Things we welcome and things we do not

We are already ten days into 2010 2020. Tempus fugit!

A week ago I was traveling on SR 10 in the northern part of the County and was surprised to see many sandhill cranes. I had assumed that they would have flown south by now.

On Thursday evening there was a meeting that was part of an effort to form a Cooperative Invasive Species Management Area (CISMA) group in Jasper County. Its purpose would be to educate people about the problem of invasive plant species. Native plants have many different insects that feed on them and help keep them under control. Sometimes a plant from abroad, which has natural controls in its native environment, will not have insect predators when it arrives in the a new environment and will expand rapidly, crowding out native plants and thus harming native insects and animals. Starting sometime this spring selling, bartering, or giving any of 44 different plants will be illegal. (See the article here.) More information about invasives can be found at this link. There were 17 people at the meeting and the next meeting, if you are interested in the topic, is tentatively planned for Feb 20 at 6:00 pm in the Carnegie Center.

The Tourism Commission had a meeting scheduled for Friday at 10:00 in the Court House. The meeting did not have a quorum, so no actions were taken. Ed Feight, who is an appointee of the Rensselaer mayor, submitted a letter of resignation. Most of the meeting was taken up by a discussion of the DeMotte Little League program. (See their website here.) The Demotte Little League had received a grant from the Tourism Commission for $8500 to restore nine ball fields. DeMotte owns the fields and leases them to the Little League group. In addition to filling in the non-grass areas with new fill, the group replaced scoreboards, added dugouts to the five fields that did not have them, and renovated a concession stand. All of this cost much more than the $8500, but there were grants from others and fundraising. The next big project the group wants to tackle is lighting, which will be expensive and they plan to make a presentation at the next Tourism Commission meeting on February 7.

This past year DeMotte Little League added a challenger division, which is for kids with disabilities. They were awarded one of the State Little League tournaments for 2020, for the 8-9-10 year-old girls. They may get another tournament in 2023 for baseball.

I found a link to an article by Larry DeBoar, who writes on local economies. (See here.) He found GDP date for counties. (See here.) Jasper County had a GDP of $1,311,535,000 in 2018, which was the 45th highest in Indiana but was down from the previous three years. Our growth rate was almost the lowest in the State. I thought that might be due to the SJC closing, but I found another table (starting here, clicking GDP in current dollars) that suggested it was due to a drop in agricultural production. The numbers for agriculture seem to be very low, so I may be missing something.

Finally, I received an e-mail from Work One asking that I spread the word that Work One is still providing services. Below is the attachment they sent.

Did you know that good weather in the summer is good for the hotel business, but good weather in the winter is bad for the hotel business?