Rison Shine To Host Meeting on Events

RISON - Rison Shine will host the fourth in a series of community meetings at 6 p.m. Monday, Sept. 29, at the Cleveland County Fairgrounds in Rison to address events and recreation in the city.The series of community meetings began in June with a general meeting that addressed three areas of action for Rison Shine: business development, public spaces and beautification, and events and recreation. Anyone interested in helpling revitalize Rison is invited to attend.Since that first meeting in June, Rison Shine has had additional community meetings that focused on business development in July and then public spaces/beautification in August. One of the action items that came out of the beautification meeting was to have a community cleanup day beginning at 9 a.m. this Saturday, Sept. 27, at Veterans Park in Rison. Everyone is invited to help out.Monday's meeting will focus the current events already being held in Rison as well as look at some ideas for new ones. In addition, there will be a discussion on possible recreational activities that could be created for the community.Douglas Boultinghouse, a Rison Shine officer and director of the Rison in the Fall Festival, and Stacy Walz, executive director of the Cleveland County Community Theater, will lead Monday's meeting on events and recreation.Some action steps have already been taken as a result of the previous community meetings. From the July business development meeting, a committee has been formed to catalog and address the vacant commercial spaces in town. In addition, there was discussion of actively pursuing businesses of need to come to Rison. The results of a community poll released during that meeting revealed that a place for youth to hang out and be entertained topped the list.During the public spaces and beautification meeting in August, there was discussion of cleaning up the city before the Rison in the Fall Festival on Oct. 18, hence the clean-up scheduled f...