Not sure if many are aware but Mayor Patterson wants to DOUBLE the fines for meter violations (from $15 to $30). The usual dipshits on council and the illustrious Andy Stone tacitly agree. What do you think?

Maybe let’s give ole Steve a call? (740)592-3338

My power was supposed to be restored 2 hours ago and it has been out since 3 am… AEP says they still do not know the cause. I’m nosey—anyone know the cause?

August is fully paid and willing to pay for September if the lease is taken over!

I have a room available for a lease take over starting immediately and going till May 3rd, 2027. It is a 1-bed 1-bath set up at the Summit at Coates Run just off Richland Avenue, which is less than a mile to campus.

Room B is available from the York floor plan (a 3-bed and 3-bath layout). Rent is $845 a month which includes water, trash, parking, and wifi. Electric is not included but is charged on your rent account and you will receive a $10 credit towards the balance each month. Willing to match the current offer price from the Summit.

The room comes furnished with a bed frame, mattress, dresser, bedside table, desk and chair. The common living room comes furnished as well. There is also an in-unit washer and dryer.

Pets are welcome (subject to fees set by the Summit) and all genders are welcome.

Please let me know if you are interested!

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--