Rising and Fallen

There seems to be a new business coming to downtown Rensselaer. Workers are remodeling inside the building between Doggers and Steffan's on Washington Street. There is a dumpster next to the City parking lot and it was full. It appeared that fairly new wall dividers had been torn out. The building was the office of Dr. Pellicore several years ago and it changed ownership in late November. There are signs in the window that say, "Top Secret."

Something is brewing downtown. We will just have to wait and see what it is.

The weather seems to have slowed construction on the Sayler Apartments on North Elza. There is still nothing above ground level.

Demolition has reduced almost everything to ground level at the former site of Superior Sales and Service. When I was by a week or two ago, the slab of the main building was gone but one of the back buildings was still standing. Now it is rubble.

It is hard to see progress on the high-rate treatment plant but what is metal half or quarter cylinders arrived. It appears that they can be put together to make a very large cylinder.

On Thursday I noticed a large metal pipe that I had not seen before.

I doubt if I will post again before Christmas. Have a merry one.

Tuesday evening

On Tuesday evening the Jasper County Historical Society held it annual Christmas dinner. This year was special--they celebrated the 50th anniversary of their founding.

I left before the reading of the minutes of the very first meeting to get to another meeting, the Jasper County Council. I arrived a few minutes late, after they had discussed board reappointments and while they were discussing the salary ordinance, an ordinance that made official the salaries that they had discussed in their budget meetings a few months ago. It passed. They also approved the Sheriff's contract, which had been approved earlier this month by the Commissioners.

The Sheriff gave them a brief update on the departments IT status. They are running on a server that was installed shortly after the jail opened in 2008 and it needs to be replaced as does some of the other computer equipment the department uses. The Council and the Sheriff will work on finding which funds can be tapped to pay for the upgrades.

The Sheriff was asked about accidents during the recent icy weather. He said that there were only four or five accidents with injuries and that the overall picture was not too bad considering how awful the roads were. He attributed the low number of accidents and slide-offs to people staying off the roads as much as  they could.

The Council approved some transfers. Several were for the Airport Authority. The Airport Manager said that hangar construction was behind schedule. He also said that six guidance signs along the taxiway needed to be replaced because the paint had faded and they no longer met FAA requirements. It was cheaper to replace than to attempt repairs.

This was the last meeting for John Price, who was defeated in the primary earlier this year. He has made a difference in his years on the Council. He fought to lower the county income tax over the past few years. (This year because the state made major and confusing changes to structure of local income taxes, the Council did not make any changes, but the state income tax will be a tiny bit lower.) Mr Price, probably more than any other Council member, came up with new proposals, some of which were beyond the scope of the Council. The hotel tax was his idea and he pushed for it until it was enacted. The revenues fund tourism promotion. He was the loudest voice for the need for a frost law, which Commissioners enacted early this year. And he was also a loud voice for the need to revamp the heating/cooling system for the jail. Not all of his initiatives have been enacted. He wanted a system to collect fines for ordinance violations, a violations bureau, and so far that idea has not gone anywhere. He pushed for change in enforcement of metal thefts, which is in a bill at the state house that has not yet made it through the legislature.

His replacement, Brett Risner, has been attending Council meeting since he won the primary, which should reduce the time it takes him to get fully up to speed next year.

As I was out on Tuesday night, I noticed new, very bright lights. They were on the high-rate treatment plant on Lincoln.

Silent auction

This morning I traveled east to the Whistle Stop Cafe. The wind was from the south and there was a lot of snow blowing across SR 114. When I came back the blowing snow had stopped. We are finally emerging from the icebox--the temperatures are going above freezing for the first time in several days.

Tomorrow is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. Starting Thursday the days will start getting a little bit longer and the sun will get a little bit higher in the sky, though it will be hard to notice the changes for a few weeks.

I noticed that the Whistle Stop had employment records for Virgil Grissom on the wall of the entry way to the museum. I asked if they were new and was told that they had been there for a long time. I had never noticed them. When Grissom was a freshman at Purdue, he worked a summer for the Monon Railroad.

Coming back to Rensselaer, I stopped by CDC Resources to see what they had in their ongoing silent auction. There are 40 lots of items that were originally used for the Playscape preschool when CDC had a preschool. (If I remember correctly, CDC Resources closed their preschool because state regulations made it uneconomic. Treasure Keepers took over the facility and because they were church based, they were subject to less restrictive regulations. Recently CDC Resources decided that they needed the space for their other operations and declined to renew the lease that Treasure Keepers had.)

There are three rooms full of stuff for sale, all divided into forty lots. So if you want just one or two items, you are out of luck. However, if you want a bunch of similar items, like little trikes or lots of toys, this is the place to go.

 This is the other side of the room. I do not know where all this stuff was stored when the pre-school was operating.

 A close-up on one of the lots.

 The gray things seem to be cots for naps.

 Lots of little furniture was in the second room.

 A third room had more furniture and lots of little chairs.

 You have until December 30 to put in a bid. If you are interested, stop by (they are at the east end of Angelica Street), check out the lots, and submit a bid.

I suggested that CDC Resources Thrift Store submit a bid on each lot to prevent low ball bids from winning lots. When the Rensselaer Central School Corporations had its surplus auction, there lots won for a penny.

There are two donation boxes at the parking lot at CDC Resources-Rensselaer. These are wooden and built in one of the CDC Resources workshops. The donation box by Royal Oak and north of Save-A-Lot are metal and were purchased before CDC Resources realized that they could build their own.

Speaking of the workshop, the people there were very happy today because they had work and were earning money. They were repackaging filters for Donaldsons, taking them from big boxes and putting them into individual boxes.

A couple pictures

The cold has frozen the surface of some sections of the Iroquois River. Below is the view from the Talbert Bridge as it was late Friday afternoon.

 Friday night or Saturday morning we got a bit of freezing rain that coated everything with a thin layer of ice. The forecast for today said that Rensselaer would get above freezing, but it has not and will not.

The City salted at least some of the streets so they are mostly just wet. The sidewalks, however, are slippery. It is a good day to find things to do inside even though it is not bitterly cold (yet).

Teen Challenge

On Wednesday morning an informational meeting was held to present ideas that are stirring in parts of the community about ways to deal with the drug epidemic that is raging in our part of the state and nation. The invited guests were from Northern Central Indiana Teen Challenge (NCITC), which despite its name, does not deal with teenagers but with men with ages from 19 to the mid 50s.

Rein Bontreger, president of the County Council, and Chief Deputy Pat Williamson of the Sheriff's Department made some introductory comments. They briefly noted that addiction is a serious problem in our area. It wrecks lives, destroys families, and is a drain on  the community. People who are addicted often land in jail where they detoxify, but once released find it almost impossible not to fall back into old habits. I learned later that the major impetus for this reaching out to Teen Challenge came from law enforcement, who are concerned that we lack effective programs to deal with addiction.

The main speaker was Andrew Collins from NCITC, which is located in Elkhart, Indiana.  He explained that the origins of Teen Challenge were in New York when a young and naive preacher from Pennsylvania reached out to the youth gangs. He found that he could convince the young people that they needed to change their lives and that they wanted to do so, but given the environment that they were in, could not. They needed a safe place outside the community where they could learn new behaviors, lean a skill, and become productive members of society. Fifty-eight years later there are over 200 centers in the U.S. and about 1100 world wide.

He said that Teen Challenge, a faith based solution to the drug epidemic, has a much higher success rate than secular programs. About fifty percent of those who enter the program complete it, and a study that is now a bit old found that 86% of those who completed it were drug and crime free after seven years. He said that a large study of the problem found three keys to successful programs: they were long-term, residential, and faith based. He said that addiction is a symptom of deeper problems and that treating symptoms is not enough. People who do not like who they are find that drugs make the problem go away, at least temporarily. Underling causes include physical and sexual abuse and divorce. Teen Challenge helps them heal.

The Elkhart Center is only about a decade old and is in the process of completing an expansion. Looking to the future, NCITC is toying with the idea of establishing feeder centers and that is what the interested local parties want to get established in Jasper County. Planning is at an early stage, but the thought is that it could be an eight or ten bed facility that would house men for thirty to forty five days, detoxifying them and getting them ready for transfer to the Elkhart campus. Although the idea has much support among county officials, it will not be eligible for government funding because it is faith based. Only time will tell if this gets established and what it will develop into if it does get going.

(There was floating ice in the river today, the first I have seen this winter.)