Arts and entertainment activities approved

The Nashville Arts and Entertainment Commission will soon be executing a plan to paint a few downtown crosswalks with a leaf motif. It’s an idea that’s been discussed for more than a year.

The town council approved spending $2,000 from the town’s general fund and $2,690 from the town’s economic development income tax funds to paint four crosswalks in the Village Green area. The plan had been to paint 18 of them, but that was scaled down when a grant application didn’t come through, said Michele Wedel, president of the commission. The town bought a crosswalk stencil last year.

Two other grants the commission applied for, it received, Wedel told the town council in June.

• A $5,000 cultural district grant will help to fund the installation of a public art piece at Coachlight Square, in the area of Casa del Sol and the new Brown County Visitors Center. Its purpose will be to get folks to interact with the art piece, take photos with it and post them online, and learn about Nashville’s arts and entertainment history, Wedel said. What the piece will look like or who would be making it hadn’t been determined at the time of this meeting.
• A $4,000 project grant will bring in artists to do interactive sessions with the public, so locals and visitors can make their own art pieces.

Time no longer stands still in Nashville

The downtown clock at the corner of Main and Van Buren streets is keeping the correct time again.

The clock had been frozen in time for more than a year. Former town maintenance man Lamond Martin was working on it; former town council president Roger Kelso decided to take over that project when Martin moved out of state.

Kelso pledged at the June council meeting that taking care of the clock will be “his community thing” from now on.

Town switching to new notification system

The town is going to be switching to a new system to notify residents of emergencies, such as water line breaks and boil orders.

The Nashville Town Council voted in June to pay the county $750 to get in on the Everbridge system. Everbridge will be replacing Nixle, said Nashville Utility Coordinator Sean Cassiday.

He said the switch will save town employees time, because when there is a water line break, they can program in specific addresses or phone numbers and the system will automatically send them a notification, rather than staff spending “half a day” making individual phone calls.

However, people probably will have to sign up for it to get those notifications, Cassiday said. The town hasn’t determined yet how it’s going to gather those numbers and Cassiday wasn’t certain when the new system would go into effect.