Happy Tuesday from Steve Kadel (left), Ken Vance (center) and Joanna Michaud (right)!
What Ken’s working on ...
How about a little help?
You might have noticed that The Reflector currently has a part-time reporter position open. This week, Joanna, Steve and I are conducting interviews. We have scheduled meetings with three candidates so far. It’s very exciting to meet new people and visualize how they would fit with our news staff and assist in our effort to provide our readers with quality content. Stay tuned. I hope we have an announcement of a new hire soon.
Yesterday, I told you about our weekly game of Monday Afternoon Quarterback. Once we get the paper finished, we start analyzing our performance and what we could have, or should have, done better or what we didn’t get a chance to do that week. One of the items I didn’t get to last week that I wanted to was a collaborative effort between Prestige Theaters, owners of Battle Ground Cinemas, and the Vancouver Washington North stake of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Battle Ground Cinemas is just completing a two-week run of a movie titled “Meet The Mormons.’’ Only 317 copies of the movie were released in the United States. Normally, Battle Ground Cinemas isn’t able to get movies with a distribution of under 2,400 movies but the direction of President/CEO Elie Kassab and his staff and members of the local stake of the church secured the movie for Prestige Theaters in Battle Ground and Sandy, OR.
The opening weekend in Battle Ground ranked 98th in attendance out of the 317 theaters in the United States. Congrats to all for a great effort to serve members of the Battle Ground community.
A story about the effort will be available at www.thereflector.com on Wednesday and also in next week’s edition of The Reflector.
What Steve’s working on ...
Some of this, some of that
Today is a potpourri day at The Reflector for me. There are several brief stories to write about and upcoming events – a talk about the Northwest’s musical history Oct. 30 at Pearson Air Museum, Mount St. Helens Institute’s dinner and silent auction Nov. 15 at the Hilton Hotel in Vancouver, and other activities. They usually appear in the paper’s C section without bylines, but are valuable in giving people ideas about events they might want to attend.
There are regular, full-length pieces to be produced as well. This afternoon, I’ll be putting together a story about federal funding for two area transportation projects. One provides $692,000 for construction of a roundabout at Fourth Street and Pacific Highway in La Center. The other allocation gives $143,900 in design money for right turn lanes at the intersection of SR 502 and SR 503 in Battle Ground as well as $108,100 for right-of-way acquisition.
The money is funneled through the Southwest Washington Regional Transportation Council.
What Joanna’s working on …
Good old “Monday Funday” with the BG City Council
Although Mondays are typically a pretty stressful day here at The Reflector due to the fact that we need to have all of the pages in the A and B sections of the paper signed off and ready to go to print by 12:30 p.m., some Mondays are more stressful and quite a bit longer than others.
Yesterday was one of those more stressful and longer Mondays. I arrived at the office at 8 a.m. and worked on one last article for this week’s paper, and then worked on reading and signing off on pages. The rest of the day consisted of a quick lunch with my mom, a staff meeting, getting the brakes on my car fixed and then returning to the office again to start putting articles and photos online. I stayed at the office until about 6:45 p.m. and then headed over to Battle Ground City Hall to attend and cover a Battle Ground City Council meeting.
This City Council meeting was one of the longer meetings I have been to in a while, starting at 7 p.m. and not ending until about 10 p.m. Needless to say, 8 a.m.-10 p.m. makes for quite a long Monday.
I have to say, however, this was an interesting meeting. Several things were discussed that I believe I will expand upon further in some articles. One of the most notable items on the agenda that council members discussed was the possible formation of a Salary Commission. If established, a Salary Commission would be made up of members appointed by the mayor and could not be a city official, employee or members of council members’ immediate family.
Council member and mayor salaries would then be able to be set by the Salary Commission, which could include raises for the council members and/or mayor, or decreases. Increases/raises could go into effect immediately without regard to the term of office, but decreases would not be able to go into effect until the next subsequent term.
What were some of the council members’ thoughts on possibly forming a Salary Commission? Read about it in my article in the Oct. 29 issue of The Reflector.
