Archive for September, 2010

Lancaster Elementary has exceeded its goal for its state test scores, and is planning a special party tomorrow at 2 p.m. in the school gym to celebrate. Nancy Holland with the school told me the principal, Tracy Bottoms, is going to fulfill her promise to kiss a pig if the kids achieved as well as they did.

A fire on Emma Drive in Cade’s Cove in northern Garrard yesterday completely destroyed a family’s home. Tevis Graham told me Troy Forester, his wife and 14-month-old baby lost everything in the fire, which destroyed the house, burned up grass and a privacy fence, and melted the siding on the houses to either side.

The full story is in the Advocate today. If you want to help out the Foresters, you can call Tevis at 548-5171.

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A sidebar to this is that there is now a burn ban in effect in Garrard. During the Cade’s Cove fire yesterday, another brushfire broke out in the southern end of Camp Dick’s district. The dry weather has led the fire chiefs to ask John Wilson to put a burn ban into effect. John told me he is signing the burn ban today and it will be in effect until further notice.

Based on Lisa Phelp’s lawsuit filed in Garrard Circuit Court on Sept. 14, it looks like she’s suing because the Housing Authority Board terminated her without a justifiable reason before her contract had expired. She wants the Housing Authority to pay her salary and benefits through Dec. 1, when her contract would have expired. She’s also suing because the statements board members made about her to the media (including me at the Advocate) amounted to defamation.

She’s seeking unspecified amounts from the Board, former Board Chairman Cecil Dunn and current Board Chairman Randall Carrier. She also alleges she saved up about $25,000 in a retirement account while working at the Authority, but she has not received that $25,000 back and board members have told her they don’t know anything about the money.

Phelps’ suit also goes into some detail about her disagreements with Mayor Don Rinthen and an incident after she resigned where she claims interim Housing Authority Director Rachel White “dangled” her final check in front of her until she provided certain computer passwords and other information that could have been E-mailed.

I’ve just gotten word from the Advocate’s public records clerk that the former director of the Lancaster Housing Authority, Lisa Phelps, has filed a lawsuit against the Housing Authority. Phelps was asked to resign by the board back in April because of, according to Don Rinthen, a lack of financial reporting. The board also fired essentially the entire staff of the Housing Authority. I should have my hands on the lawsuit sometime this afternoon. I’ll post some more details when I get them. For background on this storyline, there are archived Advocate stories here (April 20), here (April 28) and here (May 25).

I went over to the judicial center construction site and got some photos today. Construction on the exterior of the building is expected to take another two months, with project completion expected in the first quarter of 2011.

I had a question posed to me while I was on the Public Square today: “what’s the story behind the shoes?”

It seems a pair of shoes and some kind of strap have been thrown over the traffic light for U.S. 27 on the Square. I don’t know what the shoes’ story is, but if anyone out there knows, I and probably a bunch of other people would love to hear it.

Lex18 has a partial story here. More info tomorrow morning when the sheriff’s office is open again.

I was elsewhere on Thursday, but David Brock headed out to the Garrard County Tobacco Cutting Contest, took some photos a wrote a story, which you can read here. David told me he really enjoyed the contest, for many of the same reasons I enjoyed it last year. The ability of the tobacco cutters is simply amazing to cut that much tobacco so fast with so few errors, and the angles, the crowd and everything about the event make it a fun one to take photos of. I’ve posted three of David’s photos that didn’t appear with the story on here.

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Colby Arnold stepped down from Garrard County EMS in late August. I’ll have a story about it in Sunday’s paper.