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.
Folks around Oak Ridge are enthusiastic about the prospects for small modular reactors (SMRs) at the southwestern Oak Ridge location known as the “breeder site”, but we need to be aware that there are other project sponsors and communities aiming for financial assistance and quick regulatory review as the first SMRs. A New York Times [...]
The third ordinance on parking – the one that Council passed on first reading last Monday – is an amendment to the city ordinances related to on-street parking. It will clarify some of the existing requirements to make it easier for police to enforce them and it will add some new provisions to discourage on-street [...]
This is a really impressive program line-up.
International Women’s Day Forum
Prepared Girls – Powerful Women
Friday, March 9, 2012
12:00 PM (Registration) to 4:30 PM
at the
Oak Ridge Campus
Roane State Community College
The forum is FREE.
Refreshments will be provided.
FREE parking is available in front of the facility.
Speakers:
Power and Priorities, Lori Tucker, News Anchor, WATE-TV
Domestic Violence and Human Trafficking: The [...]
Here’s the guest column that I supplied to the Oak Ridge Observer this week. It’s in the print edition, of course (along with a few items that the dailies didn’t carry) and on the Observer website, but you can read it here, too:
As we move into another new year, I propose a resolution for everyone [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]