I'm Ellen Smith, member of the Oak Ridge City Council. Thank you for visiting my blog and reading my views on public and private life in and around Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This website is my own; content here does not represent the official policies or views of the City of Oak Ridge. To add your own comments, click on the topic title to open a comment box. To read posts about a particular topic, scroll down to "Categories" (in the sidebar) or use the "Search" box in the sidebar. Look under "Archives" to see collections of past posts organized by date.
It’s true — as the Knoxville News Sentinel predicted Friday morning, TDOT killed the Knoxville Beltway project! This means it’s now up to the region to find creative solutions to congestion on the highways — but it should mean that money that might have gone to the road project will now be available to help [...]
This piece on the Roane Views website is a nice feel-good story about preserving little bits of local history: Number 68 Comes Home
The author lived in a flat-top house on West Outer Drive around 1950, and was able to visit the flat-top that’s now on display at the American Museum of Science and Energy, apparently [...]
On Tuesday the UK government released a long-awaited report on its investigation of the “Bloody Sunday” events of January 30, 1972, when British troops fired on unarmed civilian street demonstrators in Londonderry (Derry), Northern Ireland, killing 13 people (BBC news story). We visited the Bloody Sunday sites while on vacation less than a month ago, [...]
Phew! The Oak Ridge League of Women Voters will be busy this summer, holding a bunch of candidate forums before early voting starts on July 16 — plus a public forum to meet the finalists for the position of Oak Ridge city manager. Here’s the schedule:
June 22 – Roane County Forum
Candidates for County offices
Oak Ridge [...]
The PBS website has an article about automatic license-plate reading devices, a new technology being offered to police departments. The vehicle-mounted device scans the tag numbers on passing vehicles, records the GPS location and time, and runs a check against a database of Amber Alerts, cars reported stolen, etc. — all fast enough that the [...]
Traveling around Oak Ridge, I’ve been seeing two disconcerting trends related to signage, one temporary (“signs too soon”) and one more permanent (“signs too flashy”).
The temporary trend is political signs going up too soon. Oak Ridge’s sign ordinance (part of the zoning ordinance) specify that political signs can’t go up until 30 days before the [...]