The Homewood Star TheHomewoodStar.com
April 2014
Volume 4 | Issue 1 | April 2014
• 1
Celebrating four years of neighborly news
Return of the trucks
Support PreSchool Partners at its annual Food Truck Round Up at Colonial Brookwood Village. Read more about this and other festivals in April in this issue.
Community page 8
Park Board Chair Chris Meeks and Parks and Recreation Director Berkeley Squires take a look at the exterior of the new Homewood Community Center, set to open in May. Photo by Madoline Markham.
Take a peek
Homewood love
New community center to open next month By MADOLINE MARKHAM
Preparations are underway for We Love Homewood Day to return to Homewood Central Park this year. Find the full schedule inside.
When the City of Homewood was designing its new Senior Center in 2002, the average age of its residents was 55. A decade later, that number had dropped by 20 years. So when plans for a new
community center came into motion, the City and Parks and Recreation Board had the community’s families in mind. “Our seniors have the nicest senior center in the state, and once this is done, I feel like we will have the top community center in the state as well,” said Berkley
Squires, director of parks and recreation and public services. After 13 months of construction, the new center next to Homewood Central Park is scheduled to open in mid-May. In the planning stages for the center, the Park Board took into consideration the comments of
both members and residents who are not members about what they wanted in a facility. The result is a $16 million, 51,000-square-foot center with two full-court gymnasiums, a cardio room with more than 4,000 square feet, additional
See CENTER | page 28
See full floor plans and feature details for the new Community Center inside
Community page 10
INSIDE Sponsors ................. 2 City ........................... 4 Business .................. 6 Community ............. 8 Sports ...................... 14 Home & Garden ..... 19 School House ......... 24 Calendar ................. 30 Opinion .................... 31
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What now? Oxmoor hotel denied business license, but next moves by both sides unclear
By JEFF THOMPSON By April 1, America’s Best Value Inn & Suites could be vacant. During a public hearing in March, the Homewood City Council decided not to renew the hotel’s business license for 2014, effectively making further operations at the hotel, located at 260 Oxmoor Road near the I-65 exit, illegal. However, the details of closing the business, removing its patrons and monitoring the property were not immediately available. “They’ll have a reasonable time to vacate their tenants, but they’ll have to stop doing business,” Homewood City Attorney Mike Kendrick said. He added that he could not
Owners of America’s Best Value Inn & Suites present their case for their Oxmoor Road hotel to receive a business license renewal. From left are attorney Josh Watkins, Shawn Patel, Dennis Patel and Mike Patel. Photo by Jeff Thompson.
define “reasonable” but estimated it was “within the next seven days.” For residents of West Homewood, the council’s decision could change the landscape of the exit. The 160-room hotel might sit dark
and vacant on the side of I-65, but in doing so — as the council hopes — it would reduce the transient population that has shown a propensity for attracting the Homewood Police Department.
“[Chief of Police Jim Roberson] pulled statistics from all the hotels on that exit, and this one is the worst. That’s why we started
See HOTEL | page 7