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.
For quite some time now, my household has been looking forward to acquiring a Nissan Leaf — the first mass-market plug-in electric car. On Saturday we finally had our first chance to see, touch, and drive one, when Nissan brought 14 cars to World’s Fair Park in Knoxville.
This car is an exciting opportunity for our [...]
The Oak Ridge Environmental Quality Advisory Board’s long-awaited Climate Action Plan is available in draft form for public review — download it here. The plan describes recommended measures for reducing energy consumption (and thus emissions of greenhouse gases) by city government and by the community at large. I missed last Tuesday’s public meeting about it [...]
By most measures, Saturday’s forum “Greening Oak Ridge: A Community Forum for Shaping a Green Future” was a smashing success. There were about 100 people there, with a diverse variety of perspectives, and those people seemed to be thoroughly engaged in generating ideas about what Oak Ridge needs to do to make Oak Ridge [...]