Down River – Aug. 6, 2015
Day 36 and Counting:
Yes, it’s better than five weeks since Pennsylvania’s new fiscal year began, better than five weeks since a Republican legislature and a Democratic governor agreed to disagree on a new budget.
And now the pinch of their intransigence is beginning to be felt. STEP has temporarily shut down its Mill Hall Community Center. And Clinton County recently learned firsthand from State House Minority Whip Mike Hanna that it will soon need to borrow to cover curtailment of state human resource dollars.
Hanna walked into the belly of the county beast last week to deliver the county commissioners a face-to-face update on the Harrisburg stalemate. If you look at the commissioners’ reaction in a Record page A1 picture, you’ll see all three didn’t look enthralled with the Hanna report.
They appeared to share the view held by many back here a hundred miles or so northwest of Harrisburg, something to the effect that ‘we elect you all to go to the capitol and keep the state running, the dollars and services flowing; you’re not doing that, we’re not happy.’
Followed by, ‘let’s drop the partisan bull-crap, lock yourselves in a room and don’t come out until you reason together.’
For the record, all those middle-aged and older white guys who should be working ‘round-the-clock on an accord did meet earlier this week. They did put in 35 minutes. Well done, guys.
Things:
Yes, here are some things that could have been news stories but due to space limitations let’s use Down River to give you a couple updates on local developments:
PennDOT has been promising for a few weeks that new bridge beams would be installed at the Route 220/Auction Road intersection in Lamar Township but that hasn’t happened yet.
A call to the highway agency’s Clearfield office brought word that the project contractor has pushed back the installation a few times due to permitting issues. Barring further complications, look for that phase of the project to be carried out August 17 and 18. The project contractor has until this November to finish the much needed improvement…
Clinton County’s unemployment rate in June was 6.6 percent. That compares with a 7.5 percent figure in May and 7.1 percent in June of last year. That’s pretty good when you consider that Marcellus shale work in the area has been limited the last couple years due to a drop in the price of natural gas.
Economic sources updated Down River on two major Lamar Township-based Marcellus players: Baker Hughes is reported to have 70 on its local payroll at this time and the nearby Trican operation has about 170 employed.
Eureka!
Son of a gun if it didn’t work.
It was written here last week that The Record would unveil its first-ever live online webcast, this from the Pennsylvania Little League 9-10 championships from somewhere north of Scranton.
Webmaster Butch Miller and Down River held our collective breathe a week ago last Wednesday about 5:30 p.m., pushed the “on” button and lo and behold presented live on-air online coverage of the Keystone Little League team for the next five days.
And it worked!
It was almost seamless, except for about five minutes on a particularly hot day when the online sending device went into a brief overheated shutdown mode, resuscitated by the cool hands of webmaster Miller.
Other than that (and the 144 mile daily one-way drives back and forth from Clinton County to Fleetville), therecord-online’s first foray into live reporting was a resounding success. We didn’t have a lot of advance time to promote this new Clinton County venture, but averaged well over 1,500 online hits each game we sent back.
What was also remarkable was that friends and family of the Keystone team could stand around the ballpark fence at the Christy Mathewson Little League and listen to the broadcast as they watched the game, although it should be noted there was a seven or eight second delay to get the words out of Down River’s mouth, into the mike, onto the carrier, out to San Francisco and back to Jesse Simcox and buddies enjoying themselves just beyond the centerfield fence.
The quality online was quite good, not perfect, but much better than that on the occasional sports radio broadcast you sometimes hear, this as evidenced by a note from a listener: “The baseball internet broadcasts sounded very good on my end. In fact, they sounded so good I wondered if you were really there … kind of like that guy that follows Buzz Aldrin around and tells him he was never on the moon and was actually in a studio.”
So it’s a new era in the news business in Clinton County. We’re looking for new opportunities, including the use of online video to augment expanded online audio coverage. therecord-online welcomes your suggestions.
