Ribbon cutting at NITCO

On Thursday afternoon NITCO had a ribbon cutting for its new office in what was the Blockbuster store.

 The interior has a completely different look than the offices of the former Rensselaer TV Cable, which NITCO purchased either at the end of last year or the start of this year.

 One of the NITCO people said that the building had been vacant for seven years. I knew that was not correct. Here is a post from June, 2016 mentioning the end of Blockbuster's going-out-of-business sale.

After the ribbon cutting, the president of the company made a few short remarks about how happy the company was to be in Rensselaer (they have been serving DeMotte and Mount Ayr) and how important broadband Internet is for the future of rural America. Later I asked one the NITCO officials how Rensselaer was connected to the Internet. There are connections both to Indianapolis and to Chicago, so there is redundancy. If one link is disrupted, our service should not be.

Here is a post about the last ribbon cutting I attended at this building. It is rather ironic that an Internet service provider is moving into the space that was last used for DVD rentals. The DVD rental market was squashed by streaming over the Internet.

A new Mexican restaurant will soon open at what used to be Martin's. The sign is up but the windows are still covered in paper.

 On Thursday morning part of the sidewalk along Milroy was being poured.

 I had been wondering what the sidewalk would look like along Sparling where a connection was needed between a sidewalk close to the street and one further back. The forms on Thursday morning showed how they made the connection. By the end of the day this section had been poured.

On Thursday morning the Property Tax Assessment Board of Appeals (PTABOA, pronounced Pita boa) met for the first time this year. The three members were sworn in and they elected a president and vice president. There were no appeals but the Board did approve several tax exemptions. Privately-owned cemeteries must file for an exemption every two years and they approved three of those. A church which had purchased an adjacent lot had that lot taken off the tax rolls. A landlord had the portion of property rented to the Indiana Department of Child Services exempted—I believe that DCS increased the amount of space it was using. In Remington what was Treasure Keepers is now Growing Patch and the organization running it changed its name to Seeds of Promise, and those changes prompted a request to continue the exemption. The meeting lasted about 15 minutes.