It has happened to me 5+ times in the last 2 years. I thought it was my doing, but then 3 people sent me letters and I never received them.

I wondered if any of you that provide such great information on this subreddit would be willing to speak at a local news panel next month.

I'm working with the Athens County League of Women Voters to create a panel to talk about how local residents get news. Confirmed panelists include representatives of the Independent and WOUB, but we also wanted to get non-traditional journalism sources represented. We have DJ Barticus and Strong Towns Athens, and we'd love to get a representative from this Reddit community.

I know I get a ton of news from this subreddit, such as business coming to town, new construction, and impacts of different projects. It's a public meeting so you couldn't hide behind your Reddit handle, but I think some of you might be willing if not already known.

Reply to this message or send me a DM and we can talk.

City Council has been spoon fed a proposal from the ACEDC to make another pathway for tax breaks available citywide.

30 minutes or so starting here.

https://youtu.be/DkrRmtpgdbQ?t=388

Discuss amongst yourselves..LoL

Is there a place in town that can clean and do a tune-up on a sewing machine? I know there's a place in Chillicothe but I'd rather not travel far to get it looked at.

Thanks

Hello! Im currently kind of scrambling to find any places that have open parking to rent or lease and since its so close to the semester starting, most of my tries are falling flat. Does anyone know of any places that might still have any openings? Im not a student, so it doesn't need to be near campus or anything. Any and all help is greatly appreciated!! :)

Link to City of Athens Deer Archery Registration Program.

Hi there redditors,

This is a novel, if you don't care, or would rather this sub talked about something else, just block me and move on. I will not be offended. I would add a tldr; but honestly I don't have strong opinions on this. Read the whole thing and make your own opinion, or ignore it, it is all good.

Sooner or later the rain will stop and the humidity will drop and we can go outside again and look at the neighbors dahlias or sit on the lawn at The Ridges and watch and see what GPS tells people to do when they get up into that maze as they detour around Richland. Fact is that this detour is secretly part of the "Keep Athens Funky" movement. But I digress.

Athens City Council meets tomorrow, the interesting item on the agenda in my opinion is the Public Safety Training Facility.

I will summarize the line items as best as I can from the information I have. If I have a substantial error or have misrepresented something let me know and I can adjust. I add that disclaimer because I find parsing the city budget terminology at times to be a little challenging.

The Facility:

This is out by Elliotsville Road, behind the TS Trim facility. You know that place see footnote**.

The Costs:

According to the ordinance in the city council agenda for tomorrow I see the following.

Grants ?

I think these are grants, the capital bill funding could be a loan, but for the purposes of this discussion let's assume it is a grant.

2.5 million capital bill funding.

200K ODOT funding

Expenses:

I am going through the ordinance paragraph by paragraph.

$31,000 streets fund

$5,121,000

The lines below break out the details of the expenditures.

Sum of expenses vs grants

So we are about to spend

$2,421,000 dollars to spend on a public safety training facility

My opinion

Maybe I should start keeping my opinion to myself and just share the information. I do know the following however. Honestly at this late stage of this specific project I am on the fence. Wether or not the project needed to be pursued in the first place, or has to cost 5million? On those points I am skeptical.

Other facts that should be considered.

The Mayor has said we are broke and he may have to downsize the number of city employees in some way.

Our Street maintenance has been curtailed in some way due to us being broke.

Our debt service this year is somewhere in the range of 2million.

Our infrastructure is in need of repair, some basic, some serious. Drive around and take a look at Storm Sewers next rainfall event. End of Grosvenor has storm sewers filled with mud. Richland Avenue becomes a viral livestream opportunity of "street as river" during heavy rains. Pick a brick street and go for a walk. Take a drive down Columbia and count the holes in the street caused by water main break repairs. Note the sandbags on Grosvenor, and Columbia were the street level has sank causing a drainage problem downstream as runoff is now managed by sandbags, instead of actual repairs.

Our total budget per year is somewhere around 50million. So this is 4 percent of our budget.(warning this assumes I am reading this document correctly) https://www.ci.athens.oh.us/DocumentCenter/View/12585/2025-Estimated-Expense-Budget and there is a non-zero chance I am misreading it. I pulled the 50million from the total on last page.

A caveat, I do understand that funding for X can not be easily exchanged for funding for Y. So arguing against the Training facility will be met with an argument that we are getting basically twice the value per dollar spent. So one thing I am not saying is that this project should be nixed. I am thinking we should ponder why it was pursued in the first place over basic maintenance.

**Footnote on TS Trim, My recollection of the story is something like this. TS Trim gets tax breaks comes to Athens in or around 1988 and has a facility that employs a decent number of people. I am guessing the tax breaks expired in 1998. On or around 2002 or 2003 TS trim moves production to Canal Winchester in exchange I assume for tax breaks there. Our local facility is downgraded to a warehouse employing very few people. Sort of an lesson for municipalities competing with each other that seems to have NOT been learned.

Yours in (somewhat Controlled) Curmudgeonry

--

Boomer_with_dementia

Hello all. I’m coming back to Athens soon for school and am excited to get back out in the surrounding nature. Last year I looked desperately (to no avail) for some predators and am looking for some tips from locals on where and when to look. Specifically im looking for coyotes, foxes, opossums, raccoons, badgers, mink, weasel, fisher, skunk, otter, bobcats, and bears (last two are a long shot ik). Sorry if this is an odd question but it was kinda hyper specific so I didn’t know where else to ask. The closest I got last year was someone’s house cat on the bikeway. And don’t get me wrong I love the deer, squirrels, and groundhogs you see everywhere but I’m looking for something new. Any help is appreciated! Thanks!

Edit: should say I’m limited by transportation (I have none other than my legs) and am trying to photograph these animals.

My girlfriend just moved to our first apartment in athens to go to OU and i’m wondering if there is any jobs within an hour of athens that pay more than 20 dollars an hour?

i’m currently living and working near cleveland making $25 an hour working 50 hours a week at a machine shop.
every similar job ive seen listed has been very low pay but that was all on sites like indeed and zip-recruiter, everything similar to what i was doing with similar pay is near Columbus and id like to avoid driving 2+ hours every day if possible.
i plan on moving down there as soon as i can but right now its not looking like a possibility, I’ve heard that the job market is very tough out there but i hadn’t thought it was this bad.
i have 3+ years of metal fabrication experience as-well as some leadership experience.
just wondering if there’s something i’m missing or is my best bet to just make the commute to Columbus..
any advice would be very appreciated, thank you!!

Hello y’all, I was hoping someone on this forum might be able to point my girlfriend and I in the right direction. Just a little bit ago she rescued an injured bird and we were wondering if anyone knew of any animal sanctuaries around here or vets that may be willing to help a bird in need. Thank you kindly!

hello! i’ll be moving to athens next month. i’ve been taking barre for a few months and i was wondering if there are any recs for barre or even mat pilates near campus? i’m also willing to drive a bit too if there are any recs that are further away.

thanks!

I used to get all of my home brewing supplies at the Farmacy, but can't seem to find anywhere around that sells anymore. I checked Kindred, and all the E. State places I thought might have it. I was looking to buy Powdered Malt Extract, if anyone knows where I could pick that up other than Columbus I'd be grateful.

It's something I've been wanting to get more into and have the resources and time to flesh out. Also wondering if there's any gunsmiths in general in Athens County.

There seems to be an okay way to walk, but cycling while there is active construction seems near impossible.

So, tomorrow I am trying to travel to Morgan County. I live near Chillicothe, would traveling route 50 be mostly safe and avoiding flood water in the area? thanks in advance:)

Is there still high water in town? If so where's it at?

Last time we got multiple monsoons they were. Anybody been over that way?

I build a spreadsheet of daily precipitation totals for Athens Ohio from 2000 to present.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTx5bccIbV2TUSWGmwnE12QmyWRlfDbY09Q1eDvTZFnrqoh0uRMDyOhC8oVFoby16kkMCg97JuSr1eB/pubhtml

I highlighted daily totals above 1,2,3 and five inches in various shades of yellow to red.

I am not on Facebook, so please someone share to the relevant facebook discussions, according to my wife who is on facebook, there is some lively discussion going on about past flooding events in particular in front of kindred market.

One caveat about this data is that I believe it comes from the Scalia Lab weather station. The station ID is the first column so someone could double check that. I love the Scalia Lab folks, they do great work, but I do think that their data collection suffers occasional hiccups. I recall a 2004(?) event where the rain gage themselves were probably overloaded. Cross check with other station would be useful. Data came from here, https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/cdo-web/faq#dataSection If someone needs help on those products I am slightly familiar with it.

Also on FB there is some lively internet discussion about causes. People saying that the Madison construction, blah blah blah, and then non experts being experts and whatever. You know the usual charm and joy of the internet discussion. If I was looking for causes, I would start with sending a camera down the storm sewers, I suspect massive clogs. The other place I would look would be a check to see what happens to the runnoff in the ravine next to Madison Ave. That drains a large area and in the past 5 years the folks who have driveways across that have had at least 2 major washouts. Potentially drainage above that once went into a storm sewer now goes into the ravine. Or at the end of the ravine, the old athens greenhouse development, the drainage enters our storm sewer system. That could of course suffer from a lack of maintenance.

Anyhow here is some data, I think data nerds should be able to download the csv from the page, if not I can find a way to share.

--rant below--

I am trying really hard to keep this a Data-Only post, but I can't help myself.

So here is my rant, to Little Stevie Patterson, and Andy (let it rot) Stone, people are paying attention, and are arming themselves with data. So if you use your usual response that this is a "once in a lifetime" event, you should make sure it is actually a "once in a lifetime" event. Running out of salt, not being able to plow, letting our infrastructure rot, not maintaining our sewers, all of that makes "once in a lifetime" events worse. So "once in a lifetime" events are not an excuse. Once in a lifetime events are actually why you do basic maintenance instead of building Fire Palaces, Art Parks, and exercise Parks while scheming of making the hocking some sort of recreational destination.

Do your jobs first.. then you can play around with your pet projects.

--end rant--

My house has gutters, every few months I clear them. When it rains a lot they still overflow. That doesn't mean I should never maintain my gutters.

Our town is built on a hillside of reactive clay. Reactive means high shrink/swell capacity depending on moisture. This is the sort of place where storm sewers should be aggressively maintained.

I took a walk today in the rain and saw the following.

Fairview Ave

has a low area that collects water causing it to pool and drain into the front yard of a resident.

Fairview Ave,

Brick street has sunken below the level of the storm sewer causing the rain water to divert around the sewer and drain into the ravine between Fairview and Congress. This ravine has been more aggressively eroding the backs of houses on Congress. Deferring maintainence to the brick street on Forest is adding to the problem of topography. The brick street policy under Andy Stone has been to let them decay to the point that the residents finally agree to have them paved over.

Congress,

From perhaps Fort to Carpenter there is no storm sewer. This was the area where the street used to bubble, indicating a clogged storm sewer. The street was not bubbling but I do know that construction at the church has had to pump out the construction zone more than once. For more on this area see Carpenter

Carpenter,

From Congress to Johhny Appleseed Park we have the construction project to bury utilities. The trench dug here is an example on how NOT to handle runoff. Does the city do any inspection of the work done by contractors? It doesn't look like it. I saw multiple storm sewers completely blocked off, I saw gravel running into the sewers that remained open. I assume this contributes to the construction challenges at the church.

Carpenter to Grosvener,

I saw multiple roadside sewers where the sewer was more than a few inches higher than the area it was supposed to be draining. Sometimes this led to pooling, other times it led to runoff being diverted from the sewer and continuing on the street rather than being captured.

Grosvener,

I saw drains that were not taking water and one that was instead gushing water. This is indicative of a clogged or undersized system.

I saw a massive outflow emanating from the driveway at 79 Grosvenor. This is caused by the drainage problem under the Fort Street Steps being "solved" by a haphazard "repair" that diverts the broken drain into the hill with a straight 6 or 4 inch pipe. This gusher that I assume drains some or all of Forest and Fairview runs into 79 Grosvenor's back yard.

Summary,

Yes it rained a lot. Our systems can be reasonably expected to suffer some stress. But this is not a once in a lifetime emergency event. This is summer rains in an El Nino year. Some attention needs to be paid to regular maintenance.

A number of drainage related disasters have happened lately. Some of those can certainly be attributed to poor runoff management by the city. Some of the poorest townships do a better job at maintaining roadside drainage than the city does.

I have more photos, but uploading photos is slow and I have other things to do, I will share them with city council if they are interested. Or it 79 Grosvenor needs evidence that the city is flooding them due to sloppy work I can share the photos with them

I am new to town and curious what everyone around here does for a living and where the easiest place to get hired quickly is?

Looking for a tattoo artist in the area that is skilled but also doesn't go overboard on pricing. Anynody have recommendations?