Kenneth Nail was so happy his eyes were welling up with tears.

“I’m not ashamed to say it — when I got that call and found out Hanceville had just become an ACE community, my eyes started stinging up,” he said Friday, just days after learning the city’s arduous application to become one of a select few Alabama towns to earn that status had paid off.

“I didn’t cry…but I almost did.”

ACE Alabama inducted Hanceville and five other Alabama cities — Bay Minette, Boaz, Center Point, Chelsea and Tallassee — at the annual convention of the Alabama League of Municipalities Saturday in Birmingham. Nail and the entire Hanceville City Council made the trip to accept the recognition.

What is ACE? The ACE acronym stands for Alabama Communities of Excellence. ACE is a nonprofit organization that deploys a team of experts drawn from professional fields involved in just about every aspect of community development.

Becoming an ACE community is something special indeed for the city leaders, business owners, educators, churches and residents who worked together to put Hanceville’s application for ACE status over the top. It gives the city free access to tremendous planning and development resources. It connects local leaders with experts statewide who can help them write better grant proposals, detect trends in available demographic data, and chart a path that can bring ambitious ideas to reality.

It promises to guide Hanceville through a long-term strategic planning process that will map the city’s future — on residents’ terms.

“We really, really believe that you need the support of a full spread of demographics in your community in order to achieve any kind of long-term goals,” ACE Alabama Executive Director Sidney Hoover told The Times. “It’s not just your government or your industry leaders who are going to make this work; it’s actually the residents.

“In other words, if you want to have success in this program, the support for it has to be at the grass-roots level. We feel that Hanceville has that.”

Once selected as an ACE community, a city works through ACE’s intensive three-phase approach toward developing its own long-term strategic plan. The first phase, which Hanceville will soon be starting, involves assessing the city’s strengths and limitations as they pertain to growth.

“An ACE Team of experts across a range of topics [will] visit the community, and based on their observations, develop a comprehensive ‘report card’ detailing community assets and recommending possible strategies,” the organization’s website explains.

Future phases will distill that information for use in the city’s forthcoming strategic plan — and then implement it. The finished product that results from a partnership with ACE, that plan is meant to serve as “a long-term guide for the development of infrastructure and community facilities,” according to ACE.

For Nail, achieving ACE status is a badge of honor for Hanceville.

“We’re the first city in Cullman County to do this, and what an honor it is,” he said.

“A lot of cities who apply for this program are turned down; they have to apply repeatedly. ACE is competitive and their selection process is serious business. I can’t say enough good things about Rhonda Lockhart, one of our residents who coordinated this thing and really saw this application process through from start to finish. She’s organized, she’s driven, and she knows how to present information. We owe her a lot of gratitude.”

While there’s plenty of joy to go around, the hard work is just beginning. ACE status isn’t a static, inert title to hang on the wall and forget.

Rather, it’s an intensive program that asks Hanceville to collaborate with some of the state’s biggest players in planning and infrastructure: utility companies like Alabama Power and the PowerSouth Energy Cooperative, major universities like Auburn, Alabama and the University of West Alabama, consulting firms like Goodwyn, Mills and Cawood, state agencies like the Alabama Department of Commerce and the Alabama Historical Commission, and financing powers like Regions Bank.

Over the next year or so, these outside players will work with Hanceville to help the city lay the groundwork for its long-term strategic plan.

“We have a number of partner organizations that work with us to deliver community and economic development tools and technical resources,” Hoover explained. “When they finish this program — which probably will take 18 months to two years — Hanceville will have a current strategic plan; they’ll work out a leadership development program. We’ll work with them to come up with a vision and mission — and then they’ll work on implementing their strategic plan.”

The ACE program is geared toward smaller towns. A city’s population must lie between 2,000 to 18,000 in order to be eligible, and the program’s overseers don’t mind a town that’s still looking for success in making its disparate assets fit together.

“In the first phase of this thing, we’ll bring our team, and we’ll come in and spend a day; a day and-a-half, in Hanceville. We want see the good, we want to see the bad — and we want to see the ugly. We can’t help anyone figure out what they need to do if they’re only showing us what they’d show an economic development prospect.”

Nail said he thinks most people who feel invested in Hanceville’s future are ready for that kind of honest self-assessment.

“ACE is not not coming up here to tell us what Hanceville needs to be. We — our residents; our people — have got to figure that out. ACE is here to do their research, to learn from citizens, business people — everything – and then they will share their expertise to show us how to reach that goal.

“I know it’s going to mean a lot of work for a lot of people — including me — but I’m just excited. I think Hanceville’s ready.”

 

Benjamin Bullard can be reached by phone at 256-734-2131 ext. 145.