Chamber addresses 54 flag situation

At the Thursday, June 8, Chamber luncheon, President Heather Brown explained what has happened to the Patriot Parkway flags on Hwy. 54.

I would like to make a statement on behalf of the Chamber Board

The second part of the beautification program was the purchase of 48 flags for Hwy. 54 in what would become known as Patriot Parkway. And this cost approximately $3,000. However this particular aspect of this program has not gone as planned. Despite the assurances form the flag company, the flags did not hold up to the winds and the storms. The flagpoles or brackets would break and the flags would end up on the ground. So we replaced all of them with higher quality flags and poles and brackets and they still couldn’t take the beating of our Midwestern storms. We even replaced half of them again and found that it was costing us nearly $1,000 per year to maintain the flags. The workers from our City have been so good to help us and take their bucket trucks and attach and re-attach the flags again and again. But finally, the City workers and the Camber of Commerce Board members realized that this was a losing battle. The City workers didn’t have the time to keep putting flags up and the Chamber didn’t have the money to keep buying new flags. So, after much, much discussion in many different meetings, we felt that it was time to move on from this project. In retrospect, we realized this was a great project in theory, but the reality was way more complicated and costly than anticipated. Probably all of us have made decisions in our businesses that we regret and this is certainly one of those for us. We do hope that at some point we can come up with a sustainable flag project, perhaps one large flag flying over our community or maybe a few flags in strategic paces that would be easier to maintain, but before we do something like this, you can be assured that we will do the proper research. So we come to you with total transparency and offer our most sincere apologies for this disappointing outcome, but we appreciate your understanding.