FERRIDAY — Sometimes, Glen McGlothin feels like he’s back in 1988.

That was the first year of his first mayoral term, and, in his own words, one year into his latest term is, “déj vu.”

“I dealt mainly with water and sewer problems then and I am dealing mainly with water and sewer now,” he said.

In July ’88, McGlothin took office and a cut the ribbon on a brand new, immaculate water plant.

“I was happy as a lark, because I knew we had water problems back them, and I thought I wasn’t going to have to deal with them,” he said.

Within a year, however, the town had had to triple its chemical schedule and add a 24-hour watch crew at the plant to make sure everything was working properly.

And the rest is history.

When he took office in July 2008, McGlothin stepped in at a time when the town had formulated a plan with an outside company to address its water problems.

Since then, however, that plan has not only fallen through, but the town has been placed on an indefinite boil-water notice by the Department of Health and Hospitals.

This time, however, McGlothin said he’s tired of throwing money at a plant that he said has never and will never function correctly, and he’s working to get whatever funding he can to address the problem and get the town off the boil-water notice.

“I hope to have a direction for our water system by the end of the year,” he said.

The town sewer plant was — in McGlothin’s words — “a wreck” when he took office last July. The plant was deteriorating after several years of neglect.

It had fallen into such a state of disrepair that the Department of Environmental Quality sent five engineers to Ferriday to look the plant over, but not before the town had replaced the plant with all new ultra-violet lights to address extremely high ammonia levels, replaced the electrical system and replaced five aerators in addition to repairing an existing one.

“The only downside to that after we did that work we got a grant that includes five new aerators,” McGlothin said. “But I wasn’t going to wait around and let the DEQ stick me with anything else.”

Next on the sewer agenda is to replace the sewer lines, McGlothin said.

But sewer and water issues aren’t the only things that McGlothin has done in the last year.

When he took office, he replaced a number of the members of the police department, which at the time was beleaguered with indictments and a reputation for nit-picky ticket writing.

“I made that move because you cannot harass people,” McGlothin said. “You can write legitimate tickets, but you cannot harass people.”

Since then, people have mistakenly taken that change as permission to speed through town, something McGlothin said the police department is currently cracking down on with a ticket-writing campaign.

“I had a guy call me and say, ‘I thought you weren’t writing tickets anymore,’” McGlothin said. “I told him, ‘If I drove through Monroe at 25 miles above the speed limit, you can bet they’d write me a ticket there.’”

Some of the changes he’s seen through the year, however, were as much about the citizenry galvanizing itself to ensure the town has a future. Case in point — Ferriday’s entrance into the Cleanest City Contest.

The contest, at first smirked at from a distance by some, became a project for all of the town’s civic club, as well as town crews, to clean up littered and embarrassingly overgrown spaces.

Since the contest — Ferriday placed third — the town has continued cleanup efforts.

The contest came at a time when the citizens needed it, and he was glad the clubs took it upon themselves to enter the town in it, McGlothin said.

“The town needed cleaning and the people needed a morale boost,” he said. “If you let your town get to a certain point, of course people are going to feel down about it.”

Other town rejuvination projects — specifically downtown — are under way, and McGlothin said the town will soon let bids for the long-delayed farmer’s market project at the end of Louisiana Avenue.

Likewise, though the state is reducing its culture and tourism budget, he said the town will continue its efforts to be designated a Main Street community.

“Our downtown project is still viable, and we are still working on it,” he said. “We are going to continue what we are doing, maybe just on a smaller scale.”

Looking even further into the future, the mayor said he would like to see a new fire station built before he leaves office.

Since taking office, McGlothin has seen 15 new businesses come to town, and sales taxes — significantly impacted by Walmart’s exit — have begun a slight creep upward.

“We’ve been forced to do a lot of catching up, but it can only get better,” he said.

“Bottom line, I don’t want to see Ferriday written off.”