Office Depot Part 2

I followed up with the investment firm working to bring Office Depot to the area. The good news is I was able to confirm they are still locating in the old Winn-Dixie shopping center. The bad news is they have pushed their opening date back to first quarter 2010. The reason for this was stated to me as being due to the national economy and a need to slow down growth.

It's discouraging, but at least they are still coming.

Office Depot/Sears

I have been asked before about the arrival of an Office Depot to the area. There has been one slated to arrive as the anchor store for the center where Corky's and Little Caesar's is currently located. Sears is also set to move in between the Office Depot and Little Caesar's and will remain the smaller hardware focused franchise (compared to the larger Sears located in Columbus). Office Depot is still supposed to arrive; however, due to national economic issues, they have slowed down their rate of growth and have their project here delayed until sometime this fall/winter. In the meantime they have floor plans submitted to our building department and have a hold on the property in question. To those still unsure, consider that if Office Depot weren't coming there would have already been a lease sign out there in an attempt to find a new tenant.

An Apology

I made the mistake of taking the fact that the new electric department website was up as a green light that the billpay feature was also active. As a result, a few people have been confused why they're unable to access their accounts online. While the website is up, it won't be until sometime in September until the billpay feature is active. I forgot the first rule of proper programming technique, always beta test first.

Starkville Mentioned in USA Today!

Please go to this link to read an USA Today story that mentions Starkville, MS.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/2008-08-06-Buildgreen_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

It regards the adopt of LEED standards for our public buildings. Our new city engineering, Ed Kemp, deserves the bulk of the credit for presenting the concept to us. I was glad to see unanimious support amongst the board in holding ourselves to a higher standard of development.

Starkville in Motion Meeting Tonight!

Tonight (August 11th) at 6:30 at the Bost Extension Center Starkville in Motion will have it's monthly meeting. This meeting is important to both the residents of Ward 4 and the city at large because it will deal primarily with the Cotton Mills development. From the Starkville in Motion Facebook group:

The focus this week will be on educating ourselves about the Cotton Mill development and TIF bond projects in Starkville, with special guests Chris Campany and Taze Fulford, landscape architects and local activists.

Blog Updates

I took a few days off blogging to visit my grandfather in Jackson, TN, who is 88 and not in the best of health. My grandmother had passed away years ago and it's sad to see him in this state.

In better news, a shoutout to my friend and constituent Wesley McGrew (Weasel as we call him) for discovering a major software security flaw. Wesley is a PhD candidate at MSU. Link to article.

We had our regular board meeting last night. It started at 4:30 and didn't get out until around 9pm. We first listened to a presentation from our courts and city clerks departments (which I'll post about individually like I have been for other departments). Then at 5 we heard a budget overview from Alderman Cox, who touched on the enterprise funds, which are seperate from our general fund. These are the funds generated by self-sustaining entities such as water, sewer, sanitation, and electric.

Finally the regular meeting started at 5:30 and lasted until 9pm. We scheduled two public hearings to talk about the upcoming fiscal budget and possibility of a millage increase. They're scheduled for August 18th, and Sept. 2nd. More information and a more in-depth overview of the meeting will be provided tomorrow.

Information Technology Report

Following a series of departmental reports I'm sharing with you all, our IT director, Al Quinn, shared his report regarding what is the city's smallest department. IT consists of Al and an on-call employee Chad, who also works in the engineering department. Together, they keep the city running by fixing any and all technical issues. Ask any department head and they can tell you how important these two guys are to keeping everything working.

I work closely with Al in the technology committee that I asked the city to form. We've worked with and updated the software at the electric department, which by the way will start allowing people to pay their electric bill online in about a month through the website http://www.starkvilleelectric.com (the website isn't up just yet, should be within a month)

We also made a major update to the software used by the police and courts. This is important because the old software would sometimes crash every other day, stopping court entirely and resulting in people having to wait and time lost. The new software also works with the computer units we're retrofitting our police cars with. They allow them to pull up information on vehicles and also records the events during the officer's time in his car. Video recordings are valuable because there have been incidents where a person may claim an officer treated them bad, but with the video evidence that can be proved or laid to rest conclusively and without the time, trouble, and potential legal proceeds that previously plagued the department.

Click here for a copy of Al's presentation if you're interested and please feel free to email me if you'd like to learn more about our committee or have any suggestions.