Well, the garden is still motoring along.  I’ve lost the squash and cucumbers completely b/c I trimmed too many leaves and due to the incredible vascularity of those plants, they dried out and died.  Won’t make that mistake again.  However the okra is coming in like mad.
 About half of the tomato plants are goners and half are still going.  The half that are still going were purchased at Southern States.  I seem to have really good luck with their plants.  I am making sauce and freezing it, making salsa, eating tomato sandwiches and supplying everyone I know with tomatoes.
  The pepper plants are also starting to come in strong.  I purchased 3 pepper plants – 2 were supposed to be bell peppers and one was supposed to be a sweet banana pepper.  As it turns out, one of the bell peppers isn’t a bell pepper – it’s liquid fire…:)  I thought the pepper looked smallish but picked it anyway.  Big mistake!
 The green beans produced a good round of produce and I’m starting to see flowers again so I am hopeful that I will get one more load of beans. That’s about all I’ve got for now…. 

The decision to hire the new fire fighters was forwarded to the Finance committee for consideration this past Wed.  The finance committee talked about it and decided that the whole Council needed to take this decision so we voted out a recommendation supporting the hire to the entire Council.  To this end, there is a special meeting Monday night at 7:30. 

Another item that came up for discussion were the budget cuts handed down by the General Assembly.  The GA cut the amount of money they send to localities and sent us suggested cuts.  The biggest cuts are in police spending and spending on programs for at-risk youth.  Spending on police is, of course, discretionary but spending on the at-risk stuff is mandated however, the General Assembly, in their wisdom, declined to rescind the mandated spending.  The net effect of this is the state is transferring its budget problems to the localities.  The total cut to the City is about $150k and what the Council will probably do is just take $150k out of the fund balance and plug the gap.  I think that this is a mistake.  If the state wants to cut the budget, they should go ahead and cut it.  

Sending a recommendation to the localities to cut spending on police and at-risk youth is a time-honored tactic to ensure the cuts won’t actually happen.