If you were in a Super Bowl haze all week, here’s what you missed:
Good luck to Nick Goepper in South Korea! He’ll compete on February 18th.
Goepper will go for gold in men’s ski slopestyle competition on Sunday, February 18. If you want to catch the competition live on television, and not on your DVR, you’ll have to stay up until about 12:11 a.m. Eastern Time that day. Watch on NBC or NBCOlympics.com.
Goepper earned bronze at his first winter games in Russia in 2014. Ski slopestyle was new to the Olympics that year.
With a clear understanding of the true scale of work, in December the Speakman House’s owners agreed to sell the property to Mark Banschback of nearby Dearborn County, who will use the house as an office, residence, and community gathering place.
Banschbach owns Top Quality Building Products, Inc. and has decades of experience in residential and commercial development. With partner Guinevere Emery, he expects to operate Banschbach Properties, a property management company, on-site.
Delta is adding two warm weather destinations at Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport.
The airline announced Monday it will soon begin service to Austin, Texas and Phoenix, Arizona, reports the Cincinnati Enquirer.
Flights from CVG to Austin will begin May 1. Flights will run daily with the exception of Saturdays.
Service to Phoenix will run daily beginning November 4.
Indiana is slowly inching towards considering medical marijuana legalization
Two bills are passing through the legislature that are intended to, in one, legalize CBD for all Hoosiers and, in another, support the hemp industry which is currently under tight controls limited to research. House Bill 1137, authored by Rep. Jim Lucas, R-Seymour, intends to start the process in opening industrial hemp production. The bill authorizes the Indiana Department of Agriculture to set up a program to study industrial hemp and its products, including CBD. The bill also eliminates the state registry, created last session, for patients with epilepsy who are prescribed CBD.
“This issue gets more and more exciting as we move along,” Lucas said. “We’re seeing more momentum pick up for the hemp industry and the CBD issue here in Indiana that hopefully will be resolved very shortly.”
This week, House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, was asked about the CBD bills, as well as his view on Sunday alcohol sales, and said, “I think policymakers have spoken clearly on both of these issues that these are things Hoosiers want, these are things that policymakers want.”
Study shows rural Indiana is struggling to retain youths
Hicks said Indiana doesn’t struggle as much to keep its residents, but attract people from out of the state. The country is full of people who would want to move from a big city to a small town, he said, especially creative people who can work remotely. But, they want to confidently know that their children will receive a good education and that their home doesn’t depreciate in value.
Towns and cities that focus on their amenities tend to lure in more residents, Hicks said.
“Don’t worry so much about growing your economy, worry about making your place something that people would like to live in, and it would grow on its own,” Hicks said.
Hicks also has some interesting thoughts on growing the local economy
Most places in Indiana should entirely eliminate economic growth as a public policy goal. That’s right—most of Indiana’s counties, cities and town should abandon economic or even population growth as a realistic policy goal. The demographic trend is already set, and more than half of Indiana’s counties will continue to lose population throughout this century.
Instead, today’s economic development policy ought simply to focus on making life better for residents who have chosen to remain. These people need great schools, yet most don’t really have them. These residents need safe communities, some sort of recreational activities and a thrifty and responsible local government. They don’t need speculative buildings, fancy makerspaces or tax abatements granted on all new businesses. Those are the policies of the desperate, uninformed and unimaginative.
This new strategy is not a surrender to inevitable decline. Rather, it is a recognition that growth will someday return to much of Indiana, and the places that enjoy that growth first will be the ones with the best schools, the cleanest neighborhoods and the most efficient local governments. Those will be the places people wish to live. The places that ignore these fundamentals will remain in decline for decades to come.
Bosma: Major changes to state workforce system likely must wait
Indiana House Speaker Brian Bosma said Tuesday that lawmakers, despite proclaiming that revamping the state’s workforce development efforts was their major issue this year, wouldn’t tackle the majority of needed changes to the system until next year.
His comments came a day after the Indiana House passed a workforce development bill that didn’t go as far as he and other advocates wanted in terms of fully retooling the system.
“I think we’re teeing it up for a major retooling next year,” Bosma told reporters.
That is likely to frustrate some advocates in the business community who believe lawmakers have toiled long enough on the workforce development system, making incremental changes year after year.
How the opioid crisis and child poverty are hurting Southeast Indiana kids
Every Southeast Indiana county in our region saw an increase in the number of opioid overdose deaths between 2013 and 2016, according to the report.
Dearborn and Ripley counties saw their child abuse and neglect rates increase during that time, too.
Dearborn County went from 10.1 cases of substantiated abuse or neglect for every 1,000 children in 2013 to 24.9 substantiated cases for every 1,000 children in 2016.
Ripley County went from 11.5 cases of substantiated abuse or neglect for every 1,000 children in 2013 to 18.9 substantiated cases for every 1,000 children in 2016.
And across all four counties, there were more children living with a foster parent in 2016 than in 2013.