QUESTION: What is the former Graham mayor Jennifer Talley’s position on building a new park along West Elm Street, versus saving Sesquicentennial Park on the northwest corner of Court Square?
ANSWER: Talley initially demurred when asked about her position on the park, telling an Alamance News reporter, “Why does my opinion matter? …I’m not even elected. You need to stop putting my name in the paper. I don’t understand how my opinion is even relevant.”
Talley went on to say that she didn’t have a strong opinion about the city’s plan to build a new park on a city-owned parking lot at 129 West Elm Street and to raze the Sesquicentennial Park on the northwest corner of Court Square.
“I’m staying out of it,” Talley said in an interview Monday afternoon. “If I was still the mayor, we’d be putting in crosswalks. The [state grant] money – that was how it would be used.”
Talley was referring to a $600,000 grant that the city of Graham received in the state biennial budget passed by the General Assembly on September 22, 2023.
She eventually said that she wishes there was some way possible to keep Sesquicentennial Park but supports the council’s decision and the reasoning behind it.
“I support the council in understanding why they feel the need to move the park, and I wish there was a solution that would allow the park to remain where it is,” Talley said Monday afternoon.
The former mayor also echoed concerns about structural degradation, as well as potential soil contamination underneath Sesquicentennial Park, which several council members have expressed over the past two years.
“I think the council members don’t want to be in a position of having to deal with excavating and restoring the park,” Talley elaborated. “Every council member wants to keep it where it is. I think one of the things the council members said is, ‘tell us where we can put this park.’…I think the council doesn’t want to have deal with the liability.”
The $600,000 “directed grant” that the city received in the state budget for 2023-2025 was designated for “downtown revitalization,” according to the General Assembly’s so-called “money report” (i.e., the Joint Conference Committee Report on the Current Operations Appropriations Act of 2023), released on September 20, 2023.
A directed grant provides a specific amount of state funding, directed to a “named organization for a purpose described in the appropriations act in which the grant was included,” according to the North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management.
Talley has maintained since the spring of 2024 that the grant was specifically designated for restoring “stamped brick pavers” in crosswalks around Court Square in downtown Graham.
While Talley was mayor, the city council agreed in June 2024 to restore the brick pavers at the four intersections around Court Square – which had been removed when the state Department of Transportation (DOT) resurfaced Main Street (N.C. Highway 87) in 2023 – and to install stamped bricked crosswalks at North Main and Harden Streets and at South Main and Pine streets.
In the two years since the council agreed to use the grant money for brick pavers, Graham residents and downtown business owners have repeatedly asked and criticized the council for rejecting the use of any portion of the directed grant to repair or shore up the sinking foundation of the Sesquicentennial Park.
The former mayor has consistently said that the grant had to be use for the brick pavers, because that was what she had told state senator Amy Galey, whose district includes Alamance County and part of Randolph, the money would be used for. But Galey has previously told The Alamance News the council could use the funds for “downtown revitalization,” the description used in the state budget.
Graham’s city council subsequently agreed at its meeting on January 13, 2026 to allocate $84,000 from the directed grant to install “rectangular rapid flashing beacons,” or flashers, at pedestrian crossings around Court Square, instead of stamped brick pavers, and to use the remaining $486,000 to relocate the park from the northwest corner of Court Square.
City staff later acknowledged that the directed grant would be used to build a new park, based on emails and other documents that the city recently furnished in response to a public records request from The Alamance News.
“The plans for the new park are tied to federal grant funds that we are trying to use before the end of the fiscal year. If they are not use, then we will lose them,” Graham planning director Cameron West wrote in a March 5 email to the city’s Historic Resources Commission (HRC), to lay the groundwork for a special meeting and public hearing on March 24, at which the HRC approved a Certificate of Appropriateness for the new park at 129 West Elm Street. [West inaccurately referred to the grant as federally-funded; it was actually funded by the North Carolina General Assembly in the state biennial budget for 2023-25.]
Construction of the Elm Street Park is targeted for substantial completion by late June or early July, based on the Request for Proposals for “design build” services that the city issued earlier this month.
Graham city officials are scheduled to open bids inside the council’s chambers at City Hall at 2:00 p.m. today. The city had to re-bid the project after receiving only two bids for construction of the new park; state law requires a minimum of three bids and also requires the contract to be awarded to the lowest responsible, responsive bidder.
