Wind — one of the gifts of nature. A provider of electric energy was first demonstrated in 1888 when Charles Brush installed a wind turbine electric generator to power the lights and appliances in his Cleveland home. In the current stampede to reduce carbon emissions and combat global warming, power from the wind has been […]
Props to John Glascock, PE, who has hit the ground running as acting city manager. He’s listening to, talking to, and renewing the confidence of those who serve the city while wondering about their jobs and where the city was headed. The easy part for this former public works director will be ministering to and
2025? 2025! I predict that 2025 will be the year when the new, improved version of Columbia Regional Airport will finally be up and running. The improved version will include a new terminal with a still-to-be-determined number of enclosed jetways, more parking, and the longer (7,460 feet) main runway. It will also include additional non-stop
The call for a municipal performance audit costing upwards of a million dollars won’t go away. Proponents believe there’s a geyser of cash squirreled away that could be used to augment and enlarge the city’s police and fire services. More cops. More firemen. More vehicles. More stations. More everything else. More empire building for those
Whether the City of Columbia decides to — or is allowed to — lease some of its optical fiber lines to third parties reminds me of incidents during the 20-year struggle to bring cable television to Columbia that followed a languorous pace until July 22, 1977, the day the system finally went into operation. Cable
MoDOT recently unveiled its “325 Plan” for Missouri’s 34,000-mile network of bridges and highways the agency has been charged with building and maintaining. With $325 million available for this Herculean effort, the agency says it will only have funds to care for about 8,000 miles of interstate highways and heritage federal routes, including Highway 63.
It’s old news by now, but the outcome of two municipal propositions in last month’s election may give us a pretty good idea of where Columbia is headed. Although many cheered the resounding defeat of Proposition 2, which would have raised impact fees on new construction, we were just as disappointed by the failure of
Few were surprised when voters statewide rejected Amendment Seven that would have increased sales taxes three-fourths of 1 percent to fund a variety of transportation infrastructure improvements. So another year goes by, and nothing gets done. And another. And still another. And how many more after that? Voters balked the poorly devised amendment for a
It’s somewhat amazing that it’s taken more than 30 years to replace the parking lot at the northeast corner of 10th and Broadway with a four-story apartment house that’s now under construction. Almost as startling is the underutilization of the half city block on Locust Street between Seventh and Eighth streets, the most recent nexus
Some were not surprised to learn that the complex web of largely buried downtown utility infrastructures — water, electric and sewer — is about to be overwhelmed if the accelerated pace of downtown development, some of it high-rise in nature, is allowed to continue. These alarms represent the opportune time for broad reviews of citywide infrastructure amidst growth that’s both enviable and vexing. Until the recent
