Summer plans

The Rensselaer Park Board met on Monday evening in an on-line Zoom meeting to decide the fate of summer programs. After discussion, they decided to go forward with a season of youth baseball that will have practices start June 1 and games June 14. The reason for June 14 is this is the date of the start of the Governor's Stage 4, when large groups can be together. The season will be extended through most of July. The 176 kids who have signed up will be contacted to ask if they are still interested. If they are not, they will have their entry fee refunded. If they agree to go forward, there will be no refunds even if events cause the season to be shortened or canceled. There will be no organized team pictures this year.

Park Shelters will be available for rental after June 14. The programs that Heather Hall organizes will be scaled back and a new schedule prepared. The Spring Trail that was planned for April was canceled, but there will soon be a Senior Trail in Milroy Park. It will honor the graduating seniors from RCHS.

There was a long discussion of what to do with the LaRue Pool. The summer swim team season will not happen this year and the pool in DeMotte will not open. Kentland has not made a decision on whether they will open their pool and no one knew what Morocco was deciding. The Governor's guidelines say that pools can be open after May 24 with restrictions. There was concern that opening the pool entails several thousand dollars of expenses for water and chemicals and that if the pool then has to be shut, that money will have been wasted. There was also concern about the availability of life guards. Training that normally would have taken place in the high school pool was not done this spring and there are only eight guards signed up. However, because other pools will be or may be closed, some of the people who guarded at these pools may be interested in guarding at Rensselaer. Eventually the Board decided not to make a decision at this meeting but to poll the Board members in two weeks for a decision. (If you have strong feelings one way or the other, contact a Board member or leave comments on this blog or social media. The City website does not have a list of Board members and only has a telephone number for contact.)

This year there were plans to dedicate a plaque to Jimmy McFall, the boy whose drowning in the quarry spurred the building of the pool. No one wondered if keeping the pool might encourage some kids to find other swimming options.

Nothing has been done yet with adult softball and the recommendation was to put out some publicity and see if there is enough interest to have a summer season.

Thousands of dollars of free labor have been supplied by local contractors working on park projects. In the next three weeks a lot of work will be done on the Blacker Fields. This week work on putting the topsoil back on the fields is underway.

I forgot to mention in the previous post that there will be early, in-person voting for the Primary Election for those who do not want to do the absentee ballots. Early voting will start May 26. In Rensselaer the polling site will be the former prosecutor's office in what was originally the REMC building. For more, see here.

Trying to make sense of the what is happening with the Corona Virus is almost impossible because there are so few reliable numbers. We have data on how many people have been tested and how many of those tests are positive, but what we do not have is data on how many people, tested or not, have been exposed to the virus. When populations in prisons or factories are tested, most of the people who test positive have had few or no symptoms. We have numbers on how many have died with the virus, but without knowing how many have had the virus, we do not know the death rate and how deadly this disease is. We do know that it is very dangerous in nursing homes and other facilities that care for the elderly and that it seems not to be much of a problem for the young. In the coming years the current response to this virus will be evaluated and re-evaluated. My guess is that a consensus will gradually form that there was a massive overreaction to it, that the "cure" was worse than the disease.