February 2010 Entries
Thursday Feb. 25, 2010
You can be the proud owner of a New Orleans Saints flag that once sat outside Gov. Mitch Daniels office.
“I sure don’t want it around here any longer. I’m tired of looking at it,” Daniels said in a press release Thursday.
As part of a Super Bowl wager with Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Daniels placed the banner outside his statehouse office for a week after the Indianapolis Colts lost to the Saints in the game.
The week is up and the gov said today that he’s putting it up for sale on ebay. Proceeds...
Wednesday Feb. 24, 2010
A few random notes from some recent pre-election reporting:
Can there be much more political excitement than the four contested races for township trustee here in Elkhart County?
Not to be too much of a wisenheimer, I reckon they’ll be intense in their own way, though township government generally doesn’t garner much attention. Dale Stickel, chairman of the Elkhart County Republican Central Committee, suspects the township races will swing not necessarily on policy questions, but which candidates are the most respected, the most known, among those in the varied jurisdictions.
Township trustees — posts that...
Friday Feb. 19, 2010
Is spring about to spring?
I hope so and I saw a somewhat encouraging sign — a city of Elkhart road crew out fixing potholes.
Sure, that’s a reminder that there will be some rough, crumbling roads out there thanks to the contraction and expansion of asphalt that comes when temperatures continually edge above and then back below freezing. I noticed that the annual crater-sized pothole in the alley off Third Street that leads to the Elkhart Truth parking lot is starting to open up.
But the patches of black, fresh asphalt are also...
Tuesday Feb. 16, 2010
Here's Gov. Mitch Daniels flying the flag of the New Orleans Saints. He doesn’t look too excited and he's not letting the flag furl out in all its glory.
Having lost his Super Bowl wager with Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Daniels raised the banner today outside his office in Indianapolis. The Indianapolis Colts, you’ll recall, lost to the Saints.
“For the next week, per our agreement, we’ll keep it on display in the atrium, where, incidentally, each day I’ll be demonstrating how to cover an onside kick,” Daniels said in a letter to Jindal. Yuk,...
Friday Feb. 12, 2010
State stats don’t bear out suggestions of a spike in accidents on the U.S. 33 section getting an overhaul in the Dunlap area between Elkhart and Goshen.
Some motorists and others have complained of a seeming uptick in crashes along U.S. 33 between U.S. 20 and C.R. 15 since the ongoing upgrade there started in March 2009. But while accidents last year did spike in certain months compared to 2008, the overall crash rate is slightly down.
Here are the numbers, courtesy of the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute, which tracks such things:
...
Wednesday Feb. 10, 2010
How much are 20 parking spots worth?
In the case of Kroger at Johnson Street and Beardsley Avenue in Elkhart, the answer is $88,500. That’s how much Elkhart County has to pay for a strip of the supermarket’s parking lot in conjunction with the ongoing Johnson Street Bridge upgrade project just to the south.
The county had originally offered around $55,000 for the 20-foot wide strip on the southeastern edge of the lot, the part that abuts the southbound section of Johnson Street. That didn’t sit well with Kroger or the actual owner of the...
Monday Feb. 8, 2010
Pity the inmates at the Elkhart County Correctional Complex who have to eat nutraloaf.
Or not. Maybe that’s exactly what they deserve.
Either way, John Letherman, president of the Elkhart County Council, doesn’t want the jail fare anywhere near his plate.
“It looked like vomit,” he exclaimed last Thursday, shortly after Sheriff Mike Books offered him a helping.
Nutraloaf is actually meant for unruly inmates at the jail, those with a yen for tossing their food, according to Bill Fletcher, who oversees sheriff’s department finances. You take a little bit of everything from the kitchen,...