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.
November 30 is the deadline for input in the City’s survey on the design of the planned pavilion at Melton Lake Park. It’s a bit hard to find on the City website, so I’ll provide links to background on the project and possible design concepts, sketches of possible building shapes (see the background paper for [...]
Lately I feel like the airport is my second home, but I may finally be getting a chance to catch my breath after my most recent trip, to the National League of Cities meeting in Phoenix. I returned home with my bags stuffed with handouts and new knowledge and ideas on topics including managing and [...]
The City is upgrading its internet services this weekend, but websites and email (including messages to the City Council addresses on the cortn.org domain) are likely to be offline most of the weekend. Anticipating that people will be wondering what’s going on, I’m posting an excerpt from the announcement I received from Oak Ridge City [...]
While the LOC is still in business for now, the future is uncertain. As Frank Munger describes in his blog and in today’s newspaper, under Mayor Beehan’s resolution, the mayors are supposed to convene to decide where they want to go in the future. Ironically, that’s exactly the way the LOC was set up in [...]
After an interesting meeting in Kingston this afternoon, the Local Oversight Committee (LOC) is still in business. Oak Ridge Mayor Tom Beehan’s resolution to dissolve the organization passed (by a 7-4 vote), but only after several substantial amendments, including one that changed its main effect from “is hereby dissolved effective September 30″ to “is hereby [...]
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 [...]
At a meeting on Friday afternoon, Oak Ridge Mayor Tom Beehan and several county mayors from around the region are expected to vote to dissolve the Oak Ridge Reservation Local Oversight Committee (LOC), asking the state to instead direct the LOC’s funding to a “board of mayors and county executives” who will decide how to [...]
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, [...]
On Monday evening, August 8, City Council is being asked to approve issuing $10 million in bonds for wastewater and water projects (see agenda). We absolutely need to borrow this money, but I have doubts about the staff’s plan for structuring the debt — that is, how we pay it back.
This is part of about [...]
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 [...]