A lot of pictures

Brick Streets

This week workers are removing the bricks from the last bit of Harrison Street. 

On VanRensselaer it seems the water main is finished and now the workers are installing storm sewers.

The street is lined with concrete sections of storm-sewer pipe.

On Wednesday the first bit of the storm sewer was finished.

There are a lot more supplies near the intersection of VanRensselaer and Harrison. I think the blue pipe is water main but do not know what the black pipes are for.

Art Show

The Fendig Gallery is currently showing the last of their regional art shows, this one of art by middle-school students. An assignment for students from one school was to do a picture of their names done in sign language. 

The ever-popular zantangle art was another assignment.

This happy meal is done in clay.

My favorite picture in the exhibit used a medium that I had not realized was an art medium: coffee.

The exhibit runs until April 4.

Window Art

Downtown businesses are feeling Spring. Again this year spring art is being painted on the windows. Cup of Joy has a busy bee.

Earth Magic

The Rensselaer Library

First Merchants Bank

Sblended Nutrition

Unique Finds

Below the artists are at work.

Notes

Gutwein Seed Services moved into its new location at the end of January. The new sign appeared this week.

The vernal equinox this year was on March 19. The sun is now north of the equator. Do you notice the difference in sun angle? 

Despite some cold nights and a lot of wind, shrubs are sprouting leaves and the magnolias are starting to bloom.

Jasper County Plan Commission meeting

The Jasper County Plan Commission met Monday evening with one cause on their agenda, a rezone from A1 to A3 for Rose Acre Farms. The land is at the intersection of US 231 and SR 16 where they have their hatchery. Rose Acres wants to move to providing cage-free eggs, and to do that, they need even the hatchery to be cage free. They want to tear down two of the buildings and replace them with larger buildings. In the process of obtaining the permits, they discovered that the land was not zoned properly for what they are doing. So this request for a rezone is a correction for actions that should have been taken by the County in the 1980s when that facility was constructed.

There are three buildings presently used for chickens. The plan is to tear down two of them and replace them. The third will be converted to other uses. Presently the facility has State approval for up to 520,000 birds (if I heard the numbers right) and the new facility will be able to house up to 390,000. They sent the request on to the Commissioners with a favorable recommendation. The next meeting will be on April 15.

Rensselaer Advisory Plan Commission meeting

The Rensselaer Plan Commission met on Tuesday evening rather than the usual Thursday so there would be a quorum. The first item on the agenda was a request for advice from attorney Ned Tonner. He has clients who are doing estate planning and want to establish a trust to divide property among three sons after they die. They own land west of the Interstate but it is in Rensselaer's exclusion zone, so the matter falls to Rensselaer, not the County. The question they had was what was the best way to divide the land and one way to divide land is to create a subdivision. Some of the land they planned to sell to a farmer. There was no application at this meeting. The discussion was hard to follow because Mr Tonner kept pointing to various lots from A to F on a map that was facing the Commission. One of the lots would not have road frontage. The Commission told the family to come back with a new survey, combine two lots, create an easement to the lot that has no road frontage, and ask for a split.

The next item was a rezone request from Mayor Phillips for a property just to the west of the Interstate owned by the Molenaars. The City wants to extend water and sewer west of the Interstate but does not want to use State right-of-ways because if the State decides to expand or change the intersection, the City could bear the cost of rerouting these lines. Instead, the City would like to cross a bit north of the intersection and place the lines under the privately owned Molenaar land. That land is farmed, but it is zoned B2. The Molenaars would like it zoned A1. The Commission moved to set a public hearing for the rezone.

The next item was a review of height requirements for new buildings. There was a motion passed that I think was to review the whole zoning code.

There are a number of properties that are not in conformity with current zoning, in part because when a property changes ownership, the new owner is supposed to conform even if the old owner did not have that requirement. The Building Commissioner reviewed a number of situations, asking what the Commission thought. The first was the possibility of an elementary school called Harvest Christian Academy opening on the SJC campus. The Board did not think it would need a variance.

Two towing companies are out of variance with the zoning and the Commission thought they should ask for a variance. There is a new church, Truth Bible, meeting in the Ritz Theater and the Commission thought they should apply for a permit. Someone noted that the old Pub sold recently and a new business there might want a liquor license, which a church could block. The next meeting is scheduled for April 18.

The room was filling up for a BZA meeting that followed the Plan Commission meeting, but I did not stay for it. Instead I left and went to the County Council meeting. I did grab the agenda packet before I left. There were three requests for variances and I learned on Wednesday that all were approved. The Good Samaritan Food Pantry is moving from their current location on the corner of Harrison and VanRensselaer to the building behind Pizza King on College Avenue. They requested a variance of use to operate a charitable institution open to the public in a single-family residential district. (The Food Pantry plans to open in the new location on April 2.)

Shan Shan LLC has been remodeling the old house on 226 E Washington. The two upper floors are rented as apartments but the owner has not been able to find a business to rent the main floor. He now wants to rent the first floor and basements as apartments, but the building is in a B-3 district that does not permit residential units on the first floor.

The final request was from the Rensselaer Fire Department for a variance from developmental standards. They plan to erect a fire-training tower that may exceed the 40-foot height limit. In addition, their previously approved conditional use was for a building that resembled a house or a commercial building. The tower will be constructed from shipping containers.

Zoning locks property into limited uses but sometimes flexibility is needed. Some of the land along highways, for example, is useful for commercial uses, but there is more land than commercial uses need. The rest can be used for housing. However, over time the mix of commercial and housing will change as a town grows or contracts and the types of businesses change. It would be nice if there was a zoning classification that gave developers flexibility without having to always go before a board to get permissions.

County Council meeting

After the usual preliminaries, the County Council heard a presentation from Judge Potter about the problems the public-defender program is having and some suggestions to improve the situation. Jasper County pays public defenders considerably less than some neighboring counties and there is a shortage of lawyers in Northwest Indiana, partially caused by the recent closing of Valpo University's law school. In the past three years five public defenders have decided to work as public defenders in other counties to take advantage of higher pay. Most of the costs of public defenders are reimbursed by the State at 40%, but the Judge thinks that the County has not billed everything that can be billed. There is a public-defender board that is not as active as it is required to be and that has a hard time finding people to serve on it. The Judge would like a public-defender office to manage the program and he gave a binder of documents to the members of the Council with his suggestions. He will give the same documents the the Commissioners. The changes he would like to see made must be made by the Commissioners and financed by the Council.

Most of the rest of the meeting reviewed and approved a variety of additional appropriations. Some, like an additional for Part-Time Annex, were the result of mistakes in the budget. Money should have been encumbered from the 2023 budget for finishing the EMS budget, but was not, so it will be paid from this year's budget. The IT Department wanted to move the telephone/Cell/Internet expenses out of its budget to the Commissioner's budget. It was deleted from the IT Department but not included in the Commissioner's budget, so there was a $200,000 additional appropriation. The Sheriff's Department is down four dispatchers so there is move overtime and training costs, so an additional appropriation of $20,000 was made to cover it. At its last meeting, the Commissioners agreed to give the Jasper County Recovery House and the House of Grace each $30,000 from the Opioid Restricted Fund and the Council approved an appropriation for that purpose.