The Frequency

The Chambers County Circle of Care Center for Families held a ribbon cutting Tuesday morning for Hope Haven, billed as Alabama’s first transitional home built specifically for single mothers and young children facing housing instability. The Valley Chamber of Commerce hosted the ceremony, the finish line on nearly three years of planning.

“Now we’ve got staff hired, and we are looking to welcome our first several families by the middle of August,” said Kea Costley, executive director of the Circle of Care Center for Families. “Strong communities are built by supporting people in their time of need, and that’s what this place is going to do,” added Kendall Andrews, Valley’s mayor pro tem.

Hope Haven is open to single mothers and children up to age 10, with two house mothers living on-site; men are restricted to two designated visitation rooms. The building holds 38 rooms and can house up to 52 people, with a full kitchen, garden, laundry room and children’s activity space. Residents arrive with only the clothes on their backs — every room comes furnished, and the facility supplies toiletries, dental care and daily meals from a hired caterer. Stays can run up to 18 months.

The Circle of Care Center for Families has served Chambers County for 30 years, but Hope Haven is its first residential program. Every mother is required to complete a course called Life Skills 25. “They’re going to be required to take a class called Life Skills 25, where you learn everything you kind of need to know about going forward within life,” said Kevin Pigg, the center’s equipping and emerging programs manager. “They’ll do budgeting classes, cooking classes, they’ll do anger management classes, they’ll learn how to get a job and keep a job.” Residents must secure employment within six months of arrival, and Circle of Care’s other programming stays available to them after they move out.

Officials expect Hope Haven to reach 20% capacity by the end of this year and about 75% by the end of its first year of operation. Two additional wings haven’t been completed yet — there’s room for this to grow.

LaFayette Main Street has been named to the Innovate Alabama Network, a designation that brings a new entrepreneurial hub to downtown LaFayette funded in part by a $45,000 grant. The hub will stock copiers, printers and laptops alongside meeting and coworking space open to the community, plus mentoring, workshops and pitch competitions down the road.

The need came from the front desk, not a planning document. “Everyday I have different businesses come in here and need to utilize a copier, need to print something, or need a meeting space. This was something I really saw as a need for our town and our community,” said DeAnna, LaFayette’s Main Street director. Local business owners describe a downtown that’s been building momentum for a few years. “We did our grand opening in 2023, the downtown area was kind of slow,” said Adee, a downtown business owner, who now sees a different pattern: “I have people stop in all the time and they want to know what’s going to go into that building, what’s going to happen here, and how can we support this area. There is some excitement that you don’t always see in other areas.”

DeAnna is betting the hub does more than solve a printer problem. “I hope some of our new businesses or smaller businesses will actually have the confidence, and tools and resources that they need to open a brick and mortar,” she said, pointing to a younger crowd moving in: “We’re seeing more young people come into town, so I really hope that we see more of them open small businesses, or have offices downtown.” Fellow business owner Veronica said the resource pool matters as much as the hardware: “To be able to have not only a place, a hub where we can do our copying, but it’s also going to be a place that’s going to have a lot of resources that are going to be available to us.”

The Innovate Alabama Network designation also opens LaFayette Main Street up for additional grants and seed-funding opportunities — this hub is a starting point, not the whole plan.

The City of Valley has finished a round of improvements at the Valley Sportsplex: a cleared amphitheater, a new quarter-mile walking trail, cleanup around the tennis courts, and a fishing pond reopened to the public. Valley Parks and Recreation partnered with Milton Land Management on the roughly three-week project, working with excavators and mulchers.

“Clear out all the underbrush through the amphitheater, clean up by the tennis courts, and then they created a trail right behind us that’s a quarter mile,” said Jon Neal, director of Valley Parks and Recreation. The amphitheater clearing has a specific purpose. “I was like, it’d be really nice if we could do a fall music series with it, and I wanted to clean up the backdrop,” Neal said — the series is planned for late October. The trail work isn’t finished, either: the city plans to bring in gravel for better footing, a pedestrian bridge is planned, and the path will eventually carry the name of longtime Parks and Recreation employee Cooter Williams, pending a final decision.

The pond is already drawing a crowd. “Now that we see people want to fish here, we’re probably going to stock it once a year,” Neal said, after catfish and brim started turning up on lines within days of reopening. Residents are noticing the pace of change around the Sportsplex generally. “I got here in 2021, even before they built the Marshalls, before they built the Chick-fil-A, like even in the past few years it’s improved so much,” said Taylor O’Neill, an Auburn resident. Anna Parmer, who lives in West Point, said the distance used to be the deciding factor: “Now that there’s actually stuff to do that’s 5 minutes away instead of 45 minutes away, it’s actually like more enticing to do things that are 5 minutes instead of taking that drive.” Valley resident Cameron McLemore put it simply: “I’m telling you, we’re expanding as a community and I’m loving it.”

Neal said he wants to keep expanding the Sportsplex and putting Valley’s available space to use.

Fob James Drive was cut through in the 1970s as a four-lane connector giving the Langdale, Fairfax and River View communities a straight shot to what’s now Exit 77 on I-85. It’s named for Fob James Jr., who was elected Alabama’s governor that same decade — first as a Democrat from 1979 to 1983, later as a Republican from 1995 to 1999 — and was the first Chambers County native elected to the office; he was born in Lanett. Half a century later, the road bearing his name is where Valley’s growth keeps landing.

Grading began in late June at the future site of a Beef ‘O’ Brady’s and a Scooter’s Coffee, the next stretch of commercial development on the corridor. Beef ‘O’ Brady’s, a Florida-founded sports pub known for wings, burgers and a full bar and game room, is expected to employ around 40 people once it opens. Scooter’s Coffee, one of the country’s fastest-growing drive-thru coffee chains, is projected to add about 12 jobs. A second San Marcos Mexican restaurant location is also planned nearby, though construction hasn’t started there yet.

The activity doesn’t stop at that lot line. Across the street, diagonally from the new development, there’s visible work underway at the long-vacant former Steak ‘n Shake building — what’s moving in isn’t confirmed yet, but the site has sat empty since the restaurant’s closure, and the sudden activity has drawn attention from residents watching the corridor fill back in.

It’s the latest data point in a growth story Chambers County has been tracking for a while now: 600-plus new homes and more than 10 subdivisions in progress, Korean economic development advisors touring local sites, and a state Development Fund built to back exactly this kind of investment. Fob James Drive was built to move people through Chambers County faster. These days, it’s just as much a measure of how many are choosing to stop.

Alabama voters in Congressional Districts 1, 2, 6 and 7 return to the polls August 11 for special primaries — a direct consequence of the redistricting fight this newsletter has tracked since spring. After a federal court blocked Alabama’s Republican-drawn map in May for diluting Black voting strength, the U.S. Supreme Court intervened in a last-minute order and reinstated a map giving the state six Republican-leaning districts and one Democratic-leaning one for this year’s elections. Because district lines shifted under that map, some voters now sit in different districts than they did in 2024 — hence the do-over primaries.

The format skips runoffs entirely: whoever gets the most votes in each primary advances straight to November, majority or not. District 1 is an open Republican primary between four candidates, vacated by Rep. Barry Moore’s move to the U.S. Senate race. District 2’s six-candidate Republican primary sets up a November matchup against Democratic incumbent Rep. Shomari Figures — the seat redistricting analysts expect Republicans to flip. District 6 runs primaries in both parties: four Democrats and a two-way Republican contest between incumbent Rep. Gary Palmer and challenger Case Dixon. District 7’s two-candidate Republican primary produces a challenger for longtime Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell.

Chambers County sits in District 3, which wasn’t redrawn and isn’t part of this election. There’s no ballot to fill out here on August 11. But the outcome still matters to Chambers County voters: District 2’s result will help decide whether Alabama sends six Republicans or five to the U.S. House this term, and the map fight that produced it is the same one this newsletter will keep watching as it works through the courts.