September 10th, 2025 by WCBC Radio

Residents and business owners of the Virginia Avenue area who attended the City of Cumberland’s kick-off meeting expressed safety as their biggest concern for the corridor’s future.  Rich Everett, a lifelong resident of the area, says Virginia Avenue itself is not a safety concern; rather, the surrounding neighborhoods are problematic…

“You’ve got wild dogs running around.  People, when they get evicted they throw their trash out all over the streets—half the time it don’t get cleaned up.  I think this will work, but to get people to thrive here and to come here and be part of it, you’ve got to clean up the whole area there and make it nice.”

Michael Mudge, resident and pastor in the Virginia Avenue area, added that the corridor's weakness is in the residential area when it used to be its strength…

“If we want to have the capitol for Virginia Avenue we’ve got to raise the level of the residential neighborhood around it.”