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.
This has been a long time coming, but it’s finally here: There’s now a nice information sign in front of the Oak Ridge Welcome Center (located in the historic Midtown Community Center on Oak Ridge Turnpike at the corner of Robertsville Road), complete with brochures and maps for after-hours visitors to take away.
I’ve been asking [...]
People who get all of their local news from Oak Ridge’s daily newspaper still are unaware of the effort by some city and county officials to terminate the Local Oversight Committee at a meeting this afternoon (September 9, 2011), but yesterday’s issue of the Oak Ridge Observer has fairly in-depth coverage and Frank Munger has [...]
With school starting up for the year, everywhere I turn somebody is talking about standardized testing in schools. Oak Ridge schools are making TCAP test scores count for a fraction of kids’ grades (not the school board’s idea — it’s a state mandate!), Tennessee is requesting a waiver from the No Child Left Behind requirements, [...]
After much waiting, our new Nissan Leaf is finally here. I picked it up this afternoon. It’s definitely a new kind of car — not only is it fully electric, but in many respects it seems a bit like a computer on wheels. It goes faster than any computer, though. Driving on Oak [...]
After a few years of fireworks over the water at Melton Hill Lake, this year’s City of Oak Ridge July 4th fireworks display will be shot from A.K. Bissell Park (the park area surrounding the Oak Ridge Civic Center) in the middle of town. The press release came out today and I figure I’d better [...]
A City of Oak Ridge press release today reports that our trash collectors are going to start taking holidays — basically, joining the rest of modern workers. Until now, Thanksgiving and Christmas have been the only weekdays when trash wasn’t collected. Starting with July 4, they are also going to get a day off on [...]
Phew! The last 5 days were a whirlwind of activity that concluded with the completion (well, almost) of the new Cedar Hill Park playground. Some finishing touches remain: hooking up a few more swings, installing the waves around the new pirate ship (you’ll have to see it to understand), hanging some plaques in the castle [...]
More 2010 Census statistics are available. The Census reveals that as Oak Ridge’s population grew 7.1% between 2000 and 2010, the increase in the city’s average age pretty much leveled off. Our median age in 2010 was 43.5 — well above the state average of 38.0, but (after years of continually increasing) just 0.1 year [...]
It wasn’t exactly crowded, but on Sunday afternoon Cedar Hill Park playground entertained several families visiting for the last time before it closed on Monday to be torn down and replaced.
It’s been a wonderful play space since 1988. My family is one of many that have fond memories of good times there.
However, it’s showing its [...]
Census data have been slow trickling in. I posted earlier about Oak Ridge’s total population and housing occupancy data, which were the only statistics available. I’m very curious to see the neighborhood-by-neighborhood breakdowns (they are available to computer techies, but haven’t been output in a user-friendly form yet). However, there’s information on ethnicity.
Oak Ridge’s minority [...]