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WEST POINT — At Wednesday’s noon hour meeting of the West Point Lions Club, West Point Police Chief Kevin Carter talked about a transition he has seen in the city since he’s been with the police department and how he and fellow officers are dealing with it. Carter has been with the WPPD for some time and moved up through the ranks to being the chief. He was named to that position almost two years ago.

He’s seen West Point in its lean years following the Farley disaster and in the boom period of Kia and Point University coming to town to dramatically revitalize the city.

“It’s a very different place from what it was when I first came here, but it still has the appeal of being a sleepy little town,” he said. “Things have been moving forward in a big way, and I think our city’s best days are ahead of us. More growth is on the way.”

Few cities anywhere with 4,000 people have as much going for it as West Point does. There’s a major car manufacturer that takes out Super Bowl ads, and a four-year Christian college whose downtown presence has brought new life to one of only two towns the Chattahoochee runs through the middle of. One’s on the north end of West Point Lake (Franklin) with the City of West Point being on the south side.

With Kia Parkway and I-85 running Captainide, West Point is one of few small towns anywhere with eight lanes of traffic moving through it.

Carter was accompanied to the meeting by two fellow officers, Captain Terry Hunt and Lt. Brice O’Steen. He commended both of them on being excellent law enforcement officers. Hunt is nearing 50 years in the field. He’s best known for the many years he spent with the Troup County Sheriff’s Office before coming to West Point. O’Steen is a West Point native and has gained some valuable experience as an officer while still having youth on his side.

At full force, West Point has 20 officers in the department. They are three officers short of that right now, but Chief Carter is confident the department will be fully staffed before the year is out.

“We will have some new people on board and get them to the police academy,” he said.

Carter said he’d like to have an additional investigator with the department, given the growth that’s on the way.

The WPPD has a couple of new message boards that can be placed by the road. They were out before the recent weekend storm. “We can track speed data with them,” Carter said. “The most possible wrongdoing while driving is a big concern for us. I think we’ve come a long way in isolating crime types. This will never go away completely, but we’d like to reduce it as much as we can.”

Carter said the department is attempting to separate crimes against the person from crimes against property. “In terms of both confidentiality and transparency we want to give our citizens the best kind of law enforcement we can offer.”

Carter said he feels blessed to have the kind of support his department receives from the city council and the city manager. “They are good at thinking outside the box in helping us do what we do,” he said.

Being the police chief in West Point, Carter said, is definitely a non-stop, full-time job. “It sometimes seems like I have been the chief for 15 years, not just two,” he said. “But it is an honor, and I appreciate having the opportunity to do it. I promise the citizens of West Point to give 110 percent in the effort to be the best we can be with what we have.”

The coming of Kia to West Point in 2006 has brought with it some tremendous expansion. Before the Kia announcement, West Point was a city of approximately four square miles. It’s now three times bigger than that at 12.4 square miles. Something most Troup County residents thought they’d never live to see has happened. The cities of West Point and LaGrange touch each other on the north side of Sandtown Road off I-85.

“We have grown a lot in size over the last 15 years,” Carter said, “but I thank God we still have a close-knit community. We are growing, and that’s good. I remember in the old days when my lunch when I was on duty would be a hot dog, a Slim Jim and a Mountain Dew from the Spectrum store. An officer has more options than that now. We have come a long way in a short time in West Point. It has been good to see it, and I’m excited about the direction we are heading. It’s a great place to be, and exciting to think about where we will be just five years from now.”

A member of the club asked Carter if his department was still getting complaints about the new roundabouts near Exit 2 off I-85. He admits that it was really a mess when they first opened and there were many complaints. “There must have been five or six accidents the day they opened,” he said. “I will never forget the first time I drove through them. It was at night, and it was hard to maneuver through those orange and white barrels if you’d never done it before. But things have settled down. We aren’t getting the complaints we were getting at the start.”

The biggest complaint from people driving though West Point is the traffic signal at the intersection of West 8th Street and the four-lane coming across the river bridge. Very rarely, it seems, a driver coming across the bridge can get through the light without getting stopped by it.