Public Meetings on Merger Study Scheduled for 2/7/13 & 2/8/13

From the inbox:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media contacts:
John O’Brien: 216.698.2099 or jfobrien@cuyahogacounty.us
Nicole Dailey Jones: 216.263.4602, 216.338.0863 or ndjones@cuyahogacounty.us

MERGER STUDY KICK-OFF, COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION DESIRED

Cuyahoga County – The Shared Services/Merger Study for Moreland Hills, Orange, Pepper Pike, and Woodmere, Ohio is being launched through a series of public meetings on Thursday, February 7, and Friday, February 8, 2013.

These meetings will provide the community with an opportunity to learn about the study process and to join the conversation around both merger and shared services for these communities. Each meeting will include an overview of the project, information about some of the key characteristics of the four communities, an interactive live survey and a roundtable discussion of challenges and opportunities. 

The meetings will be moderated by the project consultant, the Center for Governmental Research of Rochester, New York.

Each of the meetings will follow the same format so attendance is only necessary at one of the four options listed below:

Public Meeting Information

Thursday, February 7th

• 1:30 pm – Woodmere Village Hall at 27899 Chagrin Boulevard
• 4:00 pm – Orange Village Hall at 4600 Lander Road
• 7:00 pm – Moreland Hills Village Hall at 4350 SOM. Center Road  

Friday, February 8th

• 8:30 am – Pepper Pike City Hall at 28000 Shaker Boulevard

About the Center for Governmental Research:

CGR is a 98-year-old independent nonprofit strategic consulting and decision support organization with significant expertise conducting local government merger and shared service studies and developing implementation plans across New York and the Northeast. CGR is headquartered in Rochester, NY and was engaged by Cuyahoga County and the involved municipalities to serve as study consultant in December, 2012. 

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Editorial Cartoon re: The Brainards

From last week's Chagrin Solon Sun:

Yo - School's Started - Don't Honk At The Buses

I'm digressing from political chatter in this post in order to provide a friendly reminder to everyone who traverses through our community on school days: don't honk at the buses while they're picking up kids. Don't drive past the bus on the opposite side while kids are loading. Don't pass the bus while it's stopped.

Check out this rules of the road for encountering school buses quiz. How many questions could you answer?

Here are the two main Ohio laws that govern exactly what a school bus driver must do when picking up children and what you as a driver encountering a school bus must do to for stopped school buses.

A lot of school buses go through Pepper Pike on nearly all if not all our streets, including the main ones of Lander, South Woodland, Shaker, SOM and Fairmount. They are unavoidable if you're out on the roads between 6:30am and as late as 4:30pm.  I know how frustrating it can be when the drivers and the kids and the parents appear to you, as a driver in a stopped car, to be taking "too long." But you have got to trust that there is a reason and that it is almost certainly a reason related to safety - yours and theirs.

This post was triggered by the following incident: This morning, my children's first full day in the Orange schools, much to my enormous disappointment, and in 12 years of having my kids ride the school bus and picked up on South Woodland, for the first time ever, a car leaned on its horn and did not stop until my child's school bus began to pull away from the driveway edge.  It was probably a good 15 seconds of that honk, maybe more.  That is absolutely uncalled for and obviously did not work (if you're honking for more than 5 seconds and the bus isn't moving, do you really think another 10 seconds is going to make a difference?).