March 2009 Entries
Monday March 30, 2009
The owners of the McDonald's at C.R. 17 and S.R. 120 apparently want more than what Elkhart County's offering to make up for changes brought on by the upgrade of the nearby Six Span Bridge.
County Highway Administrator Jeff Taylor said today that the owners of the fast-food eatery rejected the county's offer, forcing the matter to court, as is the norm in such instances. Now, three court-appointed appraisers will come back with recommendations on how much Mickey-D's should get, aiming to reach a figure amenable to both sides.
As part of plans to widen Six Span, the C.R....
Thursday March 26, 2009
Down and out in Elkhart County
Denny Peak and his friends, out of work and struggling to keep a roof over their heads, have had a tough time of it these past few months. Check out a story in today’s paper and another we ran about him and his housemates in January .
But they know how to rough it.
Peak lived in his car for several months until last November and he said one of the key things to keep in mind is your feet. More particularly, he always took special care to wrap them in...
Wednesday March 25, 2009
A group of local leaders got the chance to bend the ear of Mike Huckabee the night before he taped his Fox News program here last Saturday.
John Letherman, president of the Elkhart County Council and a guest on the show that day, said he, Elkhart County commissioners Terry Rodino and Mike Yoder and State Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Elkhart) met with the former Republican presidential hopeful at the Elcona Country Club. Also at the get-together were a few local business leaders, Greater Elkhart Chamber of Commerce President Phil Penn and Dorinda Heiden-Guss of the Elkhart County Economic Development...
Tuesday March 24, 2009
We don’t watch too much. No cable, no satellite.
Still, when television went digital, we didn’t want to be left too far back in the dust. We got a converter box and an amplified antenna to assure access to at least the broadcast networks.
Initially, though, we thought maybe even that wouldn’t be possible. Try as we might — even with the fancy antenna — we received signals from just a couple stations with any consistency. The others would come in sporadically, but you never knew if you would be able to see a program in its entirety.
My days...
Monday March 23, 2009
The much-debated fee meant to fund programs aimed at keeping the rivers, streams and ditches here clear of contaminants carried by stormwater runoff generated $1.9 million in 2008, down from $2 million in 2007.
The annual fee — decried by some as excessive — went in effect in most of Elkhart County in 2007. Impacted homeowners must pay $15 while business owners and others, even churches and non-profit organizations, must pay $15 for each 2,800 square feet of hard surface (think rooftops and driveways) on their land.
Bristol, Elkhart County, the city of Elkhart and Goshen share the money...
Wednesday March 18, 2009
Wisdom of offering tax breaks questioned
Elkhart County leaders approved a partial property tax abatement for a company here last Saturday and they’re leaning toward granting another to a second firm. That would triple the number of abatements the county has ever granted from one all the way up to three.
Hardly whopping figures.
Still, it has at least one official on edge, warning about getting too fast and loose.
Abatements, also known as property tax phase-ins, reduce the property tax load on eligible new development, promoting, at least in theory, job creation via the expansion of existing companies and the...
Monday March 16, 2009
Some people go to Florida for the winter.
Mike Yoder, a member of the board of the Indiana Soybean Alliance and an Elkhart County commissioner, chose Alaska and the Arctic Circle instead. A place aptly called Coldfoot, to be precise, where the mercury dipped to a decidedly unbalmy -25 degrees Fahrenheit while he was there.
This was no pleasure trip, though, not surprisingly. Regular diesel turns to gel in bone-chilling temps and Yoder and the soybean contingent went to test their contention that a soy-based biodiesel product they're promoting works just fine in such conditions. They put the fuel...
Monday March 9, 2009
The national housing crunch notwithstanding, numbers crunched by First American CoreLogic show only a slight dip — 0.71 percent — in the price of homes sold last December in the Elkhart-Goshen area compared to December 2007.
By contrast, the Loan Performance Home Price Index in the United States as a whole fell 11.14 percent and plummeted 26.92 percent in California, the worst in any state. The number for Indiana, on whole, fell just 0.67 percent while West Virginia, the nation's leader, saw home prices actually go up 5.69 percent.
Numbers generated locally, meanwhile, paint a grimmer picture. According to...