April has flown by

April has flown by and it was a cruel month. The magnolias are now blooming.

Paving is scheduled to begin this week. Last week sod was laid next to the new concrete curbs and sidewalk along Grace Street. Several streets were milled, including parts of Kannal, Milroy, and Jackson.  Below is a picture of a truck watering the newly-laid sod. In it you can see the new curbs and sidewalk and the milled street.

The Indiana Department of Transportation announced that this week the new lanes will be opening on I-65 at Lafayette. The announcement is here. INDOT Northwest announced changes to the schedule for repairing the bridge on SR 231 over the Iroquois River north of Rensselaer. The work will begin at the end of July and the bridge will be restricted to one lane with a traffic signal directing traffic.

Tree cutting should be mostly done. Over 60 large trees, mostly ash, were removed. Below is part of a large maple that was on Front Street.

The work on the water main at the end of Milroy is not yet finished. There are a variety of other utilities under the street and great care must be taken in excavating. It appeared that the workers were using a jet of water to remove the dirt around some of the pipes. I hope the water main never springs a leak there or it will be a nightmare to fix.

SJC has announced more details of what it sees as its future. It wants to start a two-year program with Marian University as a partner. It also has a list of buildings it considers essential for its renewal. With the exception of Justin Hall, the other dorms do not make the list. Halleck Center was also not on the list. See the SJC website for more.

The Parks Department held its delayed Spring Fling on Saturday and the cold, windy weather discouraged people from attending. I think they shut down early because when I returned at 11:00 everyone was gone and the inflatables were deflated.

Greene's Furniture is for sale. If it closes, Rensselaer will be without a furniture store for the first time in over a century.

Finally, I noticed a fisherman on the Iroquois on Sunday. It seemed to be such a peaceful scene that I could not resist taking a picture.

More meetings

We are finally getting spring-like weather.  On Sunday a large crowd was watching a soccer game at Brookside Park.

On Monday evening the Rensselaer City Council met. They heard about an escort ride that will begin the Vietnam Wall event. The ride/parade will be on May 23 at 4:00 pm and will go through the downtown. The Wall project still needs volunteers; they are about 60% filled.

John Julien from Umbaugh was there to support a bond ordinance for constructing a second gas tap into the trunk line, this one in the Pleasant Ridge area. The ordinance sets out the conditions of the the bond and is a long legal document. The target is to sell the bonds in late June or July. The City is trying to buy a 1/3 acre lot near Pleasent Ridge at the tap point. The Council suspended rules so they could do the final passage of the ordinance at the meeting.

The Council then repealed an ordinance it had passed in 2015. That ordinance set conditions for anyone who wants to produce their own power (with solar panels, for example) and wants to interconnect their generation with the City grid. Recently IMPA changed policy and will now purchase power from anyone who has their own generation, so the City will no longer assume that role. It will, however, check any installation for safety and to make sure it meshes properly with the City electrical supply. Currently no one in Rensselaer is supplying their own power.

The Council next approved a contract with First Group, a company that assesses roads and which the City has previously used to support grants from the Community Crossings program, which funds a lot of the road construction currently underway in Rensselaer. The Council also approved spending $1900 to remove two trees (in addition to the 60 that are currently being removed). They are large trees, one on Vine and one on Front Street.

Prairie Arts Council received approval to use Potawatomi Park for the Rock the Arts Festival on July 28.

The City received an award for being a 10-year Tree City and will fly a Tree City flag in Milroy Park.

The Park has rescheduled its Spring Fling event for this coming Saturday from 9 till noon. On May 4 the fire men will have an all you can eat dinner at the fire station from 5:00-9:00 and on the same day the gas department hosts its Pipeline Awareness event.

Tree cutting is about 60% finished.

Paving on Grace Street may begin on Monday. Below is a picture of the sidewalk being installed along Grace Street.

The water main for Well 8 on Sparling has been installed except for the junction where Milroy meets Sparling. The crew ran into many problems last week as the bore hole kept collapsing and they had to dig out many spots. On Friday I saw them still working at 7:00 pm and was told that they did not finish until 11:00 pm. The connection at Sparling and Milroy is tricky because they must avoid a large storm sewer, a regular sewer line, and a water main.

Later in the evening the Jasper County BZA met to consider a special exception for a storage unit along SR 10 near Wheatfield. The lot is zoned general commercial, but the code says that storage units must be separately approved. This is a case that was before the BZA a couple times a few months ago. After an hour of discussion and concerns from neighbors, the special exception was approved. Perhaps the most humorous part of the proceeding was when a neighbor asked why there were surveyor stakes in his back yard, only to be told that those stakes marked the property line.

Odds and Ends, 4/19/2018

Work continues on the water main along Sparling. The south end of the main seems to be installed and on Thursday there was a small gap between the part that had been put in place by digging and the part put in place by directional boring. In the picture below you can see a gas main on the right of the picture and in the lower left, in the shadow, a water main that supplies customers.

 From what I could tell, the pipes still have not been installed at the north end of Sparling.

The fencing is up for what will become a solar park on the north side of Rensselaer. The workers still need to finish putting the barbed wire on the top of the fence.

 I found another flower of early spring, dandelions. They were along Vine Street.

Saint Joe's was in the news this week. They are planning what they are calling "The Purple Tie Dinner" on June 9 at the Farmhouse Restaurant. The featured speaker will be Mike Ditka. The proceeds from the dinner will be used to refurbish Schweiterman Hall; general admission is $175. You can read more at the SJC website.

There were a couple of meetings on Tuesday evening. At the Jasper County Historical Society meeting Stephanie Johnson reviewed the 400 or so letters that the late Ralph Fendig wrote home during World War II. He was stationed in Indiana, England, Belgium, and Germany while in the military and worked as a pharmacist well behind the front lines. Much of his life in the military was apparently quite boring (I suspect that that is the experience of many in the military). He took advantage of his free time to explore the countryside, visit old buildings, and attend as many movies and performances as he could.

 Fendig's drug store was located at the corner of Washington and Van Rensselaer. The building burned more than 20 years ago and the site is now a parking lot. The Fendig name lives on in two cultural organizations, the Fendig Summer Theater and the Fendig Gallery at the Carnegie Center.

The Jasper County Council met on Tuesday in an uneventful meeting. It heard a report from Honeywell about the proposed upgrades to cooling and heating in the Court House. The Council passed the financial management plan that Umbaugh had prepared. (The Commissioners had passed it at their April meeting.) Judge Bailey requested additional appropriations for an upcoming trial that will require interpreters. This trial may be the first of three similar trials. In a discussion of taxes, it was noted that because the assessed value of farmland is falling, the tax rate will be rising. Most Jasper County residents will see higher property taxes this year and next.

Dutchman's Breeches

The cold April weather has a lot of people looking for signs of spring. (There are snow flurries outside my window as I write this.) On Friday I found a stand of an early spring flower, Dutchman's Breeches (Dicentra cucullaria) south of Rensselaer.

Below is a closeup of the flower.

For more information about the plant, see here, here, or here.

Odds and Ends, April 2018

The Park Spring Fling scheduled for Saturday was canceled due to the weather.

Walsh and Kelly, the street contractors, have been busy installing curbs and sidewalk ends.

I am surprised how quickly this work is being completed.

Most of the curbs along Grace Street are finished. A sidewalk is planned for the west side of the street.

 LGS Plumbing is pulling pipe along Sparling. They seem to have run into some problems because they have dug a number of pits and trenches along the route. They were using a tractor to lift the drill head in this section and I have no idea of what the problem was.

On Tuesday evening (April 10) the Jasper County Republican Women hosted a candidate forum at the Jasper County Community Services building. Candidates who will be on the Republican May primary ballot were invited. Each candidate who attended was allowed three minutes to speak. Members of the audience were invited to submit written questions but no questions or comments from the audience were otherwise permitted. The format was not a debate format and candidates were told to avoid bad-mouthing other candidates.

What follows are my impressions of the evening. Others who were there may have somewhat different impressions.

First up were candidates for U.S. Congress. Three of the four who are on the ballot attended. There was very little difference in the stances they took and the policies they advocate. All are army veterans.

Jim Baird is from the Greencastle area. He served in Vietnam and has a PhD from the University of Kentucky. He is a farmer and with his wife started a home-health care company. He stressed his advocacy for agriculture. He is missing his left hand. Diego Morales lives in Plainfield. He was a senior advisor for Mike Pence when Pence was governor and worked on economic development for the Pence administration. He has an MBA from Purdue. Jared Thomas is the youngest of the three, only 28 years old. He is a graduate of Harrison High School in Lafayette and of West Point. He served in Iraq. He had spent Tuesday going door-to-door in Rensselaer and I saw him campaigning again on Wednesday.

Judge Potter is unopposed in the primary. He mentioned the seriousness of the opioid problem that has affected everyone connected to law enforcement. Over 1% of children in Jasper County are in foster care, many because of drug abuse by parents.

There are three people running for prosecutor in the Republican primary. The incumbent is Christine Haskell Bogen. She stressed her work on family problems: child abuse, sexual assault, and child support. Jacob Taulman has served as town attorney for several Jasper and Newton County towns and has been a public defender in both Jasper and Newton County. Rick Kallenbach is a former prosecutor. He stressed his work in prosecuting drug offenses while he was in office.

There are two candidates for Sheriff. (Sheriff Risner is term-limited; he cannot run for re-election). First up was Scott Balch. He graduated from Crawsfordville High School in 1985 and was recruited by colleges to play basketball. He stressed the lessons he learned as a student athlete in helping him deal with people when he entered law enforcement. He served as a state trooper based in Lowell until he retired and has lived in Jasper County while he was a state trooper. Since 2011 Pat Williamson has been the chief deputy of the Sheriff's Department. He graduated from Rensselaer High School and initially intended to go into agriculture but was recruited for police work by a former Sheriff. In 2016 he helped start the Vivitrol program in the jail and probation departments. (Vivitrol blocks the high from opioids.)

There were not a lot of questions submitted by the audience, but someone very interested in animal control had questions for all three candidates for prosecutor and both candidates for sheriff.

There are two candidates for surveyor. Jim Mattocks runs an excavating company and he said that he is unhappy with the way some of the work has been done. Vince Urbano, the incumbent, read his remarks and defended the work that his office has done. Much of the work of the surveyor involves drainage issues.

Also speaking, some very briefly, were candidates who are unopposed on the May ballot: Fishburn for Clerk, Hoffman for Assessor, Maxwell for Commissioner, and Norwine, Fritts, Jordan, and Bontreger for Council.

The last speaker was Doug Gutwein, who is unopposed in the primary. He is seeking what he says will be his last term. He used his time to speak on what he considers to be his most important accomplishment in the legislature, pushing a bill for infant testing of a genetic disorder called SMA (spinal muscular atrophy). It affects about one in every 10,000 births and the result until recently was that the baby died before the second birthday. Recently a treatment was discovered that stops the progression of the disorder (but does not reverse damage already done). So if an infant is diagnosed, treatment can be started at birth and the child can have a normal life. Gutwein became interested in the issue when a relative had a child with the disorder. Indiana is the third state in the nation to require testing for the disorder.