At Tuesday’s meeting of the City Council Budget and Finance Committee, fire chief Mack Bailey shared some statistics that reminded me why it makes sense to live in Oak Ridge. Per capita fire losses per capita in our city are only about 1/3 of the average in the southeastern U.S. (just $15 to $25 per [...]
Posts from ‘January, 2009’
Cedar Hill playground is alive and well as Fort Kid fades away
The morning news on WUOT included a report that the City of Knoxville is phasing out the popular Fort Kid playground near the World’s Fair site. It’s going to be replaced by a new playground on the Fair site, apparently one of the modern plastic and steel variety.
Fortunately for fans of amazing wooden playgrounds designed [...]
Tennessee: Please don’t take these two backward steps
I expected the state budget to be the main topic Monday morning at the League of Women Voters’ monthly Breakfast with the Legislators, and I was right (as Bob Fowler reported in the News Sentinel). I didn’t predict the discussion that occurred over reauthorization of the Tennessee Plan (the procedure that Tennessee uses to select [...]
Looking across the county line at Knox’s gas hogs
If we thought that Oak Ridge should cut back on fuel use by city vehicles, consider Knox County, where it seems (according to today’s News Sentinel) that there are 136 county-owned take-home vehicles (not even including the sheriff’s department), including 52 SUVs, 46 pickup trucks (most of them 3/4-ton Ford F-250s), and 6 “vans or [...]
The Community Forum for Shaping a Green Future – Part 2
The process used at the Saturday forum was based on the process followed to elicit community input to Chattanooga’s climate action plan, which had been published two days before the Oak Ridge forum. Jim Frierson of the Chattanooga Green Team spoke at the forum regarding Chattanooga’s experience, helping to set the stage for our discussions.
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The Community Forum for Shaping a Green Future – Part 1
By most measures, Saturday’s forum “Greening Oak Ridge: A Community Forum for Shaping a Green Future” was a smashing success. There were about 100 people there, with a diverse variety of perspectives, and those people seemed to be thoroughly engaged in generating ideas about what Oak Ridge needs to do to make Oak Ridge [...]
Our taste of winter
As a transplanted northerner (and having spent 9 winters in the icebox region of Minnesota and Wisconsin), I figure that Tennessee doesn’t have “real winter.”
This weekend might be the closest thing we get to a taste of real winter this year. It’s already warned up a good bit since then, but in the cold on [...]
Senior citizen drivers may not be more dangerous, after all
Good news for families or communities with older drivers — and good news for all of us who expect to get older. It seems that the higher rate of auto accident fatalities for older drivers is not because they are bad drivers, but because they are more frail. This suggests that the number of senior [...]