A growing Hogansville focuses on parks and infrastructure improvements
Published 9:45 am Wednesday, January 1, 2025
For Hogansville Mayor Jake Ayers, 2024 was a very productive year for the city.
The city is growing with residential developments breaking ground, the water improvements have been made, and the long Royal Theater renovation project has finally come to fruition.
“One of the biggest projects that we completed, that everybody is very excited about, is the grand opening of the Royal Theater,” Ayer said.
The five-year project culminated in the grand re-opening of the theater in November. Since then, the theater has hosted events that brought hundreds of people to Hogansville, including the holiday shows with Peabo Bryson, Ruben Studdard and Haley Reinhart.
The city is growing, too, as evidenced by increased utility users. Ayers said the city added about 200 new utility users, which means about 300 new people moved into the city limits of Hogansville just in 2024.
“If you look at it from the grand scheme of things, that’s almost a 10% population increase just in the year of 2024, so that’s pretty wild,” Ayers said.
Ayer said several new businesses have opened downtown, and a ton of developments are on the verge or have broken ground.
“We’ve got four different neighborhoods that broke ground and are going vertical,” he said.
The city has gotten new amenities as well.
“Right before the summer, we put up a new playground in one of our parks and rec facilities over on the west side of town in Strozier Park. We partnered with the county to build a new playground over there,” Ayers said. “It’s the first public playground that the city has put in in years and years.”
Ayers said they aren’t done with park upgrades. It is a big focus for the city in 2025.
“We’re getting ready to put a lot of effort into our parks and recreation facilities, and we’re working on one particular project in construction with the county that will bring a really great state-of-the-art Parks and Rec facility, upgrade to the city of Hogansville and provide a great place for all the citizens and families to have a great and safe place to go and to have fun and have a really usable park,” Ayers said. “We did a comprehensive park plan this past year as well. This kind of falls in line with what we’re trying to do to develop new outdoor spaces for our citizens to use.”
Ayers said they have lots of residential and some industrial developments that are proposed that are likely to come to fruition in 2025. Infrastructure improvements are also coming to improve city life.
“It’s really easy to get excited about the things that you see on top of the dirt. It’s less exciting, but equally as important to take care of our infrastructure and different things that are going on underneath the ground,” Ayers said. “We have a lot of plans to put in to upgrade a lot of our infrastructure through grants that we’ve already received. We’re doing a lot of sewer, wastewater, as well as stormwater upgrades,” Ayers said, adding they were recently able to provide water service improvements thanks to a new water tower and upgraded water supply lines on the west side of town.
One of the big developments is the large residential project from Lennar Builders on Bass Cross Road, which has already broken ground and is expected to go vertical in the first quarter of 2025 with a lot of single-family homes, Ayer said.
“We’ve got probably 2000 very realistic single-family residences that are not just conceptual, but already approved platted, approved moving dirt and preparing to go vertical in 2025, so we could see a very drastic increase in population in a very short timeframe,” Ayers said.
With that increase in population comes an increased need for public safety and schools.
“We’re looking at adequate public safety and really excited to work with our new superintendent who hopefully will help us see the validity and the need to expand our elementary school because we are currently in max capacity,” Ayers said.