FRIDAY FEBRUARY 20, 2009
12:50 PM

I have had another busy week. Monday was a legal holiday. I spent most of the day at home. I cleaned up the yard again. Most of the material I had to take care of was leaves. That may have been the last time I have to deal with leaves until this fall. I hope so.

I traveled to North Little Rock on Tuesday. I attended the executive committee meeting of the municipal league. The meeting was very interesting. Most of the time was spent discussing the general assembly meeting at the state capital. So far this year the bills that the league has supported have had a positive response from the general assembly.

Our dryer stopped working on Tuesday. It is under warranty so I called Sears. They sent a repairman to the house on Wednesday. The repairman told me that I did not have a dryer problem. He said the problem was electrical. Yesterday I contacted a local electrician and he repaired the wiring in a few minutes. I am so glad to live in a small town at times like this. I am able to get someone I know and trust to help me with problems like we had this week.

I spent most of the day yesterday participating in meetings. First of all I held my weekly staff meeting. I then attended the board meeting for the chamber of commerce. There was nothing unusual that took place at those meetings. Just normal business.

I traveled to Forrest City yesterday afternoon and attended a meeting at the East Arkansas Enterprise Community office. The purpose of the meeting was to make proposals for the stimulus money that the state will receive from the federal government. The proposal that I presented was Town Creek. The city has been working to secure federal funding for this project for several years. It is a multi million dollar project. It is also one that is shovel ready. That seems to be one of the type projects that make receive funding from the stimulus money. If that project were to be completed, it would drastically change a big section of Wynne.

I returned to Wynne and had a meeting with a representative of Murphy Oil company. They offer a program that allows cities to purchase their fuel from one of their stations. They send us a detailed bill each month. I will discuss this next week with the department heads. We might decide to go the route for the purchase of fuel.

I then attended the economic development board meeting. The huge push for that board now is the sales tax election on March 10th. If the tax does not pass, the economic development opportunities for Wynne and Cross County will almost stop. It takes money to fund the office of economic development and also have some local money available to help with the location of industries in this area.

Today has been slower. I did, just before lunch, have an interesting request. The Memphis airport called and said that they had lost contact with a plane. They thought that they may have landed at the Wynne airport. I told them that I would visit the airport and look for the plane. I was about half way there when Theda called and told me that they had called back and that they had located the plane in Forrest City. The plane did have problems and had landed at the airport in Forrest City.

Pat's eye surgery appears to have been successful. She went to the doctor again yesterday and everything still looks good. She is ready to have surgery on the other one now. Her vision has improved greatly.

On a sad note, one of our neighbors passed away on Monday. She and her family have lived in the Village since we moved there in 1974. She was 80 years old and had some health problems the last few years. Pat and I visited the family home on Monday night. They did not have a public visitation and we were unable to attend the graveside services because of other commitments. There are only three families still living in the Village that were there when we move there.