At the urging of Wake Forest resident Susan Neeley, the town commissioners agreed Tuesday night to place a loaned statue by John Seward Johnson II next to the benches at the South White Street parking lot.
          The bronze statue, painted and done in a realistic style, will be on loan for a year, and the $1,400 cost will be paid by the Graham Johnson Cultural Arts Endowment.
          The statue is part of a series called Everyday People and shows a young girl in jeans and a T-shirt perched on a plain pedestal. She has kicked off her red clogs and is eating something, perhaps a hamburger.
          Neeley said she had been impressed with Johnson’s work when she saw it in Dallas but she really became enamored of it when she passed through Bennington, Vermont, and saw the large installation there. Neeley said Alamance County found that their residents made the Johnson statues a destination for picnics and part of scavenger hunts. A video from Alamance County that Neeley gave to the commissioners shows, she said, “how involved people became with the sculptures.”
            After agreeing four to nothing to the statue placement – Commissioner Peter Thibodeau was absent because of a business commitment – the board whisked through the rest of the agenda.
          They had already approved a resolution of appreciation for Town Clerk Joyce Wilson, who worked for the town for 23 years, 16 of those years as the clerk. She retired April. Several town employees and residents were at the reception for Wilson held before the town board meeting.
          One of the agenda items was to approve Human Resources Director Tammy Moody as the interim town clerk. At the close of the meeting, Town Manager Mark Williams said the search committee for a new clerk interviewed five applicants Friday and sent them out with some homework. “We wanted to judge their writing ability.” He promised there will be a new clerk soon.
          Jill Bright, a board member at the Wake Forest College Birthplace who filled in for Executive Director Ed Morris, gave the town board three versions of a report about the construction for the new annex: One was about three sentences, the second was the Reader’s Digest version, maybe 15 sentences, and the third she said was longer but printed and Durward Matheny had given it to them.
          Bright asked the board to approve the second $110,000 payment out of the $550,000 total the commissioners pledged if the Birthplace Society raises at least matching funds each year. They have raised $243,579.79, Bright said, and a designer has begun work on the exhibits, funded by a Golden Leaf award. The vote was three to one with Commissioner Chris Kaeberlein voting no.
          The board voted unanimously for a special use permit for the office and warehouse park on Capcom Avenue, for the rezoning of 2.496 acres along Capital Boulevard to conditional use highway business, and for the Verizon Wireless store on Galaxy Drive.
          When it came to the change orders for the South White Street project and they began to question the need for “waterline materials not in Bid Items but needed in order to build project per plans,” Assistant Planning Director Ann Ayers brought out what she called her “magic wand.”
          Wrapped in black material to keep in the rust and dried clay, it was a foot-long length of the water pipe that had served Wake Forest Yoga at 103 S. White. It was so misshapen and clogged the commissioners immediately voted for the $27,831.27 in the entire change order.
          Commissioner Margaret Stinnett said some of the pipes in that area are “older than all of us put together.” Ayers the owner at Wake Forest Yoga always had good water pressure from the old pipe. When the new exterior pipe was installed, all the interior water pipes began to leak, and Elizabeth and Bob Johnson, who own the building, are having them replaced.
          There was no discussion or dissension about a year’s extension of the contract with Republic for garbage and recycling collection or to approve the grant application for a constructed wetland with floating islands behind the Operations Center on Friendship Chapel Road. The commissioners also approved a change order of $146,433.26 for the Franklin Street Renaissance Plan project without dissension.
          Commissioner Frank Drake and others did wonder why the bids for the phase one expansion at the Northern Wake Senior Center were higher than originally estimated.
          “Those [estimates] were single-line schematic drawings for a twelve-hundred square foot building,” architect Matt Hale said. The final design for the addition is 1,320 square feet along with a lot of renovation to the existing building.
          The vote was unanimous to accept the low bid from Landmark Construction with $14,400 for a folding partition that will make the room more usable, Parks and Recreation Director Susan Simpson explained.
          During the commissioner reports, the mayor said she had attended 46 meetings in March and had only 43 scheduled for April.
          She follows the legislature closely and said, after discussing one pending bill, “I think the legislators sit up at night, thinking of how they can screw the towns.”
          One bill would allow the state Department of Transportation to transfer ownership of streets to towns and cities and secondary roads to counties.
          “They’re going to give us worn-out roads,” Deputy Town Manager Roe O’Donnell said.
          Mayor Jones also noted that during March the town saw the opening of three large stores: Kohl’s, Lowes Foods and Ace Hardware. “That was 175 new jobs by the first of April. I just think we should be really proud of that.”