Notes From The Last Couple of Weeks

Christmas is over. We hope each and everyone of you enjoyed it. Although we're glad it has come & gone it was a special one for yours truly. Seeing all those children while riding around town with Santa renewed my belief in the magic of Christmas. The excitement, the hope and even the rapture in some of those young eyes was beyond belief. A special thanks to Jamie McMahon, the Wellsville VFD & Nick DaLonzo for having us along. We're already are looking forward to next year.


Also, we would be remiss not to mention others. We never fully appreciated the years of dedication & work the Wellsville Lions Club has put in to their Care & Share. We do now. We fully realize the economy is sour for a lot of folks in the area. Even though, it was a shock to hear the number of families & children they were lending a hand to help. As I said before the members of the Lions Club & the volunteers that helped to put it all together are a special group. Then there is WPD Officer Marsha Eisenhart that goes out of her way to assist in the fund raising for them. The pie making ladies & Deacons of the Riverside Presbyterian Church also deserve a big thank you along with the long time support from the DQ. Also the efforts of WPD Chief Joe Scarabino, Mayor Joe Surace and others at Village Hall all earned an extra something in their Christmas stockings. Ed Wilson told me the Lions had one extra ham after all the food baskets were packed. With a little guidance from Eisenhart he delivered it to a family that could use it.


All in all what we saw with the efforts from a lot of people in the Clubs, the Village officials and just others that helped was very rewarding to us. It made this Christmas special for us.


A few weeks ago the dedication of the new Cathy Salter Memorial was held. Check out Charlie Franklin's blog at http://www.pow-peopleofwellsvilleohio.blogspot.com/. Chuck and young Bud Salter collaborated putting together a piece together about Cathy and the ceremony.


Christmas came early for the Warner family. Ran into First Christian Pastor Troy Warner the Sunday before Christmas. The Warner family have been on pins & needles with a son serving it Iraq. When we asked about him the good Pastor, with a grin ear-to-ear, turned around and introduced me to Justine. His son just got home from that "desert paradise" a couple of days before then. How special is that?


Pastor Troy also told me that Jake Lunders was transferred to UPMC's Childrens Hospital for some more back surgery. Jake is the Beaver Local student that was partially paralyzed in a car wreck going home from basketball practice not long ago. Before this last surgery he was going through rehabilitation at another UPMC facility in Pittsburgh. Please keep Jake in your thoughts & prayers.


We would like to nominate MJ Staff Writer Tom Giambroni & his editors as Grinch of the year. Head line for the Christmas Day edition read "Merry Christmas, your job is gone". Giambroni was reporting that the November unemployment rate for November jumped 0.3% to 13%. Yea, Merry Christmas to you guys too!


The Village of Salineville essentially put Part B of their new water line project on hold last week. Their Council members tabled an agreement the BWD needs to handle the grant funds for that project to clarify ownership of their old water treatment plant. The grants are Salineville's. The Village has contracted with BWD to have them take over their water system. It's the same type of agreement made for Part A of the project. Once the project is completed the old plant will become defunct. We can assure them BWD doesn't want it. In fact one BWD official told me some time ago he wanted to drive the bull dozer when they knock that building down. If those people out there would have checked with Wellsville they would have been assured that BWD doesn't want to pay real estate taxes on land they don't need. What were they thinking?


Speaking of BWD, after their December monthly meeting, I stopped by to say hello to the Village Administrator. What before my wondering eyes should appear but none other than Consultant Joe Lencewicz. Village officials confirmed that they have retained Lencewicz to negotiate with Wellsville's union. In spite of making overtures at past Council Meetings they would negotiate without paying for consultants Lencewicz is back. Wonder when they were going to announce that to Village tax payers? With one Councilman showing surprise to see us we wonder if they were getting ready to violate the Sunshine Law? He disappeared into the rest room with cell phone in hand. Hmmm...

Did you see the piece in last week's papers about the State Supreme Courts response about moving the Wellsville Municipal Court cases from Lisbon to East Liverpool? It's not really anything definitive saying they would not make any recommendations on the the actual move. Rather they suggested Columbiana County has too many Municipal Courts averaging only 16,000 cases. State wide the average is 13,000 with many courts "effectively handling higher case loads". Believe that is a yearly average but I wonder about the use of the word "effectively". The article went on to state that the Chief Justice is "thinking of ways to adapt the court system to today's world and believes in downsizing many courts in the system when possible". From what we've seen of "down sizing to today's world" conjures more negativism than good results. In the Customer Service industry the usual result is ending up in poor customer service and contributing to poor employee morale. It may cut some cost off the bottom line but many times it also leads to a shoddy product.

We fear the same would happen to our Municipal Court system too. You can stream line the court system to where the judges hear more cases but you can bet something is going to suffer. If our judges are hearing less cases than the state wide average that, to us, means they have more time to research the books. They have a chance to take their docket and refresh themselves in the legal precedents set in other similar cases. It means that before they don those black robes they are better prepared to do a fair, professional job for which they were elected to do. It probably means it will save money for the court system in the end with less appeals on something some lawyer later discovers was overlooked by an over worked judge.

JoBob had an article in last week's papers about Wellsville workers stopping a potential scam. Believe that was about the guys that were going door-to-door offering deals on natural gas for your home heating system. The scam part comes when they fail to tell you that there is currently a glut of natural gas supplies and that doesn't appear to be changing any time soon. Consequently the price of natural gas is going to remain low for a while yet. With the economy, industrial use is nearing an all time low and drilling for new sources have increased. The salesman going around town have a smooth line trying to lock you into a three year deal through their company. Think twice before signing on the dotted line.

Congratulations to Julie & Ron DuMoulin, Ferne & Pete Peterson, John & Victoria Cianni and Barbara & Frank DaLonzo. They were all winners for Wellsville's Chamber-of-Commerce Christmas Decorations Awards. If we had known about it we would have had pictures of the houses on here too. A lot of those folks now living far away like seeing pictures of the old home town.

Congratulations also to the WHS Tiger basketball players. Since our last "Notes" column the Ladies put a whopping on Toronto improving their record to 2 & 4. The Lady J.V. team won their game too going to 5 & 1 on the year. The following night the men crushed the Red Knights winning the varsity game by a score of 90 - 50. Three players scored a combine total of 71 of those 90 points. Lombardozzi hit three from outside the arch in that game. The J.V.s also won their match. The best news in the men's varsity game was what they did in the third quarter. For the two games prior to Toronto they let the opponents get back into the game in the third quarter. They came out of the locker room after the half down the river and out scored the Red Knights 38 - 7. Lets hope the 6 & 0 Tigers keep up their winning ways.

Both the Ladies & the Men return to action next week against McDonald at home. The girls play Monday night & the boys on Tuesday. Tip-off is 6 P.M. for the J.V. game both nights.

Ran into Marge Dysert the other day and asked her how long the Chamber has been putting on the Christmas Parade. Mrs. Dysert was one of the founding members of Wellsville's Chamber-of-Commerce and she's a wealth of knowledge on just about anything Wellsville.

She informed me it all started with the Chamber's Christmas Decorating Committee back in the 1970s. It was from that committee that Broadway officially became known as Broadway Park. Back then they were able to get grant money for Christmas decorations if it was going to be used in a park. The Decorating Committee morphed into the Parade Committee in the early 1980s and the Chamber has been sponsoring it since then. The late Phyllis Trasher was also very active in those events back then.

With the holidays there's not much on this week's calendar. Next week things get rolling with basketball games and the Council meeting Tuesday evening. BWD had a Salineville Water Line Progress meeting this morning. Other than that it's bringing in the New Year and lots of football games.

Before closing we beg you to use all caution when trying to keep warm with this cold weather. Too many fires get started using old chimneys that haven't been cleaned in a while. Too many electric heaters on one circuit is an overloading danger and we don't have to mention the problems with kerosene heaters. Please be careful. We want to keep you all around for a while longer. Be safe...

ole nib