Friday, April 3, 2009

SPRING

We are getting indications that spring is rapidly approaching. Not only are the days getting longer, sun rises at 7:03 AM and sets at 8:46 PM, gaining close to 7 minutes of day light a day, but the following is also evidence of spring coming:

1. People have started their gardens indoors. You visit peopl

es homes and you see little containers by widows with various tomato plants, pepper plants, etc emerging.

2. The Nenana Ice Classic is over and the bets are in for when the Nenana River is going to break up. This site is a little out dated, I paid 3.50 for my ticket, not two dollars.

3. The borough has completed “winging” the roads. Couldn’t find anything on this on the web. But got the term from a man who did this at one time. The process is to basically plow the roads and get as much of the ice and snow off the pavement as possible. So when the snow and ice start to melt during the spring days, and then freezes at night, very little ice wil

l form on the paved road ways.

Notice, I was very particular about saying paved roads. They don’t do this on dirt or gravel roads. We live on a dirt road that was made back in the early 70s. Way before there was any regulations on road construction. I heard that a man took a cat, plowed the trees under the earth and called it a road.

Now after this winging, when we go out to the paved portion of the road, there is about a 6 inch cliff, where our road meets the pavement, that we have to travel over.

4. With the warm weather, people are going out in shirt

sleeves and shorts. Even though it is still below freezing, compared to a -55, 20 degrees is warm.

5. Warm weather allows people to go out and snow machine, ski, etc. to enjoy the snow before it starts to melt.

I mentioned our road system here. When I moved here I became what is called service area manager for the Pleasure land service area. What this is, is volunteers who are responsible for maintaining the roads. Ie, ensuring the roads are plowed when needed, road is grated, etc. Basically just ensure the road is maintained.

Not to bad for a volunteer job. I did that for three years and the only time I was active is when another subdivision, not yet a service area, wanted to merge with us. It was a new subdivision which had not yet formed its own service area, because of not many homes were there yet. S

o no one was maintaining the roads, but they were better than ours because they were built to code, that was issued in the late 80s. Our roads were grandfathered and did not have to meet the new codes.

So because of this the roads in that subdivision were not cleared of snow. The school district told the residents that unless the roads were plowed, the school buses would not go down the road to pick up or drop off the children. This made some residents upset, so they paid to get the road cleared themselves, and started looking at how to fix this problem. They were told to merge with our service area.

In order to do that, both divisions had to vote and each had to approve the merger. A vote was taken, our service area approved it, more money in our coffers, and the subdivision, did not approve it. The reason they didn’t approve it is a group of homes in the sub division found out their roads would not be maintained, even though they would be taxed. So they banded together and voted it down.

In this case I helped inform the residents of our service area the p

ros and cons of merging.

Another issue I had to resolve, was when we came home from Dawson, going down Feliz, I went across a speed bump that a resident had taken upon themselves to install. It was basically a lot of gravel formed to make a speed bump across the road. I was amazed. When I got home, I had a message on my phone from the maker of the speed bump saying she did it.

The reason she did it was to stop a teenager from speeding down the road at 40 miles an hour. Well by the time I got up with her, state troopers had come to her house and made her remove it. But she was thinking of me, she claims she left enough room so my corvette wouldn’t have to go over the bump।


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