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Apartments for seniors open in Richmond Hill
2015-10-21 10.54.05
Laurel Hart of the Georgia Department of Community Affairs speaks at Wednesdays grand-opening celebration for the Ashleigh Place senior-living apartments in Richmond Hill. - photo by By Paul Floeckher

When Walter Taylor and his wife, Riley, were looking to move from Athens to be closer to family in southeast Georgia, they had all but decided on a home in Pooler.

Then someone suggested Ashleigh Place, an affordable, senior-living apartment community that was about to open in Richmond Hill.

“We investigated and we loved it,” Walter Taylor said. “I think it’s beautiful.”

The Taylors moved into one of Ashleigh Place’s 80 apartments last week.

“Everybody’s friendly,” Walter said. “It seems like it’s going to be a nice place. I’m looking forward to it.”

Ashleigh Place celebrated its grand opening Wednesday. The developers joined business partners, Richmond Hill and Bryan County leaders and Ashleigh Place’s new tenants for a ribbon-cutting ceremony and catered lunch.

“What a great addition to the city of Richmond Hill,” Mayor Harold Fowler said.

Ashleigh Place is off Timber Trail Road at the entrance to Richmond Hill Plantation. Seniors age 55 and older qualify to live there based on their annual gross income.

The complex is a tax-credit property developed by The Humanities Foundation of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. The Humanities Foundation has developed more than 20 similar communities throughout the Southeast, but Ashleigh Place is its first in Georgia.

“The people of Richmond Hill have shown great compassion and grace, and I am so proud to have our first affordable-apartment development in Georgia,” said Tracy Doran, the president of The Humanities Foundation. “Our funding partners have also shown great generosity and have given us the opportunity to build homes for seniors that go above and beyond apartment walls.”

Ashleigh Place offers several amenities for its residents, including a computer center, library, exercise room, arts-and-crafts room and community garden.

In addition, Ashleigh Place has a passenger bus “that will keep our residents on the go,” Doran said. Also, a food pantry van will deliver fresh, healthy food to the tenants on a regular basis.

“Since Humanities started our food-pantry program in the spring of last year, we have delivered more than 230,000 pounds of food to our residents,” Doran said.

Another benefit will be wellness screenings through a partnership with Armstrong State University and the Medical University of South Carolina. ASU nursing students will visit Ashleigh Place at least once a week and use Bluetooth technology to measure residents’ weight gain or loss, oxygen use, sugar levels, blood pressure and cholesterol.

“The goal of this program is to enable our residents to live independently in their apartments as long as possible,” Doran said. “We all know that health problems are the biggest barrier to older adults remaining in their homes.”

The telemedicine program is one of a kind among senior-living communities, according to Doran. Telemedicine technology will enable Ashleigh Place residents to receive health screenings without leaving the neighborhood where they live, with the screening information sent electronically to their doctors.

“It’s personalized. It depends on what you need done, and then you’ll have those evaluations done very quickly,” said MUSC professor Dr. Frank Treiber. “We have the ability electronically to send all of this, synthesized, to your health-care provider to their electronic medical record or to a server file that they can access when needed — and you can access.”

Steve Doran, the vice president of public relations for The Humanities Foundation, thanked local leaders for supporting the development of Ashleigh Place. He introduced Fowler as the ceremony’s final guest speaker and then accompanied the mayor for the ribbon cutting.

“It takes vision and commitment on the part of leaders of each community to recognize that high-quality affordable housing plays an important role in the economic, cultural and societal heart of the community,” Doran said.

Tracy Doran concluded her remarks by asking all the Ashleigh Place residents to stand. Several people stood as the crowd applauded.

“We’d like to welcome you to your new home,” she said.

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Later yall, its been fun
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This is among the last pieces I’ll ever write for the Bryan County News.

Friday is my last day with the paper, and come June 1 I’m headed back to my native Michigan.

I moved here in 2015 from the Great Lake State due to my wife’s job. It’s amicable, but she has since moved on to a different life in a different state, and it’s time for me to do the same.

My son Thomas, an RHHS grad as of Saturday, also is headed back to Michigan to play basketball for a small school near Ann Arbor called Concordia University. My daughter, Erin, is in law school at University of Toledo. She had already begun her college volleyball career at Lourdes University in Ohio when we moved down here and had no desire to leave the Midwest.

With both of them and the rest of my family up north, there’s no reason for me to stay here. I haven’t missed winter one bit, but I’m sure I won’t miss the sand gnats, either.

Shortly after we arrived here in 2015, I got a job in communications with a certain art school in Savannah for a few short months. It was both personally and professionally toxic and I’ll leave it at that.

In March 2016 I signed on with the Bryan County News as assistant editor and I’ve loved every minute of it. My “first” newspaper career, in the late 80s and early 90s, was great. But when I left it to work in politics and later with a free-market think tank, I never pictured myself as an ink-stained wretch again.

Like they say, never say never.

During my time here at the News, I’ve covered everything that came along. That’s one big difference between working for a weekly as opposed to a daily paper. Reporters at a daily paper have a “beat” to cover. At a weekly paper like this, you cover … life. Sports, features, government meetings, crime, fundraisers, parades, festivals, successes, failures and everything in between. Oh, and hurricanes. Two of them. I’ll take a winter blizzard over that any day.

Along the way I’ve met a lot of great people. Volunteers, business owners, pastors, students, athletes, teachers, coaches, co-workers, first responders, veterans, soldiers and yes, even some politicians.

And I learned that the same adrenalin rush from covering “breaking news” that I experienced right out of college is still just as exciting nearly 30 years later.

With as much as I’ve written about the population increase and traffic problems, at least for a few short minutes my departure means there will be one less vehicle clogging up local roads. At least until I pass three or four moving vans headed this way as I get on northbound I-95.

The hub-bub over growth here can be humorous, unintentional and ironic all at once. We often get comments on our Facebook page that go something like this: “I’ve lived here for (usually less than five years) and the growth is out of control! We need a moratorium on new construction.”

It’s like people who move into phase I of “Walden Woods” subdivision after all the trees are cleared out and then complain about trees being cut down for phase II.

Bryan County will always hold a special place in my heart and I definitely plan on visiting again someday. My hope is that my boss, Jeff Whitten (one of the best I’ve ever had), will let me continue to be part of the Pembroke Mafia Football League from afar. If the Corleone family could expand to Vegas, there’s no reason the PMFL can’t expand to Michigan.

But the main reason I want to return someday is about that traffic issue. After all, I’ll need to see it with my own eyes before I’ll believe that Highway 144 actually got widened.

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