Residents and passersby in Nipomo may notice a new addition alongside one of the main streets.
Now gracing the northeastern side of Tefft Street next to Highway 101 is a welcome sign — a first for the unincorporated town in southern San Luis Obispo County.
The sign made of Redwood reads Welcome to Olde Town Nipomo, Pride of the Foothills. Thursday evening, a ribbon-cutting ceremony was held to officially welcome it to the town.
And just who led the way in developing and implementing the project? None other than 17-year-old Eagle Scout Chase Hadden.
Hadden has been a member of Boy Scouts almost his entire life, working up to the threshold of Eagle Scout from Cub Scout — but needed to complete a project in order to achieve that rank.
"I started looking around and I noticed that we're unincorporated," Hadden said. "A lot of the other cities have signs, and I just thought it would be a really nice addition kind to tie the community together."
A unique twist is that Hadden and company had to search for private property as building on county property would have been too complicated, he said. That led them to the plot of land that holds McDonald's and Chevron, where a flag with the trademark golden arches flies high above the sidewalk below.
"We had to get their lawyers involved because it was a corporate matter and we had to go through Chevron; we had to go through the legal process that took a little longer than I expected," Hadden explained. "But we got it done."
Hadden said he couldn't have completed the year-long project — much of it involving lots and lots of paperwork — without the help of a few key figures, including Deb Geaslen, Jimmy Paulding and Mark Blackford.
"I've just grown up here and I wanted to give back," Hadden said of his thoughts behind the project. "That's kind of that's the main reason I chose it. That's why it's so special to me, because I get to see it every day."
