Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Rusty Efird, who works for a commercial docking door company, was born in Albemarle, and has lived in Locust most of his life, having graduated from West Stanly High School in 1984.

Efird is one of four incumbents and one new comer running for four spots on Locust City Council.

Besides serving on the city council for five years, he has spent 10 years on the Locust Youth Association.

He said it is hard to find people to run for public office, but said he did because “Locust means a lot to me.” Efird added he wants to help monitor the growth in the city.

While Locust has not had a lot of problems in his term, one issue has been housing developments. Efird said the city gets requests from outside developers all the time, adding the council “has done a great job monitoring and making sure (developers) build the right size houses and the land is spread out to keep it nice.”

He said it used to be everyone knew everyone else in the city, every name, but now he can walk into Food Lion and not recognize people.

“Everybody from Charlotte, from Cabarrus and Union (counties) want to move to Locust because of that small-town atmosphere. We just have to control that growth,” Efird said.

He noted the Elm Street Project, saying developers followed the guidelines set by the council but ‘‘wanted to work with us so everybody would be happy.”

“(The developers) did everything we asked them to do. The town council cares about what the city looks like. They monitor it so I feel like that’s the biggest thing with our council,” Efird said.

One of the biggest issues moving forward for Locust, he added, is the sewer at capacity which is “going to be a big, big job to do the next four to five years” to increase in order for the city to keep growing.

Efird said his main thing is for the city to continue having a good government, complimenting City Administrator Cesar Correa, staff and the police department.

He said the city needs more restaurants along with manufacturing and business jobs to come to Locust over the next four years.

With 26,000 cars a day coming through the city, Efird said he would like to see more rooftops in the city. He also said the water system needs to upgrade in the years ahead.