Make your community better and your life better by getting involved in your community.
That’s the message that Rick Elliott left Mount Vernon citizens with at his turn featured in the Mount Vernon guest speaker series Thursday, March 7, at Lester Buresh Family Community Wellness Center.
Elliott has served numerous roles in the town of Mount Vernon – teacher, coach, construction worker, mayor, city council member, school board president and business owner among them. He and his wife, Trude, operate the First Street Community Center in uptown Mount Vernon.
Elliott said whatever people have done previously, the choices and education they’ve received have prepared them for where they are in their current life.
He remembered attending a funeral for his uncle in Vinton several years ago and running into one of his elementary school teachers who remembered him as a shy child growing up.
Elliott said he eventually grew out of that phase, and schools have always been somewhere he has felt safe. It’s why he started there with his career in teaching and coaching after college.
Aside from his work in schools, Elliott said throughout high school, college and even after, he kept up with a masonry job, working on tuckpointing and other jobs during the summer months.
That safety in school is what lead Trude and Rick to purchase the First Street Community Center years ago and give new life to a former school building to still serve as a hub in the community.
“We now have more than 27 businesses that are in our doors,” Elliott said.
He got his start in political offices back in school, running as a class officer, and then serving as part of the teachers association, city council, mayor and school board.
“As mayor, I remember that I’d see things that I wanted to get done and would try to push for them to happen,” Elliott said. “What I discovered is that the more I pushed for some things, the more they didn’t get accomplished, and I had to come up with a different solution.”
Those different solutions were planting the seeds in other people on boards and commissions for some of that work to happen and take the time for the idea to cultivate in those commissions and then on to council when it would become an action.
“If it was something that was formed from an idea on a committee, it had a better chance of having more people want to see it get done,” Elliott said. “I look around the town and have a great deal of pride and accomplishment for many of the things we were able to accomplish.”
Elliott noted that the work for volunteers in Mount Vernon is not over, though. There are still numerous items that need to be accomplished.
In the First Street Community Center building, there are some needed items like new lights for the theater, floors and the exterior of the building that will need help.
Elliott encouraged everyone who has a hobby or interest that they can share, to seek out chances to share their gifts with others to make the communities and spaces they live in a better space.
During the question and answer period, ( ) Meeker asked about how the idea for Elliott park came to be, the baseball and soccer fields on the north side of Mount Vernon.
Elliott explained that in 1991, he and other coaches constructed a ball diamond behind the middle school to use for their prep league players, as they had limited space to play baseball. That lasted a year in that location before it was determined the need was just too great.
“It was obvious with the number of kids we had, we needed more space to play baseball,” Elliott said.
A few years later, the flood of 1993 hit. One of the areas that was noted that always flooded was to the north of Mount Vernon, but only when that space was turned into corn fields.
“It didn’t flood when it was a pasture of items like clover,” Elliott said.
He worked to turn that area into stormwater retention space instead to help curb the flooding in the north portion of town. The city made an offer on that land from the owner, and put the 10 acres of field into grass and pastures to reduce the flooding.
A year or so after the land was purchased and established as a clover field, Elliott said the work started to add a few more baseball diamonds. It started out with one baseball diamond and has eventually grown to the four diamonds in that park, as well as space for playing soccer of today.
The concession stand was helped constructed by Nor Meyer and Elliott working together.
Citizens asked about the status of the Bellamy Bowl space. Elliott said the plan is that will remain an athletic field for use for middle school and junior high athletics, but without needing to be a competition field for high school, that it may not receive as much watering and maintenance as it used to.
“We’d spend roughly $30,000 to $50,000 each year to keep that field playable,” Elliott said.
Elliott said he and Trude are working on setting up a non-profit status for the First Street Community Center to help them assist with collecting donations of the building in the future. They are also looking to establish a board to help manage the building in the future.