April 18, 2024

Search Results for: Ohio River

Olmsted Locks and Dam, Despite $Billions in Overruns, Keeps Rolling Along

by Keith Schneider0

OLMSTED, Ill. –- Engineers constructing the mammoth Olmsted Locks and Dam spent the summer of 2014 lowering colossal concrete blocks in place on the bottom of the Ohio River. Submerging each piece, which form the base of a half-mile long dam that is largely underwater, is an exacting convergence of digital measurements, floating cranes, groaning towboats, and divers working in murky waters that takes over two weeks to complete. Like everything else about the two …

Louisville and Carmel in New York Times Articles That Confirm First Principle of U.S. Economic Development

by Keith Schneider1

CARMEL, Ind. – James Brainard, the 60-year-old mayor of Carmel, Indiana, is not the kind of public official who deplores change. He’s just the opposite, in fact. In 1994, this prosperous suburb just north of Indianapolis held a planning workshop, inviting its 31,000 residents to consider ideas to redevelop Carmel’s crossroads downtown, parts of which date to the city’s founding in 1830. The next year Mr. Brainard, a moderate Republican, was elected to the first …

ROMP Bluegrass Festival Honors The Masters and Advances Compelling New Artists

by Keith Schneider6

OWENSBORO, KY — Bill Monroe, a virtuoso mandolin player and the father of bluegrass music, was born in 1911 and raised on a ridgetop near Rosine, Kentucky about 40 miles south of the bluff on the Ohio River where Owensboro is located. With every passing year the connection between Monroe, his birthplace, and this river city gets closer. That’s never more true than during the last weekend in June when Owensboro hosts ROMP, the River …

Owensboro Convention Center Opens With Big Party; Senators Paul and McConnell Not Among The Guests

by Keith Schneider6

OWENSBORO, KY – In February 2009, in the very depths of the Great Recession, seven of the nine commissioners elected to lead this capable city and surrounding Daviess County took a long breath, understood the political consequences, and approved a modest increase in a local tax to generate $80 million to build a new downtown. Though just two of the seven officials remain in office, what they accomplished in a single courageous vote achieved three distinct …

Owensboro’s Big Step Up To Relevance

by Keith Schneider3

OWENSBORO, KY — Senator Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky native and Senate Republican leader, took his place several years ago at the head of his party’s pack of ideologues who countenanced disinvestment, lower taxes, and less spending on public projects with public purposes. But here in Owensboro, a small city perched on a high bluff on a big bend of the Ohio River, the senator’s name graces a year-old riverwalk and plaza in Smothers Park, the …

9/11 Twelve Years Later – Cities Transformed

by Keith Schneider1

The day of the 9/11 attack I was in Manistee, Michigan, a 45-year-old journalist and non-profit executive focused on the usefulness of a new and greener development strategy called “Smart Growth.” My brother watched the attack from his office window in lower Manhattan. My cousin was inside the South Tower and escaped unharmed before it was hit. At the end of the month I toured the still-smouldering piles of rubble at Ground Zero with my …

Owensboro’s ROMP Bluegrass Festival: “The Best In Any Real Radius.”

by Keith Schneider13

OWENSBORO, KY — When Gabrielle Gray was recruited ten years ago from Somerset, KY to direct the International Bluegrass Music Museum here, and to found an annual bluegrass music festival, this was a comfortable southern city stuck in a mid-American mustiness, a city in need of a fresh scrub. Two hours downriver from Louisville, Owensboro’s populous, 54,000 residents in 2000, was barely growing. Its downtown largely consisted of parking lots and empty turn of the 20th …

In Civic Dispute Over Fracking, Lessons of Pragmatism From Previous Fights

by Keith Schneider0

The economic benefits of deep shale gas development are becoming apparent, especially in Ohio where two new steel plants have been built, and three more expanded to serve the drilling and production sector. U.S. Steel’s new plant in Lorrain prepares drilling pipe for deep well development. Photo/Keith Schneider Last month an 11-member collaborative – two foundations, five state and national environmental organizations, four energy companies — announced they had formed the Center for Sustainable Shale …

Frack Or Not To Frack? That’s Just One Question

by Keith Schneider1

At the corner of US 31 and County Line Road in Benzie County, one of the more than 9,000 Antrim Shale natural gas wells drilled in Michigan since the late 1980s. Michigan’s Antrim Shale was among the first natural gas reserves in the U.S. developed from hydrocarbon-bearing shales. Photo/Heather Rousseau BENZONIA, MI — It’s apparent why a great number of Americans wonder about the risks of fracking and whether states and the federal government ought …

More Evidence of Rust Belt Revival

by Keith Schneider2

OWENSBORO, KY — When it’s completed next year, the 169,000-square-foot, $48 million convention center under construction in this city of 57,000 will arguably be the most striking architectural achievement on the Ohio River. With its angles and glass and cantilevered roof, the convention center dwells atop a high river bluff like a palace to the future. Which is almost precisely what it is. Almost two years ago I first set foot in Owensboro to undertake …