Welcome back for a collection of snippets important and un, newsy and featurey, pithy and leth tho, as The Dade Planet pursues its eccentric orbit around beautiful Dade in yet another installment of ...
The Trenton Runaround!
The Blessin' of the Animals. Sort of:
Joyous tidings for housepets (and their owners)! Vet bills can set you back a pretty penny, but Dr. Nick Weldon and the Dade County Animal Hospital still immunize Fido for $12 at their annual rovin' outdoor rabies clinic. This year's clinic is on Saturday, May 12. Cash or check only. (This pic is from the 2016 clinic.) Schedule is: 8:30-8:45 a.m., Cornerstone Restaurant parking lot in
Rising Fawn; 9:15-10 a.m. Ag Building (behind Taco Bell), 10:30-11 a.m., B-Mart on Sand Mountain; noon-12:30 p.m., New Salem Community Center. Call the Dade Hospital for more info at (706) 657-7880.
IDA (The Dade Industrial Development Authority) met briefly on Monday, April 23. It had hoped to announce a new director to replace outgoing Peter Cervelli but has not yet done so. Cervelli told the IDA board the conclusions of a focus-on-Dade segment at an economic development conference in Atlanta: Dade should minimize risk to prospective investors by such precautions as having feasibility studies done for extending sewers. Also, Cervelli recommended covenants be reviewed for the existing Dade Industrial Park. "We need to make them more strict, in my opinion," said Cervelli.
Some good news for filling empty buildings: Cervelli reported that Gill Manufacturing has leased 50,000 square feet of the old Shaw facility, which has stood empty since Shaw vacated years back. Cervelli said Gill had taken it on an 18-month lease, which is the longest Shaw would grant. Cervelli said a Shaw representative had told him, "We just don't know what we're going to do with that building."
The board briefly discussed "Project Gingerbread." IDA gives such codenames to mystery investors who remain anonymous unless and until they decide to accept IDA's goody baskets of incentives to open a facility in Dade. Cervelli said this is a hot prospect that would bring a couple hundred jobs to the county.
What are the odds? The company would prefer a preexisting building, which Dade has not got, and is also looking at Walker and Hamilton counties--but: "We'll see," said Cervelli.
The Wildwood Lifestyle Center is offering a free children's health fair this Saturday, April 28, on the Trenton town square. from 4-6 p.m. There will be children's games and activities as well as information on health basics such as nutrition, exercise, water and sunlight. In the event of rain, the fair will move indoors to the Commission Room of the Dade Administrative Building. For more information, call Elizabeth at (906) 291-1360.
This picture of the Wildwood health crew comes from the April 14 Dade Festival of Life, where these young medical missionaries operated a booth at the health and wellness fair staged yearly by the Dade Public Library concurrent with FOL.
Which brings The Planet to the grim admission that such has been the pace of keeping Dade safe for democracy--April is trial month in Dade Superior as well as a heavy political month for the upcoming May
primary election--that somehow The Planet's coverage of the Festival of Life has never made it to the front page. Let us remedy that here.
Above, FOL organizer Cindy Cross announces musical acts. To the left, organizer Diane Rumley gets a badly-needed hug from Peewee Payne. The weather was not perfect this year. Vicissitudes happened. The show went on just the same!
Organizers did not release specifics of how much
FOL netted this year other than to say that the event was well-attended and that donors had as always been extremely generous.
For those unfamiliar with the festival, it is Dade's annual benefit in aid of the county's own sufferers of serious illness. This year it was in benefit of two local women battling cancer, Melissa Blevins (shown at right in the Dade County Public Library) and Allison Lancaster.
Best-dressed award for this year's festival went to--
All right, The Planet made that up; there's never been a best-dressed award before. But this young man was so sartorially splendid The Planet could not resist taking his picture. Ladies and gentlemen, may The Planet present Keegan Studstill? He was not one of the scheduled acts but played his violin as a busker between acts.
If you missed him at FOL, you can catch Keegan finessin' his fiddle at other outdoor festivals in the area--visit his Facebook page for details at https://www.facebook.com/chattkid.
While we're dealing out awards here for couture, perhaps this is a good time as any to throw in this photo of Emily Franklin slumming it in downtown Trenton the same week.
Em wasn't dressed up for the festival. She wasn't dressed up for anything. This is just the way she dresses. Possibly to make the rest of us feel like losers, but why speculate? Franklin's fab fashion flair is enough, anyway, to get her into The Dade Planet!
The May 22 primary election is coming up pretty chop-chop and as such politicking was another activity that was thick on the ground at the Festival of Life. The Planet saw several candidates pressin' flesh at the do, and in this shot caught District 1 county commissioner candidate Lamar Lowery opening his wallet to a prospective voter--OK, OK, Lamar was probably just lending the guy money for a hot dog; what would The Planet know?--in front of the children's inflatables area.
Lowery held the District 1 seat for eight years before losing to Mitchell Smith in 2010. In his bid to take back his seat at the commission table this year he will face fellow candidates Jane Dixon and Patrick Hickey. Smith is not seeking reelection.
Early voting for the primary, which also includes a referendum for the controversial TSPLOST starts Monday in the Administrative Building. Saturday voting day is May 12.
Today, Friday, April 27, is National Arbor Day. Trenton Tree City's In observance of the occasion, Eloise Gass and other Tree City volunteers this morning planted trees at Dade Elementary School, including this dogwood. Posing with Ms. Gass are members of Ms. Gibson's kindergarten class. Ms. Gass is the diminutive adult to the left, of whom only a head is visible; other adults are Ms. Gibson (holding banner) and paraprofessional Kay Kennedy.
Ms. Gass had planned a ceremony to be presided over by several officials including the Trenton mayor, but none appeared, possibly due to hopeless confusion engendered by the Georgia Arbor Day observance a few weeks ago in late February, to which they had all faithfully reported. But as Mr. Shakespeare might have penned specifically for Ms. Gass, "Though she be but little, she is fierce"; and who dare say to her, "All right, Eloise, pick one or the other already!"?
Not The Planet, and not Bobby Dunn of the Georgia Forestry Commission, who duly arrived shovel in hand to plant the trees. Dunn said he and the other GFC rangers are eating up this wet spring--no wildfires causing overtime!
That's it for this week, dear Readers. Keep safe, plant flowers, vote early and often, and The Planet will see you in the next scintillatin' edish of...
The Trenton Runaround!
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