u/Boomer_With_Dementia

Soon Athens City will be smoke testing the sewers in the East State street area recently effected by storm caused flooding that led to sewage backflow into residents basement.

The obvious correlation between the rainfall event and the sewage event implies that our storm sewers and our sewage system are not well separated. Please note that this fact has been known for decades. Our sewage treatment plant upgrade in the 80's was driven by the fact that raw sewage would flow into the river during rain events because a lot of rainwater would enter the sanitary sewer system.

You might think that various administrations over the decades have worked to ameliorate the problems caused by this failure to keep the systems separate. You would perhaps be wrong, a public records request on system upgrades over the past 4 decades would clear that up.

Some events that come to mind are when Broney's sued the city for sewage flowing into their basement. I think this was in the 90's but look it up, this information is paywalled perhaps on the messenger site, but AI models used by google seemed to have sucked up everything ever written so ask google.

Possible conclusion, homeowners at fault:

The city will be looking for houses with gutters that are tied into the sanitary sewer rather than the storm sewer. They might find some of that, and they are incentivized to find that because that would be the homeowners problem, and would exonerate the city. The city has become pretty talented when it comes to avoiding blame or taking responsibility. If you don't believe me, ask your neighbors. My sewer was backing up and it was clearly the cities side and it cost me a lot to do what the city could have done and should of done. Ask anyone who has reported drainage issues only to be told "Oh that is not sewage" or "That is not caused by a water leak" only to be proved that it was sewage, or it was a water leak.

Possible conclusion, city at fault:

When the city finally dug up the street and repaired the faulty junction between my 4 inch sewer line and the city's sewer line I got a good look at a small piece of our infrastructure. It was a joke, not well sealed, not well done, potentially a source of storm water infiltration.

I suspect that a lot of the city's underground infrastructure is not well isolated and does not do a good job of keeping sanitary and storm systems separate.

I also suspect that the cities storm system is not well maintained and that it is clogged or collapsed in multiple areas. When that water has no place to go it raises the water table and that high water can infiltrate the sanitary system. Will smoke testing show these issues? I doubt it, or if it does I doubt the city is going to take the blame.

I have reasons for my doubts about the city taking ownership including the following. Personal experience, neighbor discussion, and observed behavior. For example, when the city sent 3/4 million dollars to a scammer, did you hear anything like "The buck stops here", or "we messed up?" If the administration said these things, I missed them. Feel free to correct me with quotes and sources. When Richland Flooded, and E State Street flooded the first response was a cover your ass type of response like "once in a lifetime rainfall" not we can do better.

The bubbling spring on North Congress is another example. During rainfall events the center of North Congress would "bubble up" obviously the tunnel or drain under the street was not handling the flow. That water would come up under the street, or in your basement, or into the sanitary sewer, or somewhere else that is not a good place for stormwater. I should note that this may have been fixed by the recent work, or it may have been made worse by the tons of gravel that were allowed to flow into the storm sewers by sloppy contractor work. I will take a look at the next rainfall event.

My other reason to doubt the city here is that during a recent rainfall event I walked around and noticed a lot of storm sewers are not functioning. Some of them probably just need to be dug out and flushed, others suffer from the road bed sinking or not being graded properly so that the storm sewer is not at a low point and water merely diverts around it, or over the curb causing problems downhill.

So if the maintenance crew can not be bothered to even check for functioning storm sewers that are plainly visible, I would suspect that the less visible infrastructure is in even worse shape.

Pay Attention

I am by no means claiming to have all the answers here, or to even know everything. Life is filled with wonderful other things to do than to track everything that the city does or doesn't do. But, I do think that the current administration is not responding to our needs, or our will. There are countless examples. It would be nice if we elected our representatives and they acted with humility and courage on our behalf. If they did that, then we could ignore them and go on with our lives trusting them to be our agents and to do what is right with our money. But.. when that is not the case then we all have to pay attention to the players and make a judgement on how well they are serving us. In particular Patterson, Stone, Chiki deserve some focussed attention. A single party town that lacks competitive primaries has real risks of encouraging non-responsive administrations at best, or corruption at worse. Quite a few of our city/county officials have ended up in court, or in orange jumpsuits, so this is not idle speculation.

If you pay attention, watch a few council meetings, read a few articles and think we are doing great, that's cool. If you think we are facing financial challenges and our administration is doing the best that they can, that's cool. I suspect otherwise, but I respect any reasonably well informed decision.

One final note.. our tax increase passed by a few votes, perhaps based on a promise of weekend bus service. So let's get together and chat on a saturday bus ride through town... spoiler alert, there is no weekend bus service. Way to go Patterson, that lie got you some cash, the least you could do is spend something on infrastructure rather than vanity projects..

--

BWD

Saw the pics from "slabstock" on the post, and I thought about Athens Culture, and maybe .. just maybe there is still a vibrant DIY/skate culture here.

I sure hope so. Not like I am going to buy a board, a guitar and an amp and learn to skate and learn to play some world changing punk guitar.. But just saying.. there is hope.

Thrash on or whatever you call what you do, and DIY...

May your band be massive, or gritty, or whatever you youngsters call that stuff.

-- with love,

Grandpa Boomer

Lots of discussion in city council and elsewhere regarding the flooding on State Street in front of Kindred, Richland Avenue and then the sewers backing up on elmwood(?) somewhere around there.

Some useful tools to use as you ponder if stormwater on that section of State Street can be better managed, or if it had been better managed in the past.

Drainage and contours.

First tool is the county auditor map of property ownership with the added layer of 5 foot contours.

https://www.athenscountyauditor.org/Map then add layer, 5ft contours. The drainage I would look at would be the valley of Madison Ave that disappears into a culvert I assume. The culvert is I assume in the triangle of Franklin, Madison, and Spring. If that was failing it would end up on state street. Briarwood storm sewers may be failing or the roads may have been allowed to decay until water is diverted down the hill rather than into the sewers.

Then it would probably take some knowledge of what underground infrastructure exists, does it all drain into the culvert that the bike path curves to cross between the library and the Fire Palace? Their might be some old RailRoad era drainage in that region that has been allowed to decay or clog. I only say that because once the railroad gave the bridge to the bike path it seems like log jams are not managed, I assume that behavior applies to other borrowed infrastructure. It is worth taking a look.

There is a chance that something changed, or has been allowed to be clogged with mud and gravel over time. Home Street development is ... sortof.. new. Maybe that clogged something??

Comparison to other 2 day rainfall events

On Aug 11 2026 we had 1.84 inches of rain, on Aug 12 2026 we had 2.32 inches. A two day total of 4.16 inches. I know in another post I said that was no big deal, well it was a big deal. But looking at other large 2 day totals and asking wether or not State Street Flooded, or Sewers backed up for those events will tell you if our infrastructure has gotten worse. So here are the dates with 2 day rainfall totals over 3 inches. Data goes back to 2000.

Summary we have had 11 rain events where the 2 day total surpassed this years event. Did State Street in front of kindred flood then? June 19, 2026 (I think it did, but I don't live there so guessing) Aug 19, 2021 ??, If not then some piece of infrastructure may have failed between 2021 and 2026. July 2021? , July 2020? October 2019?

Someone with access to the Athens News Archives might be able to look it up, or someone who lives don there.

Another way of looking at it would be wether State Street has flooded 11 times in this century? If not then some part of our infrastructure has gotten less effective.

Note this data is somewhat hand curated, errors are possible but not intentional. I can give you the access to the source if you wanted to explore.

Bold = greater two day total than this years.

2002-07-11 3.61 inches

2003-07-25 3.06 inches

2004-09-10 5.12 inches *

2006-09-13 3.02 inches

2004-09-19 4.35 inches *

2010-05-03 4.45 inches *

2010-05-04 3.79 inches

2013-08-14 3.73 inches

2017-06-24 3.69 inches

2017-11-07 3.18 inches

2018-07-22 3.34 inches

2018-09-10 4.62 inches *

2018-09-18 3.56 inches

2019-07-04 3.53 inches

2019-07-05 3.3 inches

2019-10-08 4.43 inches *

2020-06-05 4.29 inches *

2021-07-02 5.07 inches *

2021-08-18 4.54 inches *

2021-08-19 5.48 inches *

2021-08-20 3.3 inches

2022-02-04 3.49 inches

2022-07-07 3.11 inches

2022-07-19 3.2 inches

2023-01-04 3.41 inches

2025-04-04 3.1 inches

2025-07-09 4.28 inches *

2025-07-17 3.09 inches

2026-06-18 4.32 inches *

2026-06-19 4.21 inches *

--

BWD

Hi Athens,

Does anyone have a status report on the Triple Nickel Restaurant in Chesterhill ?

I developed a habit of close in restaurants this year and have yet to sort out what happened out there since Fall of 2025.

Did they sell? Did they decide to stay open somehow? If there is a new owner is it still as good?

Can I trust the hours on the website as it still says "winter hours" ?

I am thinking on driving out tomorrow for a late breakfast early lunch and do not want to waste the trip and find myself in Morgan county, hungry and lost and having to buy cheese and crackers and a snickers at Waynes World in Sharpsburg just to sustain myself for the ride home.

--edit--

LoL, I can't spell Nickel.. I need a brain transplant. True fact Boomers like me will soon be harvesting the brains from youngsters like you. We have taken your future, destroyed the planet, and now we are coming for your brains. Sucks to be post-boomer but that is the way it goes.

--end-edit--

--

Thanks

BWD

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

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.

Street Below Sewer, water drains into Ravine behind Congress

Sewer clogged

Sewer Clogged

Construction Silt tube minsmanagement

Construction blocked sewer

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

Forest Street draining into Grosvenor back yard

Fort Street Steps draining \"repair\"

Not sure if they are still in town, but if you got a chance to see the King Midgets out and about it was a wonderful sight to see..

I think the chain of them I saw on Stimson were headed for the roundabout near the Fire Palace..

What a wonderful blend of the old and the new. I make fun of roundabouts, but they are in some cases beautifully landscaped, and the circle is an undeniably attractive form.

So yeah Go Athens !!!

Someone ,maybe me if I find the time, should initiate a public records request on tax abatements that various government agencies have granted over the years and calculate the tax burden that has therefore shifted to us.

In my memory, which may not be perfect, I remember the following.

Rocky Boots getting a Tax Abatement for promising production to remain local, and instead we got warehousing and an outdoor store and production went overseas.

TS Trim car trim manufacturer out by the UPS store. I forget the details but the organization changed it's structure or something.

The Lostro building. LoL

Menards 10 year 50% according to another reddit thread.

Athens Mold and Machine (search result, article paywalled, not sure if it was granted)

**note**

Once I started poking around and learning about the various tax abatements, tax loopholes, enterprise zones, opportunity zones, grape production tax credits, grape production land purchase tax credit, etc etc etc.. I realized that our whole government from top to bottom has been captured by lobbies and industry and I started shopping for land in another country.

--edit--

After I rage-posted this, I thought for a moment. In theory some of these tax breaks seem to represent the will of the people, but in practice they do not. I mean grape production preserves farmland, so that sounds good and I am sure some European democracies have similar incentives. It is just that our incentives are so undemocratic. There needs to be citizen review at each step of the way, and sadly we are hardly allowed input, and never allowed review.

If you were at the meeting tonight August 4, 2026, where the public expressed significant opposition to the nurdle factory and are wondering to yourself..

"What is this port authority semi autonomous government adjacent organization that has so much control and so little accountability? "

Well a port authority can do many things, as we are finding out the hard way. They do not necessarily respond to the democratic will of the majority of the citizens.

Our Port Authority was created by the County Commissioners in 1995, the County Commissioners can dissolve it. The county commissioners are elected, we can elect new ones if these current ones can stay out of jail long enough to respond to the will of the county.

All we have to do is ask the County Commissioners to disband the port authority if they go through with the plastic plant.

79.17 DISSOLUTION OF A PORT AUTHORITY

Either a “new” or an “old” port authority may be dissolved by the political subdivision or subdivisions that created the port authority, subject to making due provision for the payment of any obligations incurred by the port. In the event the port is dissolved, properties of the port authority are transferred to the subdivision or subdivisions that created the port. If the port authority was created by more than one political subdivision, the manner of transfer must be determined before the resolutions and ordinances dissolving the port authority are passed (ORC 4582.023 & 4582.25(B)).

We should make this a comedy night contest somewhere in town. What venue hosts comedy nights?

I will go first, I am not a professional comedian but I do like comedy and we all should try to add humor to our lives. Please reply with funnier caricatures of our local datacenter champions..

If these seem mean spirited, then cleanse your conscience by choosing instead to make fun of me. Lord knows I say some crazy shit.

Poster: TrumpsLivesMatter_101

I hate government as much as the next guy, I mean f*ck guvment, we all agree on that left and right and middle, I am neither of those, I didn't say I was, I am independent and shit.

My investment guy (Did I mention I have an investment guy), he had me put my disposable income in the Firebird DataCenter project in Romania. You know Romania, borders Iran and Turkey, ex soviet satellite, a little corrupt. Anyhow Trump said we can export chips there and Lutnick agreed, and I am sure there was no corruption at all. Anyhow I have investments there, thanks to my guy, (Did I mention I have an investment guy? ) Well I do, and he told me a LOT about datacenters, I know ALL ABOUT datacenters. So yeah, the electric grid and shit, I know a lot about that too, it is a big grid and nothing we do matters.

So wake up you dummies..

--

TrumpLivesMatter_101

Poster: Jane-Ire-oughta-think-harder

Hi everyone , Jane here. What about compassion for our neighbors, I use plastic, I talk to chatgpt a LOT. Heck AI was responsible for some catphishing scams I recently fell victim to. And a LOT of my friends fall victim to AI catphishing scams, and we now use AI to detect them. So AI taketh and AI giveth. So it all evens out, one data center is burning through GPU's to steal my money and another datacenter is burning through GPU's to help prevent me from losing money. So I think Athens uses a lot of data and plastics, shouldn't that stuff me made locally?

So yeah, think local, be local, act local, keep Athens Funky (as in smelling like burning plastics, and melting GPU's)

Love your neighbor, take a datacenter bullet for them

--

Jane-Ire

There was some discussion regarding politics in another thread. There was some discussion that we are just a cash starved city due to OU and appalachia in general. (If I am mischaracterizing anyone's opinion please correct me)

With that in mind I got to thinking about the Fire Palace and Steve Patterson's claim that we are facing a budget crisis and we are not going to fix streets, and city employees might be let go.

Posting a few screenshots of two audits, one from 2024 and one from 2021.

https://ohioauditor.gov/Auditsearch/Reports/2023/Athens_County_2021_Athens_FINAL.pdf

https://ohioauditor.gov/auditsearch/Reports/2025/City_of_Athens_2024_Athens_FINAL.pdf

Two data points do not define a trend, and more research is needed (Athens Independent.. are you listening?? ) but here are the screenshots..

https://preview.redd.it/f3cevholq8ah1.png?width=1364&format=png&auto=webp&s=543b93f77983c8a03e6456edfb0ca64b688df38b

https://preview.redd.it/pa5xeholq8ah1.png?width=1468&format=png&auto=webp&s=cda93ba6e8cbbeb3025cd66a21ce1cc82b514ac3

I am not an accountant, and the audit documents are long and may not be consistent in terms of categories, but from my quick assessment I see the following.

The city of Athens has 2.5 times the debt in 2024 (25 million) than it had in 2021 (10 million)

How can that be a good thing? I mean it looks good to stand in front of the Fire Palace for a photo shoot for a power point presentation at the global mayor's conference. But that debt has to be serviced over time.

So as a city we may be broke, but we may have gotten here through poor management.

Any candidate or organization looking to make changes should research our debt over time in more detail.

If I have made errors in my summation, and an accountant wants to correct me please reply, if I am egregiously wrong I will edit the post to reflect that rather than leaving the correction in the replies.

--EDIT--

A reply noted that perhaps choosing 2021 led to bias as it was an exceptional year due to covid economic stimulus. With that in mind I grabbed the audits from 2010->2024

Instead of pulling data from the numbers, spreadsheet style section which did not seem consistent I pulled the numbers from the summary entry in the text for long term debt. It is worded like this..

"As of Year, the City of Athens had $x in long-term bonds, notes, and loans outstanding with $y due within one year."

Charting those numbers leads to these plots.

I broke out the "payment due in one year" because the scale of the change is lost compared to the total debt value. Pre Patterson we spent a million or less servicing our debt each year, in the
"Late Patterson" era we spend over 2 million servicing our debt. The scale of that change is the important value in my opinion.

Others may have a different analysis, I welcome the discussion. If my choice of data points leads to skew in some way, I will correct it. Living within your means is the basic rule of managing finances, is our spending in line with that rule. If this doubling of debt spending led to some massive benefit in terms of grant dollars, show me the numbers and I will add them to the charts.

total over time

payment due in one year

1. Shitpost to r/athensohio

Actually this subreddit isn't always shitpost supportive, so be careful.

2. Drive to your nearest waterfall and enjoy the flow.

Cedar Falls is my favorite, but Ash Cave works as well

3. Grab the beach chairs and head to Lake Chauncey

4. Go to the hydrological prediction site for the Hocking River and place wagers on future gage height. https://water.noaa.gov/gauges/atho1

5. Hydroplane at a roundabout.

This is hard to do, most roundabouts are of recent design and drain water rather well, so act fast and get out while the downpour is active.

--edit-- adding the ones below

6. Amphibian quests..

Toads may be calling from puddles, tree frogs from trees, rare eastern spadefoot in the one or two places where they exist (Take only audio recordings, leave muddy footprints), salamanders will be on the move

The drama presented here in this Independent article, https://athensindependent.com/orca-state-funding-cut/

is over the top.

Appalachia has been defined as a region, a people, a geography. Most studies of it mention the roles of extractive industries, outside control and corruption.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Please note that I am not pointing at anyone in particular as corrupt. I don't really know how anonymous I am anymore here on reddit is one reason. I have relations with one or more entities or people involved is another reason. But I do know the smell of shenanigans when I smell it. Besides when the whole system just might be so fishy that it is hard to tell anymore wether to blame the players or the game.

My quick assessment of the issue back when the mayor split with ORCA was that we had a case of "empire building individuals in conflict" and it may just be that. Anyhow it seems like the Bailey's trail empire lacked allies in high places.

I just wish our system worked in some way that wasn't so murky.

That said, the latest episode makes me feel that the whole situation down here is ripe for literally a novel of investigative journalism, from the history of our sheriff's going to prison, our commisioners involved in sketchy arrangements, our mayors' (plural). You could probably start with the re-routing of the river and the "relationships" between OU president and US government officials, and then go from there. Heck I wouldn't be surprised if Jimmy Hoffa is buried on one of our landfills. Did I mention Nelsonville? Or Hocking college with literally a foundational purpose of shenanigans?

Anyone with insight that they can share, or with more relationships with the players who would care to offer an opinion as to what is going on behind the scenes please share your thoughts.

Anyhow who can predict who our shadowy overlords are going to be after this struggle is over let me know so I can find a way to get by without offending anyone who holds the purse strings.

Here is the relevant text of the ordinance.

"No Person Shall Park..

Within 30 feet of, and upon the approach to, any flashing beacon, stop sign, or traffic control device;"

Here is the street layout

Here is the question. Does the wording, "within 30 feet of, and upon the approach to"

Mean:

A. I can not park within 30 feet (the blue arrow ONLY).

B. I can not park within 30 feet (the blue arrow, AND the orange arrow)

I guess the meaning of "upon the approach to" does that apply to traffic approaching the stop sign from either road. Another way of wording it is "even if the stop sign does not apply to me, does the parking prohibition apply to me? "

Non lawyers responding with random opinions will be censured by the bar.. wait why would non lawyers care about the bar.. Trying again.. Non lawyers responding should have taken an advanced logic course.

Thanks in advance.

https://preview.redd.it/k5touvnkyq7h1.png?width=820&format=png&auto=webp&s=625a9078cee4ee346bb9cc00cf4dd5c2f047d0aa

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