A visit to the jail

On Tuesday morning I visited the jail. I had never been in the building before. I missed the open house that they had when the building was completed because I had an important family event that took me out of town.

My visit was voluntary, and I did not actually see the jail itself. Rather I arrived a bit before 10:00 and waited with some other people in the lobby until a deputy arrived and escorted us up to the second or third floor for the monthly sheriff's sale.

I had no idea what to expect and was not even sure how a property got listed for a sheriff's sale. I found out that the sheriff's sale is part of the foreclosure process. If you stop paying your mortgage, the holder of the mortgage will go to court to get a judgement against you. In Indiana that will result in your house ending up at a sheriff's sale.

In the sale on Tuesday 26 properties had been listed, but the sale of 13 of them had been canceled because the person who owed on the house had reached some kind of agreement with the mortgage holder. In each of the thirteen properties that were put up for bid, a representative of the mortgage holder submitted the initial bid. I could not see any relationship between the bids and the amount of the mortgage that was listed on the sale flier. Sometimes the bid was a bit more than the mortgage amount and sometimes it was much less. For example, on one house the mortgage was listed at $227,966.73 but the bid was $108,000. Here the bid was less than half the mortgage amount. Another house had the mortgage listed as $64,135.14 but the bid was $67,928.08, more than the mortgage.

This last example illustrates one very weird thing about the auction. The opening bids were usually not nice round amounts like $108,000, but more often amount that went down to the penny, such as $96,698.87.

The auction was quick. For twelve of the properties, the opening bid from the representative of the mortgage holder was the only bid. Only in one case were there additional bids. On that property three people got into the bidding and raised the price about $4500 over the opening bid.

There were 13 other people at the auction and I am sure they all knew a lot more than I did or do. The sheriff had a big disclaimer saying that any bidder needed to do research to make sure that there were no liens on the house. In the past few years two properties that were purchased as these sales had unknown mortgages, and they resurfaced to cause problems for the persons who bought the houses.

Now I can cross "Attending a sheriff's sale" off my bucket list.

Groundbreaking news

Today was the groundbreaking ceremony for the Farm Credit Services building that will be built on Drexel Drive. There were a lot of people there.

Many people who were involved with Farm Credit Services were introduced and thanked as part of the ceremony. Then everyone was invited to Ricos for snacks and a chance to ask questions. They had an impressive cake there. (Too bad it was Ash Wednesday.)

 The building will be about 7000 square feet, about double the size of their present office. It will be brick and should harmonize with the Demotte State Bank. Farm Services has a corporate look that they want their offices to have, so it may look like this office. The floor plan of the office is shown below. It will have a conference room and two kinds of offices, one that is open (is that the same as a cubicle?) and one that it private, which must mean it has a door. They expect to be ready to move in this summer.

 The Farm Credit system goes back almost a century, but the handout they distributed said that it was not until 1985 that it joined the Rensselaer community. It began with four employees and has grown to 9. Their office volume is $153 million--I am not sure if that represents the outstanding loans that have been issued through the Rensselaer office or something else. As lenders, they must have a source of funds, and their source is AgriBank, which I recall as the Farm Credit Bank of St. Paul when I was a Minnesotan. If you want to try to make more sense of this institution, you can start on the Wikipedia page.

So expect to see a series of posts over the next few months following the construction of this building just as there were posts about another construction project on Drexel Drive, the medical building that from the outside seems to be pretty close to complete, though it might look quite different on the inside.

20th Anniversary Regional High School Art Exhibition

The 20th Anniversary Regional High School Art Exhibition sponsored by Prairie Arts Council and Saint Joseph's College is on display in the lobby of the Core Building at SJC until March 1. It features student art from Rensselaer Central, West Central, Tri-County, South Newton, North Newton, and Kankakee Valley High Schools. There are a lot of drawings and paintings and at least one batik, shown below.

There are also some pottery items, these from South Newton students.

Something new for me was zentangle art. The name is trademarked, and it is a way of organizing doodles. The one below was done by a Rensselaer student.

There were several others on display by North Newton students.

There is always enough talent in the area high schools to make this exhibit interesting. The awards program for will be on Sunday, February 24 from 1:30 to 3:00.

The Fendig Gallery has its annual Limelight on Special Creations exhibit on display until March 8. It is sponsored by Prairie Arts Council and Cooperative School Services to celebrate Disability Awareness Month. Below is one that caught my attention.

It is pointillism done with letters.

Coming soon (Updated)

This afternoon workers were erecting a "Coming Soon" sign on Drexel Parkway south of the Wal-Mart store, between NAPA and the Demotte State Bank.

What is coming soon? Farm Credit Mid America. The ground breaking ceremony will be Wednesday at 1:00. This is not a new business moving to Rensselaer but an existing business moving. They currently are located at 201 N Van Rensselaer St, in the same building as the Fifth Third Bank.

I hope to update this post later this week. Speaking of updates, there is a new update on Thursday's post on Demolishing Monnett.

Update: I stopped by the Farm Credit Services Office today (Tuesday) to ask why they are moving. They said their current quarters are too small for their nine or ten employees, that as a financial institution they thought that they should own their office, and that the current site has very low visibility, which they would like to change.

Farm Credit Services is a cooperative organization, which means it is neither owned by shareholders nor sponsored by the government. It gives loans to farmers for farm operations, but also will make loans to people living outside of the city limits for housing. If you live in Rensselaer you might qualify for loans if you have farm income.

While I was there, a lady, Jody, came in to pick up some fliers for the Rensselaer Community Garden and told me I could write about it. There will be a community garden this spring located north of Rensselaer along the east side of SR 231, south of the Harvest Baptist Fellowship. If you would like a plot, call Jody at 3711 or email her at her hotmail address, which is rcga13. For those who are new to gardening, there are three free classes coming up. On February 19 at the Purdue Extension Office there is a class on Seed Starting Basics. It is at 7 pm CST. On March 2 there is an Intro to Community Garden Workshop Day from 9AM to 12 PM at the Harvest Baptist Fellowship. And on March 14 at 7 PM there will be a class at the Purdue Extension Office on Planning Your Garden.

Then Jody told me I should give some publicity to the Rensselaer Spring Gala being held on March 9. The doors open at 6:30 at the Rensselaer Central High School. It is a fund raiser for Teen Mission Rensselaer, sponsored by four or five area churches. During July a group of teens spends a week doing community service jobs around Rensselaer. They live at the Bethany Church during that week. Among events at the Gala will be a silent auction and a talent show.

Science Olympiad 2013

I stopped by the Science Olympiad today to see if I could take an interesting picture. The best I could do was this one:

It was an event where the student had to build a robot arm and then control it. It had to pick up ping pong balls, pencils, nails(?) and wooden rods and place them into the containers.

The results, given in Excel files, are available here. In the high school competition, Munster had two teams and they finished first and second. (Only one can advance to state.) Marian was third, then Peru. Lake Central had two teams and they finished fifth and seventh. Winamac was sixth, South Newton eighth, Tri-County ninth, and North Judson-San Pierre tenth. The teams that were at the bottom had only partial teams. Given the way the scores are computed, it is better to field a bad team in an event than no team at all.

In the middle school competition, the order of finish was Wilbur Wright, Taft, Burris (two teams, third and sixth) Rensselaer, Winamac, KV, Hebron, South Newton, TriCounty, and North Judson-San Pierre.