Author: Jason Feingold

In addition to the meeting of the county commissioners tonight at 6 at the old courthouse, the Vance County Board of Education will meet at 7 tonight at the school system’s Administrative Services Center on Graham Avenue. The agenda includes recognition of schools for success on the state ABCs testing and the presentation of plans to improve Western Vance High School’s results. Meanwhile, the floor is open.

We’re lacking in sources for Middleburg and Kittrell, but we’re looking forward to the elections in those towns Tuesday. Anyone have a read on those elections? Anyone care? In any case, the floor is open.

One of the downsides of the rise of activist volunteer organizations in the past couple of years is that you get a very different mix of people from meeting to meeting, with the result that the same problems and same facts are discussed over and over. Wednesday’s VOICE meeting was apparently the latest example. According to the daily newspaper and an e-mail message from City Manager Eric Williams, the VOICE chairman, the group had a lively discussion about gangs, schools, …

The City Council’s Public Utilities Committee is scheduled to meet today at noon, and it could be the final time that John Wester presides over one of those meetings before his time on the council comes to an end next month. There are a lot of things going on at the water plant, so it could be interesting to see what Wester can get done during the time he has left. With that, we open the floor to comments.

We’re reeling from the unexpected blow we suffered from our favorite columnist — et tu, Mile? — and from working our way through the 49-page Weed and Seed application, so we’ll just throw things open for discussion while we whimper in a corner.

The state Employment Security Commission released September’s jobless numbers Friday, and, as has been typical this year, the report combined good and bad news for Vance County. On the plus side, the jobless rate declined half a point to 8.8 percent from August’s 9.3 percent, and fewer than 1,700 people in Vance County are now officially counted as unemployed (1,664 to be exact). The downside is that Vance has the third-highest rate in the state and is at risk of …

We’re a little slow sometimes at HomeinHenderson, both in posting stories and in comprehending what they mean, but we finally took a moment to think about this whole question of the Clean Up Henderson Committee and conflicts of interest. First, we don’t think it’s a coincidence that the council members who are active on the cleanup committee were re-elected; the elections were a clear endorsement of Clean Up Henderson. More important, however, is that the cleanup committee has served as …

The city’s Public Utilities Committee meets this morning at 10 to discuss, among other things, the problems at Westover Terrace. Unless, of course, all the committee members resign to avoid any conflicts of interest. For the rest of us, the floor is open.