CSA's in the Cincinnati Area

I spent tonight trying to pull together a variety of sources of information about CSA's in Cincinnati. I've compiled a massive table on the wiki and I'm hoping folks out there will find it useful and help me keep it up to date: Community Supported Agriculture.

CityBeat on City Council Appointments

CityBeat has a great cover story this week on the subject of City Council appointments (here is the weird "print version" of the article online: http://npaper-wehaa.com/city-beat#c-156416 ).

Ever since the introduction of term limits in 1999, this provision of the city charter has gained in popularity amongst outgoing City Council members. If a councilmember leaves their seat for any reason, they may select other Council members to choose a replacement to fill their seat. This gives any appointed member a big advantage in elections over other challengers that may have wanted to fill the vacant seat.

Republican councilmember Leslie Ghiz has proposed a charter amendment to help deal with this issue that would hold elections to fill seats when most of a departing councilmember's term is left. In odd-numbered years (when only one year remains in the term) the seat would simply remain vacant until the following regularly scheduled council election.

Naturally this has given local politicians an opportunity to give sound bites on their druthers. Councilman and Charterite Chris Bortz likes the idea. Jeff Berding isn't against it, but he is in favor of a system involving some council members elected by districts and other at large members. Democratic Party Chair Tim Burke is naturally in favor of leaving the system as it is. Charter Commitee chairman Michael Goldman would rather see a system with four-year terms instead of two. Republican Party Chair Alex Triantafilou indicate one way or the other what his or his party's stand would be on the issue. Chris Smitherman was in favor of the measure.

My favorite part of the article though was the chart showing how many recent councilmembers were appointed rather than elected into Council their first time.

(I am going to attempt to embed the image. Hopefully this works:)

(If the image goes away, try this link. )

There have been nine city council elections since 1990 and since that time there have been thirteen appointments to council. This is definitely the type of info that I find interesting and I would like to get it added into the wiki.

On a related note: I'm planning on getting more info on some of the candidates who have announced that they're running in the council election in November and putting it up on the wiki as well.

City Council Members Update

Today I went in and created articles for those City Council members that still did not have pages. I copied the info from their bio's which can be found on their official web site.

Also, I'm working on a super-secret project for hereincincinnati.net that is separate from the wiki. I hope to be able to say more about it before the end of the month.

Work on the wiki so far this month

Since my last post, I've worked a lot on the wiki. In the past month, I've been doing more work than average. It seems like every time I work on it, there ends up being more work to to. :)

* I added the info about John Cranley resigning and Greg Harris taking his place.

* I rearranged how the In The News page is layed out. This page is really ballooning faster than I would like. I may need to come with a new system.

* An anonymous user added some links to the wiki that lead to Muckety.com, a site which I had not used before. I really like the site and spent a good chunk of time exploring it. Hopefully I can add more Muckety links to other articles on the wiki as it grows.

Wiki Work for 11/21/2008

Tonight I started out with updating the relevant articles with the results of the November 2008 Elections.

From there I moved on to the In The News Page to tackle some of the stories that have been getting old in there. My original goal was to not let anything get older than a month old, but I've been letting it build up for a while now.

Tonight I was working on this story about some LEED projects getting started in the Gateway Quarter. It was actually more work than I thought it would be. I had to create a number of new articles including Over-the-Rhine, LEED, and Urban Sites. I still have to create articles for the Northpointe Group and B2B Equities.

Groundwater

There was an interesting post on BLDGBLOG yesterday that reminded me of one of the pages I added to the wiki on Thursday about the Great Miami Valley Buried Aquifer. The post refers to an article on New Scientist that's about the work UNESCO is doing related to groundwater resources. I figure it's a good excuse to do a post with a lot of maps in it...



If you live in the northwestern part of Hamilton County, you probably get your water from the GMVBA, an extensive sand and gravel aquifer that extends in a southwesterly direction from Indian Lake, north of Dayton, Ohio, to the Ohio River, generally following the course of the Great Miami River.



If you live in the orange area, you're served by the GMVBA:



Greater Cincinnati Water Works puts it through this filtering process before it gets to your house.



Since this aquifer doesn't cross any international boundaries, the UNESCO Convention on transboundary aquifers doesn't apply to us much here, but we do have a consortium that protects the aquifer, dealing mostly with pollution issues.



These are the areas protected by various municipalites nearby:



Just for good measure, here are some more maps of groundwater resources for the whole state of Ohio:

One Month

The wiki turned one month old on Sunday. Interestingly over this past weekend, the wiki received both its 100th page and its first bit of spam. I added one more anti-spam plugin that should help prevent any more spam from accumulating. So far so good.

From the November 2008 Elections page I created pages for each of the four Hamilton County Commission candidates and also one for Steve Chabot and one for Steve Driehaus.

All of these articles are just stubs right now. They will need a lot more information to become more useful, but we'll get there eventually. I'm happy with how far the wiki has come in just one month.