Today's News

The Bedford Area Chamber of Commerce held it's first town hall meeting over lunch at Liberty Lake Park last week.

Bedford Mayor Skip Tharp said that the number one issue for the city right now are talks with the county on the city's reversion to town status. He said that the talks are making positive progress and although residents of the town will get both a town and a county tax bill, he hopes that the combined total will be less than they now pay.

"Nobody has any secret agendas," he said.

Bedford Citizens for Land Preservation (BCLP) honored two of its own with its third annual Barbar Hatcher award.

The award was presented to Steve Stevick and Nancy Raine, two people who were at the grass roots of this grass roots organization.

According to Annis McCabe, Raine and Jim Jones created a DVD that illustrated the need of preserving the county's farmland and forest.

The Bedford County School Board briefly took a look at a four-day school week in order to cope with rising diesel costs. The board shelved the idea after concluding that it would create more problems than it would solve.

Dr. James Blevins, superintendent of schools, told the board that savings are so soft that they could not count on them. He said that estimated savings would be less than $10,000 and contracts with school bus drivers and cafeteria workers would be an issue.

Last week’s newsletter discussed the efforts by some of us on the Interior Subcommittee of the House appropriations Committee to get an amendment adopted to lift the moratorium on drilling for oil and natural gas on the outer continental shelf in at Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the Gulf of Mexico. Since that newsletter, there have been some further developments.