Coming soon: Endless Treasures

On Monday I got a chance to peek inside of the former Long's Gift building, which soon will be the home of a flea market called Endless Treasures. Opening is scheduled for July 1.

 Right now there is not much inside and I expect much of the moving of merchandise will happen just before opening. The large room at the back of the building (nearest the alley) has tape on the floor marking where the booths will be. A booth in the back of the room is a wall booth and has an assortment of pictures--the only booth that currently has stuff in it.

 The layout that Longs had remains--a corridor snakes around to a series of other rooms. I cannot think of anything that makes more sense for the space than a flea market. There will be numerous cameras monitoring people in the back (or front) rooms. Below you see a hallway leading out of the main room. It will be painted black and the booths here will have things like tools.

 A wall of one of the little rooms is being removed and the area is currently a mess. There is a lot of work that has to be done in the next three weeks.

 The name, Endless Treasures, was picked because of the layout of the space--you keep going on and on and you never know what treasures you will find around the next bend. You do, however, finally reach the end shown below.

I look forward to seeing how completely different the space will look on July 1.

June's Park Board meeing

The Park Board and Corporation met on Monday night at Iroquois Park. Because the old Monnett building is now privately owned, Park meetings can no longer be held there. The group decided to meet in the picnic shelter rather than in the headquarters building.

The Park Superintendent noted that the LaRue Pool had opened a week later than intended because water had gotten into a conduit with electrical wires and that problem  had to be fixed. The pool should be open until school starts and maybe a weekend or two after that. The pool will celebrate its 70th anniversary next year--I wonder how many municipal pools are older than that.

Most of the meeting was directly or indirectly focused on planned fundraising for park improvements. The fundraising is being financed by the Blacker Trust. The goal is to raise over a million dollars, but the number keeps changing. The fund raisers do not want the Park Board or Corporation to start any projects until this fundraising has been completed and members of the Park Board had problems with that. The City received almost $90K from the sale of the Monnett building and there is fear that the money will be used for non-park purposes if the Park does not move to use the money. The group decided to get an estimate of what it would cost to put a trail around the perimeter of the Monnett and Staddon Field parcel.

The fundraising people seem to be focused on baseball fields in Brookside Park. There is room for at least two fields in the area west of the tennis courts. The preliminary plans that the fundraisers had drawn up increased parking by demolishing the J C Cruiser Shelter and the Park Board was unanimous in condemning this idea.

The money raised will go to an account with the Jasper Foundation. Exactly who will control that money is not clear to me.

Mainstreet Rensselaer is planning a trail from the corner of Milroy Park by Busy Bee to the south corner of the park.

The next Park Board meeting is scheduled for July 17.

In other bits and pieces, I noticed that a lot of the ash trees at SJC in the grove along the highway are dead or dying. Do not plant ash trees.

I had not visited the apartments at the north end of Elza lately and was surprised today to notice that a foundation is in for another ten-unit  building. The first building still needs finishing touches.

Volunteers and generations

On Tuesday night the Jasper-Newton Foundation hosted a presentation about how organizations could attract volunteers. The theme of the presenter, Kenneth Culp III, was that different generations respond to different incentives and appeals and that many organizations are still trying to find volunteers with the methods that worked 70 years ago but which are no longer very effective with the newer generations. The attendance exceeded the expectations of the Foundation. The audience almost filled the conference room at the Farmhouse at Fair Oaks Farms.

Dr. Culp identified six generations: (a) the Civic or Builder generation born between 1901 and 1929; (b) the Silent generation born between 1929 and 1946; (c) the Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964; (d) Generation X born between 1964 and 1981; (e) the Millennials, born between 1981 and 2001; and (f) the Digitals, born since 2001. Rather than tell you about the characteristics he attributed to each of the first five of these groups, I am going to list the characteristics in a random order and your challenge will be to assign the attributes to the proper group. Feel free to leave your answer in the comments and I will update this post in a few days with the correct answers.

(1) Interested in how volunteering benefits them, their personal life comes before job, not team oriented, focused on the short-term.
(2) Like stability, willing to help in any way they can, attracted to the mission of the organization.
(3) Efficient and economizing, willing to help others, attracted to the reputation of the organization.
(4) Interested in outcomes, attracted to volunteer opportunities that give them benefits or new experiences.
(5) Want to make a difference, work often comes before family, good team players, look for volunteer opportunities that fit their skills.

Of course when one speaks in generalities and stereotypes, there are many people that do not fit well in their chronological generations and may not fit into any of the sets of attributes that are given.

Update: Here are the generations matched to their characteristics:

Generation X: (1) Interested in how volunteering benefits them, their personal life comes before job, not team oriented, focused on the short-term.
Silent generation: (2) Like stability, willing to help in any way they can, attracted to the mission of the organization.
Civic or Builder generation: (3) Efficient and economizing, willing to help others, attracted to the reputation of the organization.
Millennials: (4) Interested in outcomes, attracted to volunteer opportunities that give them benefits or new experiences.
Baby Boomers (5) Want to make a difference, work often comes before family, good team players, look for volunteer opportunities that fit their skills.

County matters

The Commissions met for about three and a half hours oedn Monday morning in their June meeting. Near the top of the agenda were four public hearings. One was for a speed limit on a county road leading to Remington from the south and the other three were for vacating alleys and streets in the booming villages of Virgie, Asphaltum, and Kersey. When they were platted, their founders had high hopes that they would grow into substantial communities but they have not. The land set aside for streets and alleys is now farmed. By vacating the land, the County will be put it back on the tax rolls. A number of people attended these public hearings but no members of the public spoke.

The Commissioners approved use of the Court House lawn for Kids Night at the Tuesday Farmers Market on July 25. There was a long discussion of the Smallfelt Ditch. Landowners want to deepen it and that will require crossing County roads in three places. Their plans for crossing the roads were approved. The ditch was also on the agenda for the Drainage Board in the afternoon, but I did not find the topic fascinating enough to attend that part of the meeting.

The County IT guy wants to be able to junk obsolete electronics rather than try to sell them at auction. He argued that the costs of getting them ready for auction exceeded the revenue received. The matter was turned over to the County Attorney for research. A person from Honeywell pitched on energy savings; he offered a free preliminary audit that they accepted. The airport manager gave a short report on Aviation Career Day and announced that the date of the annual EEA fly in was July 8. The Health Department wanted a change in their personnel policy requiring some employees to attend their Board meetings.

In May's meeting there was an item in which a family was complaining about the behavior of a neighbor. June's meeting seems to have featured the other side of the dispute, with the roles of good neighbor and bad neighbor reversed.

At 10:00 bids for paving and road materials were opened. There were a number of bids and, as is the Commissioners' practice, all were accepted.

The Sheriff reported on the communications tower, stating that it had been in operation for several months and the the County Highway Department was also using it. Two representatives from Motorola were present and the Commissioners formally accepted the tower. (I am not sure exactly what that meant.) There was discussion of the costs and benefits of inmate catastrophic insurance (the cost of using the helicopter as an ambulance is about $60K) and more discussion of the need to repair the west wall of the northern annex.

The meeting ended with discussion of various matters that mostly affect the running of offices. There was a long and hard-to-follow discussion of road repair. The way that the state grant process will work this year has changed and the various people involved with roads discussed how the County should adjust to those changes.

The Drainage Board had a long agenda in their afternoon meeting, but only two of the items looked interesting to me. Pilot Travel Center of Remington will do a complete rebuild at the end of the summer (mentioned here) and they presented their drainage plan. Their retention pond will be bigger and configured in a different way. Currently water is pumped into the pond and drained by gravity. The new pond will fill by gravity and will be drained by pumping. The plan was approved.

The second item was a proposed Speedway on SR 10 at the I-65 intersection. It will be built on a property that has a drainage ditch. The proposed plan is to culvert the ditch in a 48 inch tile. The Commissioners accepted that but wanted the tile to be concrete, not plastic. There were also questions about the easement of the open drain and the Commissioners suggested that the best way to deal with this issue was to extend the tile. The Commissioners wanted to see a new plan at the next meeting (July 3).

In some other news, construction is evident near the intersection of Front and Washington. The "Top Secret" building is getting a new front. (Of course if it were really top secret, the business would not have a webpage.) The words "Miller Jones Co" are now gone. I do not remember was that was. Who can help?

Across the street Embers Brewhouse has been doing landscaping and is looking beautiful. A fence stops the inclination to stroll through the grounds. The fence is required because the plaza will be part of the cafe that serves beer. When the Brewhouse opens, it will not be serving beer it brews--the person who was to do the brewing has pulled out of the project. However, they will be serving various area craft beers.

Down the block along Front Street a new business will be opening in month. The old Longs will become a flea market called Endless Treasures.

Below is a picture of fencing being installed along Sparling Ave by Lake Banet.

June is lovely

June is here and the warm, sunny weather this week has people dressing and acting like summer has arrived.

A bit of sunny news for Rensselaer arrived on Thursday when the City was informed that its OCRA grant proposal had been funded. The $550K grant will help purchase the land west of Sparling on which the City drilled a water well over a year ago and will also fund a water main that will take the water to the water treatment plant in Iroquois Park. The Rensselaer Republican was on the story and had it in today's paper.

On Friday morning the Park Department had an event called a Park Hop. It featured a proclamation by the Mayor about National Trails Day and then a walk on some of the City's trails. It appeared that most of the people attending were girls scouts.

 I took a look at the map on the table to see where our trails are. A lot of them use city streets and county roads.

 Lots of summer activities have started or are about to start. The Rensselaer Summer Swim Team has had its first meet (and had a record broken. That is impressive because the records go back to the 1970s.) Softball has begun at Brookside Park. LaRue Pool opens on Monday. I received a notice in my Rensselaer Adventures e-mail that St. Luke's Lutheran Church will host its Vacation Bible School June 12-16. The signs are up announcing Art Camp later in June, but registration closes June 9.

 The week saw a lot of changes at the Ember's Station Brewhouse. The last paving brick was placed, there are now decorative lights, and a fence is being erected.

 The manhole on Jefferson has been installed and the excavator is now in the back yard of the Jasper County Public Library where it will apparently dig a pit for another manhole.

 I noticed a crane doing something to the elevator north of the tracks.