possible convolutions, Commissioner Christina Matheson finally burst into laughter. At least everyone would be able to tell she and her fellow board members truly care about the people in town, Matheson said, amused.

And where they park.

Vance didn’t end up named in the ordinance. Instead, Town Attorney Eric Ridenour, in a burst of legal razzle-dazzle, wrote a resolution on the spot designating a former police-car spot on a nearby side street to Main Street as the new R.O. Vance Memorial Parking Space. The resolution will be considered for vote at the next board meeting.

That should prevent Vance’s fellow business owners from calling and complaining that the hardware owner has been parking in the designated police spot, which the police have said they didn’t need anyhow, Commissioner Harold Hensley said. Vance had been parking there because he didn’t want to take up a Main Street parking space.

In a downtown Canton alleyway, a rusty junction box juts out awkwardly from the sidewalk, long since abandoned to its purpose, while a few yards away broken bricks, orange traffic barrels and twisted lengths of caution tape lay in a heap atop a few pieces of old plywood. On the side of one building, a bright blue tarp hangs crookedly, covering pieces of exposed structure, with bricks on strings dangling precariously from its edges.

But this is not a construction site. This is what town officials call Colonial Alley, and its been sitting like this for a year now.

Greg Petty, owner of The Lunchbox, shares a wall with the alley, and he’s tired of patrons wondering what, exactly, he’s up to under that tarp or suspecting him of being closed. He has been asking the town for months now to deal with the disrepair and clutter in the alley.

“We’ve taken every step in the world to try to get it fixed,” he said, including attending town meetings and making specific requests of aldermen and Mayor Pat Smathers, but apparently to no avail.

“We were told that it would be done and it hasn’t been,” said Petty, who notes that he was told in July that work would begin within weeks.

The trouble began in November 2009 when Petty and Wilbur Davis, owner of the other building adjacent to the alley, noticed leakages on the walls they shared with it. The culprit was an outside wall, erected when a former storefront was leveled to make way for the alley itself. Those outside walls had, over time, begun to crack and separate from the walls of the remaining building, allowing moisture to creep in.

So the city took steps to repair the problem, and began pulling down the outside walls. However, laborers realized halfway in that the problems were deeper and outside their scope of expertise. Instead of being a quick fix, an engineer needed to be summoned, the project bid out and a licensed and experienced contractor would have to take over the job.

And it’s all these extra steps, said Assistant Town Manager Jason Burrell, that have taken much more time than expected.

“This is one of those things that, when you’re a government entity, you have to jump through some hoops,” said Burrell. Where a private citizen or business could see the problem and have it repaired nearly immediately, a government has to take steps to ensure that they’re getting the best deal possible for the taxpayer, he explains.

Burrell said that, after getting a structural engineer’s opinion on what the project actually needed, the town put the project out to bid twice but has had trouble generating interest among contractors who have the right mix of willingness and expertise.

When the town finally received a bid for an acceptable amount from an acceptable contractor, Burrell said that he and Town Manager Al Matthews took it to the aldermen immediately. That bid was approved four weeks ago.

But, said Burrell, when they went to execute the contract and get work going, they again ran into problems.

“We went to do that pretty much the next day, and honestly, we haven’t been able to get up with the contractor,” said Burrell. They called him, sent him a letter, even sent someone to his house, but all to no avail. In essence, that puts the town back at square one.

But to Petty, this doesn’t fly. While he’s concerned with the project’s completion, he said he’s been told several times that a clean-up effort would be taken up immediately. He is still waiting for action.

Matthews agreed that the alley’s appearance was less than ideal.

“It looks bad,” he said. “There’s no doubt it looks like a construction site. But we’re going to get some casual labor, we hope, to pull off the old stucco and start at the top and get the top caps back on, back in place,” which would eliminate the need for the unsightly blue tarp and its fringe of swinging bricks suspended 10 feet off the ground.

Petty said he hopes that’s true, but if no action is taken soon, he intends to climb up himself and at least replace the blue with a clear, more attractive tarp.

“I don’t have a gripe with anyone individually,” Petty said, “but something needs to be done. It needs to be fixed, and I think anyone can see that.”

Canton may be looking toward a new era of revitalization, thanks to a grant from the North Carolina Rural Center. The town was awarded $25,000 earlier this fall for the Step Up Canton program, which will formulate strategies for economic growth and development.

Several candidates have made downtown revitalization the central tenet of their campaign and consider it the one of the most important issues on the town’s agenda. They include Gene Monson, Carole Edwards, and Kenneth Holland.

“When I was growing up, it was a booming, prosperous little town. We have seen that go away. The downtown has kind of dried up,” Holland said.

Holland wants to see a downtown revitalized to look more like the town he once knew. And who wouldn’t?

“All the buildings were full,” Edwards said. “You had drugstores and you had clothing stores. We had a Belk’s on the corner. We had a jewelry store. You could buy a pair of shoes. We had all the things in our town that you would need.”

Canton is not alone in its plight. Small towns across America saw business sucked from their downtowns by strip malls and big-box stores as auto-centric suburban sprawl became the new way of life.

But Edwards thinks there’s hope.

“I really feel like we can bring this town back to life. I know other communities have done it,” Edwards said. “We shouldn’t sit there and say ‘We can’t do this.’ There is always an option out there.”

But others aren’t as optimistic. Several of the old anchor buildings are in the hands of owners who aren’t investing in their upkeep. Charlie Crawford, another candidate, questioned if the town could force the owners to do something with their buildings.

“People have a right to do with their property what they want to do,” Crawford said.

Crawford said the town has tried to create a nurturing atmosphere for revitalization. Crawford pointed to streetscape projects pursued during his tenure, which vastly improved the downtown appearance by burying power lines, installing historic lampposts and beautifying sidewalks and the public realm.

“I think the town has done about all it can do to help the building owners,” Crawford said.

The downtown proponents advocate cracking down on these building owners, however.

“Citizen after citizen after citizen appeals to the board of aldermen about the appearance of downtown. I hear the town say there is nothing we can do. I disagree. There is,” Monson said. “People sit here and say ‘As a property owner you own this and own that.’ But you don’t own it — you are simply a steward of that property.”

The downtown district has been recognized as a National Historic District and the town has a historic preservation committee to oversee it. Monson said the historic status provides a mechanism to compel building owners to take responsibility.

Holland agrees the town needs to more stringently enforce appearance codes for downtown buildings.

Alderman Eric Dills agrees as well.

“We need to require the building owners, most of whom do not live in Canton, to maintain their buildings to an acceptable standard,” Dills said.

Holland said the downtown needs an active merchants’ association to “get everyone pulling together.”

Candidate Jimmy Flynn would like to see a business organization take root in Canton, but said it shouldn’t be limited to the downtown area.

“I hate to think of downtown as an entity in itself,” said Flynn. “I feel like business in Canton is business in Canton, be downtown or anywhere else. I think we are too small a town to identify one little area to be economic development. It needs to be in any area that will accommodate business growth.”

“You can’t just focus on the downtown. You have to focus on the entire town,” candidate Ed Underwood said.