The end of March

 City Council meeting

The Rensselaer City Council met for its final March meeting on Monday evening. In Citizen's comments Stan Haines, who serves on the Rensselaer BZA and Plan Commissions, rose to praise Kevin Cochran, who is leaving the position of Building Inspector. He will be replaced by Josh Davis.

The first item on the agenda was a public hearing for the super voluntary annexation of Saint Joseph's College. Chris Janak from Bose McKenney & Evens began by explaining that no vote on the annexation could be taken at this meeting. At least 14 days must elapse between the public hearing and the vote. However, the Council could adopt the fiscal plan, which must be adopted before the vote on the annexation. Two citizens spoke next. They asked about the benefits and costs of the annexation and one of them noted that SJC has not been a good partner to the community. The cost will be a loss of $3700 in utility revenue (I do not know if that is a month or for the year). The City will assume control of Schuster Road on the south edge of the campus (the City has been maintaining it) and will also get responsibility for Daugherty Road (the road that leads to the sewage plant) and Sparling Road, both of which currently are maintained by the County. All the roads and utility infrastructure in the interior of the campus will remain the responsibility of the College. The benefits lie in the future. When development takes place (the assumption is that because SJC will never again be a four year college, the land will eventually be used for another purpose) the City will have  more control over what happens. This annexation will be easy because it is sought; a future annexation of a developer's project might be impossible. There were questions about whether the City might get stuck with the cost of removing decayed buildings and the response was that the annexation will not change that. Because the College is within the City's exclusion zone, it could be responsible just as it was for the removal of Grandma's restaurant west of I-65. There was a discussion about the need for housing. Most people who work in the City commute in and a lot of residents commute out. During the discussion, the Mayor mentioned that White Castle was considering expanding its plant and so was another company that was not ready yet to go public.

The amount of land in this annexation is 268 acres. In addition to the SJC land, it includes the County land where the Health Department is and a strip of private land along Daugherty Road that connects the main SJC parcel with the lot that has the old farm buildings.

The Council then adopted a resolution that allows the Redevelopment Commission to use TIF money for art works before it adopted the annexation fiscal plan that sets out the fiscal impact of the annexation. At the last meeting the Council opened two bids for work on roads funded by a Community Crossings grant. At this meeting it accepted a bid from Town and Country. The amount was less than the base bid read at the meeting, so I assume that some of the planned project was dropped.  The Council approved $3100 for the Gas Department's open house on April 28 from 11:00 to 1:00. In the past the Gas Department has obtained a grant that reimburses the cost of this event and is applying for that grant again this year.

The Council approved submitting a PER (Preliminary Engineering Report to the State Revolving Fund to see if financing might be available for improvements at the wastewater treatment plant, improvements that the City must eventually make. The Council approved a transfer of funds within the Gas Departments budget. A committee was formed to review fines and to see if they can be better enforced. There was a question of whether the City had an appointment to the School Board this year. Several people were confident that it did not. Several departments—electric, cemetery, gas, and parks—were given permission to hire summer help. A bid of $7300 was accepted to remove eight trees at Brookside Park along SR 114. April 27 is electronics recycling day. May 1-5 is clean-up week. 

Changes

The window of Fenwicks Distillery now has a sign

Remodeling of the of Forsythe mansion is underway. There are tenants for the upper floors.

More of the sidewalk that was ripped out last week was poured on Wednesday. This is the stretch in front of Printco.

There will be a new insurance office opening in front of Rules Auto.

27 trees were delivered to Rensselaer's Urban Forestry Council last week.

Some daffodils are blooming.

Window art

Windows downtown are being decorated with themes of Spring.

Some history updates

On March 21 I published a post about The Rensselaer Gazette, an early newspaper in Rensselaer. The editor was Daniel F. Davies. He was elected as sheriff in 1862 and died in office. (A Standard History of Jasper and Newton Counties, p 56.) Unfortunately one cannot read about that in the newspapers. There are no newspaper issues that survive from 1861 until 1868. Some of them were apparently lost in a Courthouse fire of 1864 (1864 is the date given in A Standard History; the book about the Jasper County Courthouse published for its centennial says the fire started on Jan 18, 1865.)

Benjamin Henkle had a store in Rensselaer. Below is an ad for the store that ran in several issues of the Rensselaer Banner in 1854.

He must have been a very versatile fellow because he also built the first brick courthouse:

Our friend Benj Henkle Esqr., we see has commenced work in earnest upon the new Court House Building, quite a number of hands, are now engaged on the work and from present appearances, we should judge that the foundation and first story of the edifice will be erected this fall.

(Jasper Banner, Volume 1, Number 35,Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 August 1854 p 2) A Standard History mentions him as the builder of the Courthouse, but spells his name Hinkle. 

Lots of pictures 3-23-23

EMS

On Tuesday I visited the construction site for the new EMS building. (It will be across SR 114 from the entrance to the Fairgrounds, in front of the Animal Shelter.) The concrete footings are in place.

While I was there a cement truck was delivering some concrete.

AppleTree

On Wednesday I received a tour of the new Appletree Childhood Education Center. The front door is locked and you need to press the screen on the post in front of the door to be buzzed in. You enter to the lobby, with some offices to the right.

The wall has the big Appletree logo.

From the lobby you can walk down the south corridor that has a kitchen and two bathrooms along it. The meals for the students come from the hospital. The two bathrooms are not mens and womens but child and adult.

Further along the corridor is a playroom.

At the far end is the nursery with eight cribs for infants.

A lot of the layout of the building is determined by State regulations. If a facility wants to be a licensed child-care center, they must be followed. That is why the capacity of this center is 75. However, in designing Appletree, Right Steps, which runs the day-to-day operations, had lots of input so it is the nicest of the centers that Right Steps staffs.

A four-seater stroller!

Most of the classrooms are on the north corridor. The room with the smallest toddlers was dark because it was nap time so we did not disturb them. The room for older toddlers had awake kids and we said hi. 

Like many schools, there is a policy that the children not be photographed, so the next place I took pictures was in an empty classroom for mixed ages. 

I could not resist a picture of the little potty in this room.

It is a beautiful facility. There were about 35 kids enrolled this week and another twenty are expected to join them next week. There is high demand for the seats for the youngest children because there are really no alternatives available in Rensselaer.

You can find more pictures and information here.


Art Show

The 34th Annual Regional Middle School Art show is now on exhibit at the Fendig Gallery. It will run until April 16. Gallery hours are Tuesdays noon to 4:00, Thursdays 3:00 to 6:00, and Saturdays noon to 2:00. The award program will be on April 16 1:30 at the First Presbyterian Church.

In middle school you begin to see potential in some of the artists.

The medium used here was scratchboard.

Other things

Local author Shannon Anderson was featured in a video produced by Lakeshore PBS. View it here.

There has not been a lot of work on the extension of the sewer line. Some work was done on the small lot that the City owns and the asphalt on the road next to it has been replaced with crushed stone. This is at the north end of Mattheson Street. 

Hopefully the very cold weather last weekend was winter's last gasp. The cold and strong wind seemed to depress the turnout at the Fair Boards dinner on Saturday.

Wednesday night and Thursday gave us more rain that we do not really need. At least it was not snow.

Another sign of spring: my rhubarb is starting to grow. 

I am ready for warmer weather.

A few meetings

 Remodeling of the former County Annex on the corner of Cullen and Kellner has begun. The sign is advertising for a retail occupant. I heard from a reliable source that there would be some coworking space in the remodeled building.

On Tuesday morning the sidewalks on the Cullen Street side of the building were torn out.

On Tuesday afternoon new sidewalks were being poured.

Rensselaer Redevelopment Commission

The Rensselaer Redevelopment Commission met on Thursday (3-16) afternoon and I was surprised to see a large audience of about 20 people. The main topic on the agenda was a request from Appleseed Childhood Education for funds to support the newly opened Appletree Center and the people attending were there to support the request.

The Appletree Center opened on March 6. It has the capacity for 75 but is not yet at that capacity as they are opening in stages. They had a waiting list of about 125. They will be open Monday through Friday all year.

The Center employs 15 people. The cost per student is about $14000 annually but few families are able to afford that amount. Tuition is on a sliding scale, depending on family income. There are some voucher programs that some families can use and the Center accepts those. However, the fact that this could not be a self-sustaining operation was realized from the beginning and finding outside support was part of the original plan. 

Appleseed had several letters of support in the packet prepared for the Commission and several people in the audience spoke in favor of the funding. The emphasis was on workers who without available childcare could not stay in the workforce, and some examples were cited. The Commission approved $130,000 for this year.

In other business, planning for a façade grant continues and may be ready for Commission action next month. The R&M building was mentioned, but no further plans have been made. The Commission approved paying three invoices.

JCBZA

The Jasper County Board of Zoning Appeals met Monday evening with only one item on the agenda, a request for a variance for lot width. The property owner said that there were two houses on the lot, one behind the other and the back house had been used by his father, who recently died. He would like to split off the back house preserving the tillable acres and to do that he needed to reduce the width of the entryway. The request was granted. The meeting lasted about ten minutes.

PTABOA

I noticed the agenda of a meeting of the Property Tax Assessment Board of Appeals as I arrived at the BZA meeting and decided to see what they were up to. They met Tuesday morning, and after swearing in members and deciding to keep the same officers, they approved their last minutes from October. Their first request was from NICHES Land Trust, which owns several nature preserves in Jasper County. They are a non-profit organization and requested that they be exempted from the property tax. The  other request was from Graceway Bible Baptist Church, which had purchased an adjoining lot to their already exempted property and wanted it exempted as well. Both requests were approved and the meeting ended about ten minutes after it started.


Municipal Primary Election


The primary election for Rensselaer City officials is scheduled for May 2. If you vote on election day, the polls are at the Remington Library and the Jasper County Fairgrounds. However, you can avoid the trip to the Fairgrounds by voting early at the Courthouse. The days you can vote are Tuesdays and Thursdays starting April 4, from 9:00-noon and 1:00-6:00. You will have to go through security and then up to the second floor.

County Council

The Jasper County Council met on Tuesday evening. After the usual preliminaries, Zyan Miller from the Jasper County Economic Development Organization requested an additional appropriation for the capital projects funding. These monies are from the innkeeper tax. The Tourism Board has already granted more for capital projects than was in the budget. The grants are for murals in Wheatfield, a mural south of DeMotte, and for a horse barn at the Fairgrounds. Nothing was passed at this meeting because the item must first be advertised, so it will be back on the agenda in April. There was some discussion of planters at the Courthouse and the horse barn. (JCEDO has announced its new new director, Sarah DeYoung. See more here.)


The Council then approved four additional appropriations that were needed for various reasons. About this time the computer running the Zoom session started updating and shut down the Zoom, which was restarted when the computer finished updating and restarted. (I am always a little tempted to attend via Zoom, but have seen way too many problems with it to trust it.) The Council again amended the Salary Ordinance, this time to make it read correctly. At the previous meeting they had amended it with the additions to salaries, not the full salaries.


The Council passed a motion to concur with a mandate from the judges to add money to the extradition fund. This fund is in the Court budget, but is actually administered by the prosecutor, who is the one to decide extradition. Apparently there have been a lot of extraditions this year and the fund has gone into the red.


There was then a discussion about what was needed to keep the County prosperous. The population of the County dropped a bit in the 2020 census, and the drop was especially large among the young. There was concern about the quality of education and how to have attractive opportunities for those entering the workforce.


The KV Post had a reporter at the meeting, which was nice to see. I hope his report gets shared with the Republican. There is a County surplus auction on Saturday at 9:00 at the County Highway Garage on SR 114.

I have more to write but will put it in a separate post.

The Rensselaer Gazette

A few weeks ago I mentioned that old Rensselaer newspapers on microfilm at the Rensselaer Library had been digitized and were now available on the Hoosier State Chronicles. At that time not all of the issues had made it to the Internet, but now they  have. The oldest issues are from the Jasper Banner in 1853 and the second oldest are from The Rensselaer Gazette in 1858. The Gazette began publishing in 1857 but the first year of the paper seems not to have survived. The preserved issues end in 1860.

The editor of the Gazette was D. F. Davies. I searched for him on findagrave.com and found two of his very young children buried in Weston Cemetery, but he, who died in 1865, is buried in Granville, Ohio.

The history of early newspapers in Rensselaer can be found in A Standard History of Jasper and Newton Counties (1916). Below are a couple of excerpts.

The very old newspapers were all weeklies and they contain very little local news. The Gazette (and others) had some state, national, and foreign news, but also short stories, poetry, and agricultural advice. I suspect Rensselaer and Jasper County in the 1850s were small enough so the local news was widely shared orally, so it may not have been as interesting to the locals as news from the wider world. Most of what can be considered local news was in the form of ads. (The population of Rensselaer was 241 in 1850 and in 1860 535.)

On the front page (each issue of the paper had four pages) there was a column on the left side that was called "Business Cards" Some of them were from Lafayette, Indianapolis, and New Bradford. (Recognize New Bradford? It was the community that adopted the name Monon when it was incorporated.) Below are some of the Rensselaer cards.

Hopkins died young. I think Spitler was George W Spitler, an interesting character who was featured on the first Weston Cemetery Walk. Everyone from Rensselaer should recognize the name Milroy.

The McCoy bank was already in business in 1858. The Thomas McCoy involved in the bankrupcy of this bank in 1904 was the grandson of the McCoy listed here.

Page three and four were mostly a mix of legal notices with local, area, state, and national ads.

John M Austin died in 1877. His son was a prominent lawyer in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Isaac Stackhouse left Rensselaer for greener fields in Lafayette and then near Indianapolis. His daughter, Eleanor, was a prominent author featured  in the 2021 Weston Cemetery Walk.

Ambrotype and melainotype were early photography technologies.

I am not sure which Thompson is mentioned here. 

The Gazette rarely published obituaries, but made an exception for Benjamin Henkle. He served in the State Legislature from Lafayette; I wonder what prompted him to leave and move to the little village of Rensselaer.

I was intrigued by the typeface in the masthead.

 I searched for a digitized version but could not find one, so I decided, based on a very limited sample of characters, to create what the typeface may have looked like. (Typography is a hobby of mine, the subject of a different blog.) I have replaced the picture at the top of the blog with a new version showing this typeface. 

The Ides of March 2023

 Winter lingers

We are less than a week away from the vernal equinox but winter is lingering. We woke up to snow on both Sunday and Monday.

On March 16 we will finally get 12 hours of daylight. (The atmosphere refracts or bends sunlight, so the sun appears above the horizon a bit earlier than it would if the earth had no atmosphere.)

Board of public works meeting

The monthly Board of Public Works meeting was held Monday evening before the City Council meeting. It approved two task orders that will keep spending for lead line replacement separate from other spending for the waterworks project. This was done to satisfy the State Revolving Fund, which is providing money for the project. It also passed transferring $10,000 within the budget for Commonwealth Engineering, subject to USDA conference. This is for the lift-station project.

The Board approved a pay request #10 for Thieneman for $595,460 and for Commonwealth Engineering for $18,434 for the lift-station project.  They approved a SRF disbursement request that involves a way of paying for services that I do not understand. Two firefighter applications were approved

City Council meeting

At Monday's meeting the City Council approved an update to the building code that raises several fees and also approved changes to the policies and procedures ordinance that updates them to be consistent with changes the Council has made since 1917. A committee had spent several months preparing this update.

The gas tracker for March will reflect a 9.5¢ decrease per hundred cubic feet. The electric tracker will reflect a $4.11 decrease per 1000 kilowatt hours.

Two bids were received and opened for the 2023 Community Crossings street work. One, from Milestone Contractors of Griffith, had a base bid of slightly more than a million dollars and the other, from Town and Country from DeMotte was for slightly less than a million dollars. The bids were given to the consultants from First Group to examine. They will bring back a recommendation that will probably be on the agenda of the March 27th meeting. The paperwork needs to be submitted to the State by April 6.

In the comments section of the meeting, Mr Cover said that he had been given a tour of the power plant and highly recommended that the other Council members take the same tour to see what was happening there. (After the meeting I heard mention that the City had received payment for the Wärtsilä  engine, so sometime in the next few months it would be moved. That will be quite the task because it is huge.) The Forestry Council received a grant to plant 27 trees this year and for the fifteenth year Rensselaer has earned the Tree City designation. Some trees on the north of Brookside Park need to be taken down because they are shedding branches.

 
The Street Department received permission to hire five summer employees. When work begins on the water tower near the Interstate, the underground piping will be installed before work on the tower itself is built.

Tourism Commission

The Tourism Commission met Tuesday morning. The revenues from the inns-keeper tax are down this year compared to last year; the slowing economy seems to be a reason. The Wheatfield Chamber is working on raising money for a protective coating for the murals planned there this summer. They are still working on finding walls. In Rensselaer walls at Ayda's and City Hall ave been offered.

 
There was a discussion of how to increase awareness of what the Tourism Commission does. One suggestion was that grants should be given with the provision that the Jasper County Tourism be acknowledged in the finished project. There is no signage recognizing Jasper County Tourism at the Blacker Fields even though Tourism gave $110,000 for the project.

There was a funding request from the LEAP (Leading the Education About Pigs) Foundation to help with a mural on the new Belstra Farm and Garden Greenhouse on SR 10 south of DeMotte. This is a new retail outlet. It is along the highway and the mural will be highly visible to traffic. No artist has been selected yet. The Commission approved a grant of $4500.

Last month the Commission heard a proposal for a new horse barn at the Fairgrounds but wanted more information, especially about other funding. The project has found $8000 in outside funding and the Fair Board has met and said that they would pick up whatever funding is needed beyond this and a grant from Tourism. The Horse area has 18 events scheduled for this year, beginning in April and continuing to October and they attract many out-of-state visitors. After a discussion that drifted to talking about whether and how people who camp at the Fairgrounds should be charged the inns-keeper tax, the Commission approved a grant of $40,000. The hope is that the building will be up in June or July.

This was the last meeting for JCEDO director Stephen Eastridge. The JCEDO Board was aware of his upcoming departure about six weeks ago and a replacement is in the works. No name was given.

Other things

The Jasper County Airport Authority met on Tuesday evening and most of the meeting was devoted to the nuts and bolts of running the airport. The Board approved hiring an intern for the summer. There was discussion of the possibility of hiring an assistant manager, a topic that will come up in future meetings. The airport course for high school students, which was a dream of the previous airport manager, may finally happen in the fall. The board passed some fees for aerial applicators (crop dusters) who use the airport.

The Rensselaer Plan Commission met on February 9. The meeting was very short. It passed a recommendation that will go to the City Council, which will set up a way to fund art with money coming from the Redevelopment Commission.

On Saturday the Rensselaer Library had its annual free Train Day with some elaborate model train sets.