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.
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 [...]
I’m bothered by (and have commented previously on) the City of Oak Ridge’s lobbying activities in Washington, DC. An article earlier this year in The New York Times, titled “Hiring Federal Lobbyists, Towns Learn Money Talks”, describes the disturbing national trend in which Oak Ridge is eagerly participating.
This hot trend is for local governments to [...]
Interesting article in the New York Times — In the Voting Booth, Bias Starts at the Top. Stanford University researcher Jon A. Krosnick says:
Candidates listed first on the ballot get about two percentage points more votes on average than they would have if they had been listed later (flipping a 49 to 51 defeat into [...]