HANCEVILLE – The lobby of Hanceville’s City Hall sees much action on a typical Friday morning with residents coming and going to pay fees to the City and shoot the breeze with various City staff. What’s atypical is the warmth the citizens greet Mayor Kenneth Nail with and his familiarity with everyone who comes into the building.
However, considering Nail is a lifelong Hanceville resident for over 50 years, a graduate of Hanceville High School and has been serving the city for 16 years as a member of city council and wearing the mayor’s hat, it shouldn’t be too surprising in this town of 3,000 folks.
The mayor is up for reelection in the Aug. 23 municipal election, and although there have been rumors flying about a possible opponent, nothing is set in stone until the July 5-19 qualifying period.
“I intend on running like I’m in last place. I will probably beat on 99 percent of the houses’ doors to visit people. This will be my third term when I’m reelected as mayor. See, I like to be positive! I had previously served two terms on city council. I have a few years in public service,” chuckled Nail, “I’m a 25-year veteran of the Cullman Police Department and retired from there. I’ve served on numerous boards – Cullman Mental Health Authority board of directors, 9-1-1 board and Chamber of Commerce board of directors.”
Nail is proud of Hanceville and the strides the city has made in the past eight years while he has been leading the way.
“I brought the motto in ‘positive and progressive’ and to me it means that we’re not just sitting here but we’re trying to move forward. Our town is a great place, but we want to make it even better. I want safe streets. I want us to build more sidewalks. I’m proud that we’ve built so many sidewalks in the last two to three years. It’s a good thing that doesn’t really cost that much to build sidewalks and it gives our kids and our citizens a place to walk in a safer way instead of in the street and that’s big to me. Another thing that we’ve really got going is that there’s been more movement in the last six months downtown than there’s probably been in the last 20 years.”
As mayor, Nail has continued to be a vital part of the action around town and doesn’t hesitate to work alongside the people of Hanceville to move toward an even more unified city.
“I think we are really citizen-oriented, and if somebody’s got a problem, we try to help them. We like to pride ourselves in trying to help our citizens. We actually care about people, and if people have a problem, we try to help them. Now, we can’t just twitch our nose and solve everything, but if you call here, number one, we’re going to call you back. That’s big. If you come by here and want to see me, I’m probably not here, but they know they can call me and I can usually be back here in five minutes.”
As for that third term that he’s aiming for, Nail wants to keep on the path of a safer town and a consistent, dependable day-to-day operation.
“We want to continue to work on our streets. Our streets are getting to the point where, in the next few years, we have some major paving needing to be done in town. We want to continue to work on our sidewalk projects. We really want to continue with the local government being stable, a place that you can call if you’ve got a problem and the folks down here are going to try and help you. That’s what we’re going to continue on.”
