BY JOHN BRICE
THE LAFAYETTE SUN
VALLEY — Local leaders and members of the community gathered at a grand opening ceremony for the new Marshalls retail store in the Village Square Shopping Center South on 20th Avenue in Valley Thursday, May 1. Auburn Bank Senior Vice President and City President for the Valley branch Bruce Emfinger spoke to those in attendance.
“Today is a good day for the city of Valley and for our community,” he said. “I would like to welcome everyone here. We have got some elected officials with us. Commissioner Sam Bradford is here. Commissioner Doug Jones, Commissioner Debra Riley, Councilman Jim Jones, Councilwoman Marquetta Madden, Councilman Jim Clark and Mayor Riley will be coming up in just a second to speak. What you see here behind me, this has been a long project. This has taken a while. But what you also see behind me is what happens when good people and a good team get together and make a great project happen.”
Emfinger said he was proud to be there for the event that had been a long time in the making.
“I am proud to be here today for the opening of this project, this expansion. I am also proud to be here today among people that I know are going to support this,” he said. “You know, elected officials and the people around at the development authority and all and even the community members. We hear all the time ‘I wish we had, I wish we had, I wish we had…’ Well, we have. Now it is time for the ‘I wish we had’ people to come up here and support what we now have and what we will continue to have and what we will continue to grow here in the second half of the center. We wanted it, well, we have got it. Now it is up to us in the community to support it.”
Valley Mayor Leonard Riley remarked on the essential progress being made in the city.
“We need to increase our shopping in the city of Valley,” Riley said. “We have got eight or nine new businesses coming to our city over the next six or seven months. This is our third business in the last three months. We have got four new subdivisions going. We have got 12 new houses. We are tearing down the old mill houses. So our community is growing, it is looking better, it is getting cleaner. It is important for our community to be clean and look good for people to move to this community and we have got to have nice houses for them to move to.”
Chambers County Development Authority Executive Director Chris Busby concluded the ceremony by driving home the importance of shopping in the community.
“This is a really important project in that it brings a need to the city that wasn’t there and Bruce touched on this,” Busby said. “We hear ‘we want, we want, we want…’ Now, we have it and you have got to shop locally. This is a service here now that people are going elsewhere to spend their money and now we have an opportunity to keep it here. As we do that, when other businesses see that we are shopping local and we are bringing in revenue and having good sales, they are going to come here too. It is just going to keep on growing, it is a cycle and this is one of the first dominos to fall as we see the continued growth of the city of Valley.”
