By Richard Sullins | richard@rantnc.com
Mayor Rebecca Wyhof Salmon and Sanford’s City Council honored a local doctor and his wife for their volunteer work that provides “street medicine” to locals who otherwise would not have access to medical care because they couldn’t afford it or couldn’t get to it.
Dr. Bill Hall and his wife, Cindy, were present in the council chambers on May 21 as the mayor read from the proclamation, as were more than a dozen volunteers who work with the nonprofit the Halls founded in 2019, Health, Healing, and Hope, or H3 Street Medicine.
Dr. and Mrs. Hall had previously been awarded the Governor’s Medallion for Volunteer Service in a ceremony on May 6 at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh, a distinction that “honors the true spirit of volunteerism by recognizing individuals, groups, and businesses that make a significant contribution to their community through volunteer service.”
Hall is a licensed physician and pharmacist, and Cindy has a master’s degree in counseling. Three other physicians, Dr. John Briggs, Dr. Marty Pate, and Dr. Jes Sloan, also provide volunteer services to H3, along with six nurses and five auxiliary staff members.
Dr. Hall retired from his practice five years ago and Cindy did the same from her position as Outreach Pastor at First Baptist Church. You can often see them at the clinics they hold in many places across the city, and it’s as likely you’ll find them at one of Sanford’s many nonprofit organizations as it is that they can be seen along a roadside or in a park.
H3 Street Medicine has become a model for other groups by the way it leverages its resources with those of nonprofits in Sanford that provide services to broad audiences, like El Refugio, the S3 Housing Connect, and the Helping Hands Clinic. These partnerships allow H3 Street Medicine to hold as many as five clinics a week and see up to 20 patients at each clinic. In 2023, Dr. Hall, Cindy, and the team provided free medical care to a record 1,950 patients.
After the proclamation was approved on a unanimous vote, Mayor Salmon smiled broadly as she spoke of how blessed Sanford is to have a large and varied stable of volunteers willing to do whatever needs to be done.
“We are so blessed as a city that you are out every day doing the Lord’s work.”
“All we are doing is what Christ told us to do,” Dr. Hall replied. “To do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Developer and school come to agreement for handling traffic
A point of contention between a developer and local residents that had unfolded in April also got a resolution at the meeting.
Developer Rob Bailey had come to the council that month representing the TMTLA Group in Durham, hoping to gain approval for a 69-unit townhomes development between 3310 and 3314 Keller-Andrews Road that is adjacent to Lee Christian School.
But a group of parents and grandparents stood up to him, many of them speaking during a public hearing about the traffic problems that already plague the narrow road when students are dropped off at the school in the mornings or picked up in the afternoons.
Chief among them was Andrew Ricabal, the school’s headmaster, who told the council the narrow rural road which provided access to the school was not designed to carry the large number of cars it is already seeing. There is no paved shoulder for cars to move onto, making an already difficult situation even more problematic for the 400 or more parents or grandparents who come to the school to drop off or pick up their children every day.
The heaviest traffic of the day, Ricabal said, starts around 1 p.m., when a line of cars begins to develop along the road and eventually stretching as far back as Carthage Street, forcing vehicles not in the school traffic line into the left lane and creating the potential for a serious head-on collision. Traffic that heavy, he opined, could potentially make it impossible for emergency vehicles to reach the school in the event of an emergency situation.
Ricabal had challenged Bailey to come to the school and visit during pick-up times and see for himself the amount of traffic congestion that already exists, and Bailey did just that. After observing the number of cars and how they lined up along the road to become part of the pickup line, Bailey met with Ricabal at the school and first suggested that Lee Christian consider higher fencing and security cameras along the property boundary that would border the new project to the west. That might give pause to students thinking about wandering off campus grounds.
Bailey told the council that as the two men continued walking across the properties, Ricabal began to warm up to the idea of “double stacking” cars as they came in for the pickups and drop-offs. Lee Christian School decided to try the concept on a recent Friday and were so pleased with the results that they promised to consider using the option full-time when the school reopens in the fall.
It was described by Bailey as “a fruitful and productive meeting,” a sentiment reflected in an email from the property’s owner, Jeffrey Miles. Read aloud by Zoning Administrator Amy McNeill, the communication said, in part, “I have always tried to be a good neighbor, and I believe Mr. Bailey is doing the same through this proposed project.”
Bailey had also gone further, reaching out to Duke Energy about moving a transformer to a different location on the school’s property that would make the double stacking of cars easier and offering to make a connection for the school with an NCDOT program that provides assistance to nonprofit groups that experience high volumes of cars.
Council member Linda Rhodes offered her congratulations to Bailey on the way he and Ricabal have been able to work together to craft a solution from which both sides can benefit, saying “a new model for cooperation that arose out of conflict may have been born right here in Sanford.” The city council could take final action on approval for the proposed development as early as its next meeting, scheduled for June 4.