Archive for the ‘Paint Lick’ Category

The Advocate-Messenger has decided to move me into a new position, where I will be designing pages for the Advocate and Jessamine Journal papers full-time, which means I will no longer be the Garrard County reporter.

I will greatly miss covering Garrard. You all have been very welcoming and open with me, an outsider, and made me feel right at home. I’m glad I could serve the people of the county for close to two years, providing as much accurate info as I could on important and interesting events and happenings. I hope if you were a regular reader of the paper or this blog, you were satisfied with the coverage I provided.

Advocate-Messenger reporter Mandy Simpson will be taking over as Garrard County reporter as I step down. She is a recent graduate of Western Kentucky University who came to the Advocate in January. She has some serious reporting chops and I have no doubt she’ll be great at covering Garrard.

Sources: You can still contact me with any story ideas or information you have, and I will be more than happy to get it into the paper or pass it along to the appropriate person. You can also contact Mandy at msimpson@amnews.com.

Once again, thanks to everyone in Garrard County for letting me cover your news.

An upcoming Garrard County agricultural event this summer is hoping to find more sponsors so they can lower admission prices and provide advertising for businesses.

The Field to Fork Festival is going to be a day-long event that combines several different aspects into something unique. Event organizer Deborah Messenger (formerly president of the Paint Lick Sportsman’s Club) told me there will be booths where businesses can put themselves on display, a farmers market providing locally grown food from throughout the area and workshops focused on everything agriculture, from starting with the right soil all the way up to how to sell your goods. It seems like an event that blends well with Garrard County’s prominent agricultural base and focus on local production. Pike Valley Farms is one of the local food producers participating.

Even people who don’t have a farm can come and learn how to grow their own food in their back yard or on their front porch. “You can produce enough in a square foot to feed a family of four and a lot of people do not realize that,” Deborah told me.

Deborah said right now the admission price is set at $35 because of the costs associated with putting on the event. But if enough sponsors can be found to provide $3,000 in funding for the event, the admission price can be knocked down to $10 per person, opening up the festival to a lot more people. “We have tried to make this economically feasible regardless of someone’s purse,” she told me.

Businesses, organizations or individuals interested in helping to sponsor the festival have three different sponsorship levels available, each with its own amount of advertising and perks. If you’re interested, you can check out the sponsorship levels here, or check out more info about the festival in general here.

It’s really coming down out there big time. Weather.com says the snow will run out by mid-afternoon, but for now we’re accruing lots of snow. If anyone out there takes a photo of the snow, I’d love to post it up here. E-mail me your photos at bkleppinger@amnews.com.

McConnell spoke for a little less than an hour at Performance Feeds in Lancaster. He mainly addressed the Afghanistan War and health care reform, but he also took questions from the audience, including from Teresa Pike of Pike Valley Farms and Connie Hendren, CEO of Mine Shields.

Teresa told McConnell she didn’t think the recently passed food safety bill was a good move. Her all-organic farm is small enough that it’s unaffected by the bill, but for other farms it could be bad. McConnell agreed with her, saying he thinks government does step a little too far into people’s business. Teresa jokingly corrected McConnell, saying the government steps much too far, not just a little.

Connie Hendren asked McConnell about coal mine regulation and what possibilities there are of reducing regulation he said he thinks hurts the industry as a whole because of a few bad eggs. McConnell told the audience there’s probably no remedy for coal mine regulation until a new president is elected.

It’s begun snowing yet again, but radar maps are also showing the potential for ice in eastern Garrard County right now. If you have to go out and drive, be careful and drive slow.

The rain and snow is expected to hit Garrard County sometime in the early afternoon tomorrow, and we’re in the band across the state expected to get 2-5 inches by Friday morning.

Kenny Kinnaird over at the Garrard Road Department told me the county has plenty of salt and has its trucks prepped and wearing tire chains.

On the year, Kenny told me Garrard has already had to use more than half again as much as it usually uses during an entire winter season.

“We’ve done used about 150 tons more than we did last year,” he told me.

The school board approved on Tuesday making an optional sex education class available to ninth-graders at the Garrard County High School. I just finished talking with Superintendent Donald Aldridge and Health Department teacher Tanya Watkins about the new class, which will be taught by the health department and offered through ninth graders’ health classes.

Students already receive abstinence-only sex education classes from the health department in middle school; this will be an additional class Aldridge told me he hopes will keep more students abstinent, or at least safe.

You can check out some details about the program here. The full story in the Advocate is here. Quote from Aldridge:

“Hopefully this will help reduce the teen pregnancies. If we lived in a perfect world, we know that we could be abstinent, but we don’t live in a perfect world so we know that’s not going to happen.”

I just talked with an employee at the county road department, who told me the road crews are heading out right now to salt the roads. There’s probably at least a half-inch on the ground in Garrard and the snow is still falling. “I’m looking at South Campbell Street right now and it’s white as a ghost,” the employee told me. If you have to go out and drive, be careful.

Let’s have some fun with the snow while we’ve got it: If you take a cool photo of the snow (a snowy road, a snowy plant, a snowy car, a snowy landscape, whatever), you can e-mail it to me at bkleppinger@amnews.com and I’ll try to feature some of the photos up here on the blog. Include your name and general location in the county (e.g., Buckeye, Cartersville, Bryantsville, etc.) so I can put some info up with the photo.

I just finished a nice conversation with Karla Sefcak, who is stepping down from her leadership positions with the Garrard County Solid Waste Committee and the annual Party on the Square.

Karla said she is needing to spend more time at home and taking care of her husband, Gary. “I can’t still physically do what I’ve been doing,” she told me. “I’ve not dropped off the earth; it’s just I really need to re-prioritize.”

Karla has run the Party on the Square since it began. This coming 2011 party will be the fifth year for the anti-littering event. During those five years, it’s blossomed from a rather small gathering to a large, Lancaster-Square-filling event that draws more than a thousand people.

Karla said she’ll still be active in the Garrard County community, and she’ll still use her networks of friends, her blogs and her Facebook groups to help inform everyone about upcoming events.

Ever since I started as Garrard County reporter for the Advocate-Messenger a year and a half ago, Karla has been a continual source of good story ideas, so I have appreciated what she does for the county and for me.

Full story in tomorrow’s Advocate-Messenger.

A couple of developments in Lancaster and Garrard County:

1. Brenda Powers has appointed Allen Weston as her new chief of police. Apparently Ronnie Lamb will remain on payroll long enough to earn his full retirement. I’m still trying to get in contact with people for a more complete story. I’ll post more on here, there will be a story in tomorrow’s Advocate-Messenger.

2. Karla Sefcak is stepping down from her leadership positions on the solid waste committee and Party on the Square. More to come on this as well.