Comings and goings, June 9 2014

Last week I saw work being done behind the building shown below but I did not stop to ask what was happening. I am sorry I did not. Today  the painted windows announced that we will be getting a taste of DeMotte in downtown Rensselaer, a Demotte Carpet store. Peeking inside, it looks like they have a lot of work left to do.

 Meanwhile, on the other side of the block, the InkSaneBarn tattoo place is gone, It opened in April.

Crushed stone has been spread by one of Vision Ag's structures on Walnut Street. It looks like it is for parking.

 On the other side of Walnut Street, the winter was hard on an old shed. The lot is for sale and the garage in the background has been used by Talbert.

The Dollar General building on SR 114 looks finished but I have not seen any indication when it will open. This morning a sprinkler system to water the grass was being installed and that was the only work being done.

At the Farmers' Market

The weekly Rensselaer Farmers' Market has been open for about a month and today I finally stopped by to see what was for sale. There were not a lot of fruits and vegetables, though there were some. However, you could buy direct-from-the-farmer beef, pork, and shrimp.

The guy selling shrimp is a farmer from Wheatfield who took up shrimping to add a bit more income to his farm. He started in January and has had a lot of assistance from the the shrimp farm in Benton County. He said that it has been a long learning curve to make to jump from traditional agriculture to aquaculture. I asked to see a shrimp and as he fished around trying to catch one, the shrimp were jumping out of the water--it was quite the sight. You can now buy shrimp as fresh as you can get anywhere along the coast right here in Jasper County. If you want to know more, visit the webpage or the Facebook page of JT Shrimp LLC.

 There were baked goods and some home made craft items available, but the one that caught my attention the most (perhaps because the vendor is an old high school friend of my daughter) was Aunt Bitty's Goat Milk Soap.

She said that she got into the goat soap business because she heard that goat soap was good for eczema and she had plenty of goats and plenty of goat milk. She makes the soap in different flavors (or should that be scents?) and different shapes. Sometimes kids get very excited when they see her soap because they think it is candy. I pointed out to her that that might indicated that there is a bigger market for candy than for goat milk soap.

Aunt Bitty has a Facebook page that tells more.

Now that summer has arrived, more vegetables should be maturing and there will be more available at the market. A visit to the market makes for a fun little shopping trip and you never know what or who you may find there.

Last day of school

Today was the last day of school for the local schools and the students from St. Augustine's spent much of it at Brookside park playing. I could not resist the temptation to go down and ask some of them why they were not back in the classroom working calculus problems (or at least taking another meaningless test).

 Starting tomorrow they can get to work helping their mothers and fathers. They can do things like weed the garden. This year I have had dozens of little walnut trees coming up in my garden and all over the yard. The squirrels carried them from the other end of the block and bury them last fall and now they are a nuisance. (Black Walnuts are toxic to tomatoes and some other garden plants.)

 Or they can play outside and enjoy nature. Maybe they will pay attention to some of the flowers blooming, like this coreopsis.

 Or this blue flag, a native iris that was very common in our area before extensive draining. Both the blue flag and coreopsis are blooming in the retention pond by the water treatment plant next to Iroquois Park.

School has extended so late this year that it is getting out after harvest--hay harvest. The picture below as taken about a week ago north of the new primary school.

The pool opens tomorrow. Summer will finally arrive in Rensselaer.

At the airport

On Wednesday night I attended the monthly meeting of the Jasper County Airport Authority at the airport building. I was rather surprised that I was not the only member of the public attending. The Authority has four members. Also at the table were its lawyer, the airport manager, and the airport engineer.

Like most meetings, much of the time was spent on items that are specialized and of limited or no public interest. There were a few things that stood out, however.

July looks to be a very busy month at the airport. On July 5 from 11:00 to 2:00 the annual EEA Fly In will take place. The next weekend (July 11-13) the airport will have some role in the South Shore Air Show at Fair Oaks Farms. The Harrier Jet that will be in the air show may be based at the airport, and it may be on static display when it is not flying. And then sometime in July, hopefully not while the air show is in town, an agriculture spraying group (crop dusters) will spend three days at the airport.

There was a discussion of maintenance on the approaches to hangers that was mostly of interest to those who use the airport. The engineer for the airport, who is from NGC, discussed several things including the fuel farm. The long-run goal is to replace all of it, but in the short term the airport is installing new, high-flow pumps. At present fueling some of the planes can take more than an hour, which may not matter much in most cases, but when time is money as with the crop dusters, it does. Finally, there was a discussion of the FAA's top priority, "obstruction remediation." (Doesn't that have a nice bureaucratic ring to it?) Obstruction remediation involves installing some additional lights at key points and removing a few trees, some of which are on the south side of SR 114,

Because a post is not really complete without a picture, below is a picture of the airport runway. (It is the long white line near the top.) The now-closed Babcock quarry is the most easily recognized feature near the bottom. What else can you recognize?  My son took the photo on his flight from Indianapolis to Washington. (You did not know that Rensselaer is on that fight path? So was Minneapolis.)

Meeting Monday

The commissioners met Monday morning and had a relatively short meeting--it lasted less than two hours. After several months of discussing off-site storage of copies of records, they agreed to purchase a large fire-proof safe that will be installed at the highway department offices. 

The director of community corrections asked to fill a part-time position but also told the commissioners that he thought it might be cheaper to hire some full time officers. There is a lot of turnover--in the last 4.5 years he has hired 15 people. Once they are trained, which is expensive, they tend to work a few months and then seek full-time positions. He will look at the numbers more carefully and may be back before them with a proposal in a future meeting.

The assessor addressed a number of issues, none of which I fully understood. There were two public hearings at which no one spoke. Every three years the commissioners must approve the taxes for the cumulative bridge fund and the cumulative capital improvements fund, and after no one had any comments, they approved the proposals to continue the taxes as they were, which is no more than one cent per $100 assessed valuation for the bridge fund and 3.85 cents per $100 assessed valuation for the capital improvements fund. The latter fund receives about a million dollars a year from the tax.

In discussing road repair, the commissioners noted that the Babcock Quarry had closed though sales were continuing of already mined stone. They were concerned that the closure would result in higher paving costs. Apparently the quarry could still have removed stone for another two or three years, but after that they would have needed to expand either to the east or the west. The City of Rensselaer was opposed to expansion in either direction. Some of the other quarries that the company owns needed more manpower, so the company took them from the Rensselaer operation and shut down the local quarry. (This means I will be able to post a picture about every two weeks showing the quarry slowly filling up.)

There was discussion of the old Rusk Building that the Commissioners have had an interest in. No environmental issues have been discovered. After the meeting I asked one of the commissioners what they would do with the building. There are no plans to use it. Rather the commissioners are thinking way ahead, some day in the distant future when offices may be moved out of the current court house. Then having control of much of the block that once contained the county jail would give them expansion opportunities.

Among many other topics discussed, the question of whether the county should repair one or two bridges that are showing wear came up and I learned that the county has 123 bridges that it must maintain.

In the afternoon the drainage board met. NIPSCO wanted approval of a landfill expansion to dispose of the ash and other coal remnants from not only the Schahfer plant but also two other plants. The Board decided that they wanted officials from NIPSCO at a commissioners meeting to answer a number of questions involving roads, how many phases of the plan lie in the future, and maybe tipping fees. 

The drainage proposal for Kaeb Sales was approved. It is a company selling diary equipment that wants to put an office on the corner SR 14 and SR 49, or five and a half miles east of Jasper Junction. The company is headquartered in Illinois and has offices there, in Michigan, and in Wakarusa, IN.

The other notable item was a farmer who complained about a ditch being blocked by a beaver dam. His neighbor, who apparently does not farm, does not mind that the ditch is blocked and as a result the land is flooded and cannot be planted.

In the evening the park board met. On the way, I noticed that the swimming pool now has water. At the meeting I was told that it will open this Saturday at noon.

I took some notes on the meeting but have misplaced them. There was a long discussion about what the park boards vision of the future is. Unfortunately for them, their vision has to work around a somewhat different vision of the person or persons who control the Blacker Trust, which has the money to implement the vision.. There was also discussion about the house on the north end of Brookside Park that is for sale.

I think there were some other interesting tidbits, but unless I find my notes, those tidbits are probably lost forever.