Mayor John Gettys talks about Rock Hill hosting President Trump tomorrow.

For a while now, you know, you've been talking about Rock Hill being a significant city, and that being a goal for y'all. And if we look back not that long ago, and a lot of these people were part of the reason why, but, you know, downtown was totally different, didn't have a sports and events center, that sort of thing. And now we're talking about the president coming to a city-owned site. Tell me a little bit about that and just what it's meant to Rock Hill, the way it's grown, and what it means, I mean, regardless of which side of the aisle you're on. I mean, that's a big deal for somebody coming to the area. It is. When I first ran for mayor some eight, nine years ago now, I remember being at the top floor of the cotton factory and telling a crowd there to look out one window and say, what you'll see in five to ten years is a lot of buildings now look out the other window and what you'll see out of that window is a lot of tall buildings and things and we're gonna just explode with all this plan. Well, that's come to fruition and it's come to fruition so that we have all these people coming to downtown Rock Hill every weekend. have people living downtown now. It's just really rewarding to me when you're in the Come See Me Parade or the Christmas Parade and you come downtown and you look up and you see people on the third or fourth or fifth level of their apartments and you realize at no time in our city's history have people watched a Christmas Parade or a Come See Me Parade from that viewpoint. It's humbling. It's humbling because you think about all the people that worked so hard to get us here that's been going on for 50 some odd years starting with Betty Joe Ray, Doug Eccles, and then the city council I get to work with every day and just call a pleasure. It's a good time to be in this good town. But we do have a charge before us, I think. And I think that is from changing and transitioning our good town into a beautiful city. So for the next few years, that's what I want to talk about. How are we becoming that great shining city on a hill? I think the infrastructure is there in place for us to claim that. we've just got to show just how beautiful we are. Do you ever think when I know when they were talking about the sports events, and they were talking about basketball and volleyball, how many courts it would have and how many people fit in? Do you ever think you'd be talking about a presidential event? Well, initially, we were just talking about opening. COVID closed it down before it opened. So to go from closed down because of COVID and now having the United States president come and visit our community, that's quite an arc. And that arc only lasts six years, six and a half years. and so much in between that just shows the character of our community that that fights for everything it gets. You know, when you're born on a rock, as Rock Hill was, you gotta work awfully hard to get something out of the ground. And that's our story, our grit.