bill hannabass

OAK HILL — City Council has given the green light to a consulting firm for three improvement projects in the city.

At Monday’s meeting, a committee recommended that council select the Charleston-based The Thrasher Group as the consulting firm to oversee the projects in the coming months.

The projects will include a planned overhaul of Oak Hill City Park, which will feature a new professionally-designed skate park, some new playground equipment, a pavilion and other amenities. Emphasis in the park project will be on “heavy community participation,” City Manager Bill Hannabass said. “Involving the community is part of the consultant’s job.”

A second endeavor will include an addition to the Oak Hill Fire Department to include another bay for equipment. That will feature administrative space, laundry facilities and a weight room. Hannabass said the cleaning facilities will help as departments increasingly run into situations in which they handle contaminants while fighting fires.

Finally, a long-in-planning (more than a decade) sidewalk project on Virginia Street will be undertaken. It will cover about a half-mile from Jones Avenue to the former Southern States.

In the past, the project has encountered “a lot of problems with utilities, a lot of problems with keeping it ADA-compliant” and other scenarios, leading to delays, the city manager noted.

About $500,000 — grant funding through the West Virginia Division of Highways and also including some federal dollars — was allotted back in the day, Hannabass said. Inflation has cut into that funding package in the meantime, he said.

Hannabass is glad to see the sidewalk project ready to commence.

“In December 2008, (current city councilman) Tom Oxley was outgoing city manager and I came here to work for one month to work with him, and that was our big project – the Virginia Street sidewalk grant application,” he said. “(As brand new city manager) the first thing I did was drive down Virginia Street and go door to door and say, ‘You’re going to get a new sidewalk.’ So, yeah, I’m glad to see it.”

Council/city notes:

• Work continues on Needleseye Park.

An Oak Hill public works crew was on site this week building a pavilion to be used as a gathering place for people utilizing the park, which is geared at offering rock climbing, hiking and mountain biking for locals and visitors to Fayette County.

About $500,000 in improvements will be undertaken in the coming months that, besides the pavilion, is also targeted to include trails work, a restroom facility, picnic benches and a disc golf course. Improved park signage is also planned. The money for the work came through U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin’s office, said Hannabass.

According to public works employee Shaun Coleman, the trail will eventually extend from the top of Needleseye to Minden, a distance of more than 2 miles. If all goes as planned, the road will eventually be graveled, and it could be used eventually as a maintenance road for residents in the Minden community to use as an exit in case of flooding.

Crews will be working on both ends of the area in the coming months, Coleman said.

“By fall, we should have it up and people walking on it,” he said.

In May 2019, the city officially christened Needleseye Park. The West Virginia Land Trust partnered with Oak Hill to buy 283 acres of land from Berwind Land Co. for the purpose of public recreational use.

• A public hearing geared at simplifying the city tax fee structure is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. April 11 in city council chambers. The purpose will be to discuss proposed implementation of changes in the city’s B&O tax and municipal license fees, according to Hannabass. The first reading of the proposed changes was at the March 14 council meeting.

The proposal is available for public inspection from 7 a.m. to noon and 1 to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, at the front entry of Oak Hill City Hall.

Interested citizens are invited to attend the public hearing and present written or oral comments concerning the proposed changes. Written comments may be addressed to: City Manager William Hannabass, 100 Kelly Ave., Oak Hill, WV 25901.

If implemented, the result will be a flat $15 base municipal license fee, as opposed to the various levels currently in effect. Handyman and contractors’ licenses won’t deviate from the current $75 level. Businesses selling alcohol have additional fees.

According to city clerk Damita Johnson, under the proposed change, all license fees will be the same except for contractors and alcohol sales. “It’s just going to make it easier, and it’s going to help a lot of people,” she said. “It’s going to be cheaper for a lot of people. For some, it will be more expensive.”

The move will also make concessions to some “archaic language” in state code, such as restaurants taxed depending on how many seats or tables they operate.

Hannabass also said a loophole in the B&O tax system relating to rentals will be eliminated under the proposal. When first enacted about five years ago, for licenses for rental units, dwelling units and commercial, council recognized at the time there were situations where families might have a separate, smaller dwelling beside their home, and council didn’t want to penalize families in that situation, he said. Back then, city council decided to exempt one unit from B&O taxes, Hannabass said.

“If you owned three rental units, you take your most expensive one, exempt it and pay B&O tax on the other two.”

That created a loophole of which some property owners took advantage, he said.

“People that owned many rental units, they would form separate corporations, they would form multiple corporations. Then, because we didn’t have it defined well, they would take an apartment building (under one corporation) and then they would put multiple dwelling units in another corporate name and exempt another expensive building or unit. It’s not fair.”

• As of a second reading at the recent meeting, Oak Hill will dedicate significant funding to Fayette County Teen Court, Hannabass said. Going forward, $5 from any fines in municipal court will be targeted specifically to Teen Court operation.

• Council approved a location for a future veterans memorial site, on the corner across from Baptist Church on Main Street, next to Davis Tire and Mufflers. That is the site once occupied by the Pure Oil Station made famous by a visit by legendary country music singer Hank Williams Sr. at the time of his death.

The project will be enabled “through the generosity and the graciousness of the Jones family,” the city manager said. The family is in the process of donating the property to the city.

The memorial — for veterans of all wars — is in the design phase.

• Oak Hill has committed a $2,500 match to HubCAP, the Communities of Achievement Program promoted by the West Virginia Community Development Hub.

According to Hannabass, it is a three-year program that assists with community involvement, community engagement and capacity building, drawing out people in the communities as leaders. Locally, that could boost involvement in such projects as Oak Hill City Park and Needleseye Park, allowing city leaders to get input and see more people involved. “And we need it desperately right now,” said Hannabass.

Council thought the financial outlay was “money wisely spent,” he said.

• Consideration of one-way parking on assigned streets in the city will occur in coming months.

“We have several narrow streets in Oak Hill, several in which it’s not wide enough to park two cars in the street,” said Hannabass.

While drivers normally drive in zig-zag fashion to get past parked cars along the route, the situation causes particular problems for the fire department and snow plows. So, the aim is to help alleviate the situation in some fashion.

“Nobody knows the nuances of particular street parking better than the resident does, so they’ll have heavy input,” Hannabass said. “At the end of the day, nothing may be done, or there may be some things we can do to help.

“Everybody that’s going to be affected will have input.”

• The city earlier this week was notified it received honorable mention status for the Clean Water State Revolving Fund’s 2021 George F. Ames PISCES Recognition for performance and innovation in the SRF Creating Environmental Success.

The recognition was for the city’s wastewater system upgrade and infiltration/inflow rehabilitation project, a $25 million project that is just wrapping up.

“The extensive project taken on by the City of Oak Hill will greatly reduce the adverse impacts on the local community,” a letter from Katheryn D. Emery, P.E., director of the DEP’s Division of Water and Waste Management, read in part.

• The city is still planning a community playground park near the post office in Minden, to be located on a site donated by ACE Adventure Resort. A water problem there is being addressed.

• Council decided unanimously there are three options for the future of city hall: purchase another structure to refurbish for city offices (the former BB&T building has been among sites mentioned), construct a new city hall from the ground up, possibly near the police station on Virginia Street, or refurbish the current city hall.

Financing wasn’t discussed, said Hannabass.

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