Rensselaer Adventures

This blog reports events and interesting tidbits from Rensselaer, Indiana and the surrounding area.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Did you know?

The County Commissioners had another meeting on Monday. Usually they have only one meeting each month, but this month they continued their meeting from April 7 and reconvened it on the 21st. There were a number of items on the agenda of limited public interest. The main item, the item for which the meeting was continued, was to open bids for renting three pieces of farmland the county owns, identified as the airport property, the highway or county farm, and the jail property. There were five bids submitted, most in the $250 to $300 per acre range. I had no idea what farm land rented for. Did you know?
However, the most interesting bit from the meeting was at the end with a discussion of GIS data. The county is switching GIS providers this year but there is a company that wants GIS data and the question was who should provide them, one of the providers or the county itself. (Data are plural, as my dissertation advisor kept pointing out to me many years ago. Did you know that?) Why was this interesting? Because the company that wants the data is interested in putting a wind farm in the eastern part of the county, stretching into Pulaski County. The area that they are interested in is between SR 114 and SR 14 east of Pleasant Ridge. I had not heard anything about this project before, but apparently many people had. Did you know?
Entering and leaving the meeting I could not miss that absentee voting is taking place. Two ladies were sitting at the table when I left, and they told me that they had not been very busy.
I got sample ballets for my area. There is only one contested race regardless of whether you take the Republican or Democratic ballot, that for congressman. There is a challenger for Todd Rokita on the Republican ballot, and on the Democratic ballot there are four people who want to challenge him in November. The primary election will take place May 6th. Did you know?

Perhaps the biggest news on Tuesday, the thing that affected the most people, was that SR 114 was closed in two spots, at Brookside Park and east of Rensselaer near Talberts. In both places a culvert is being replaced. A lot of people were surprised by the closure--they did not know that the road had been closed. Did you know?
One reason cars and trucks kept driving up to the barricade was that there were no signs for traffic that was coming south on US 231 and then taking the shortcut to SR 114 via Cullen Street. There was nothing at the intersection of Cullen and Clark to tell them not to go west on Clark.

The picture above shows the machine that was removing asphalt from the road.

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