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.
Monday evening’s City Council agenda included several resolutions to authorize sale of municipal bonds in order to refinance some of the city’s debt at lower rates of interest. (Oak Ridge recently attained a very favorable bond rating, making it possible to borrow at better interest rates than the city was able to get earlier.)
Two weeks [...]
In the midst of Oak Ridge’s continual community gripefest about the dearth of retail, I discovered today that there’s a Barnes & Noble outlet right here in the Atomic City .
OK, it’s “just” the bookstore at the Roane State Community College campus, but it’s still a Barnes & Noble store…
Today’s morning newspapers both had articles (Oak Ridger: 13-cent tax hike projected and News Sentinel: Stagnant development behind OR tax increase) describing Steve Jenkins’ presentation at yesterday’s meeting of the City Council Budget and Finance committee, and both reported (based on a table included in Steve’s handouts) that Oak Ridge has the 4th highest [...]
I’ve gotten word that the fireworks show planned for tomorrow evening (the 4th of July) has been canceled due to unforeseen problems. Added: See WBIR-TV for details.
The City of Oak Ridge has procured the fireworks, so the show will go on some time later this year.
Added July 3, 2008: Lest anyone is confused, [...]
Tim Holt has submitted a letter to the editor about a statistical analysis of shopping centers. This post is borrowed/modified from his to-be-published letter…A 1996 paper by by two university researchers, published in the Journal of Real Estate Research, examined the question: “How Critical Is a Good Location to a Regional Shopping Center?” The research [...]
This is a partially written blog post that I filed away last October and failed to finish — until now.
At its October 2006 meeting, City Council extended both of the city’s lobbying contracts for more than a year — through the end of 2007. That same evening, Council voted to lodge a strong [...]
Oak Ridge is in the midst of the 20-day drive to collect enough petition signatures to force a referendum on the proposed bond issue for the Crestpointe shopping center.
As a general rule, I don’t think that voters should be able to insist on voting on individual financial decisions by elected officials. (At the February 19th [...]
Oak Ridge may have its share of contentious local issues, but we can take pride in being a progressive community where government employees are professionals — unlike certain neighboring communities where nepotism seems to be standard operating procedure, as Average Woman discusses today.
Earlier this week the Knoxville News Sentinel reported on the phenomenon (discussed here earlier) of local governments employing Washington, DC lobbyists to give “extra muscle” in seeking targeted pork-barrel funding for local projects. The report indicates a new dubious distinction for Oak Ridge — we spend more on federal lobbying than any other local government [...]
Reports in the news (Pelosi Says She Would Drain GOP ‘Swamp‘) and on blogs suggest that the Democrats who are about to take control of Congress hope to rein in the practice of earmarking.
An article in the Washington Post last winter explained earmarking:
An earmark is a narrowly focused appropriation. …These home-state projects — which range [...]