Ribbon Cutting at Demotte Carpet

The Chamber of Commerce recognized the opening of the Rensselaer office of Demotte Carpet with a ribbon cutting today (Friday).

A few years ago it was usual for the November and December months to be very busy for the carpet business. People wanted to get their house in shape for relatives who might be critical of less than perfect houses, so Demotte Carpet has actually been installing carpet on Christmas Eve. In the last few years the Christmas season has been less busy. Perhaps that is because people have lost equity in their homes so home improvement loans are harder to get. In any case, if you have an Aunt Sally coming over for the holidays and you want to impress her, there is still time to give Demotte Carpet a call.

Groundbreaking and bugets

On Wednesday afternoon a groundbreaking ceremony was held for a MacAllister Agriculture Division building that will be on the corner of Airport Road and SR 114. There were a lot more people there than I expected.

 The new building will have 12,000 square feet, much bigger than the current MacAllister building.

 It will include a showroom (on the left in the picture below, some offices for sales staff, the parts manager, and the service manager on the bottom of the picture. There will be a large service shop on the right of picture. It will initially have two bays, but once the operation is up and running, bay doors can be installed on the other end so that four service bays will be available. The company has already begun to hire new staff so that they will be trained when the new building opens. When everything is fully operational, the company will have about ten employees.

MacAllister has been in Rensselaer for several years. Before that, they had a small parts business in Remington for a few years. They figure that the Rensselaer office will be able to service farmers within about a thirty mile radius.

 I asked about construction and was told that construction might begin as early as this week. The completion date is vague, but is expected to be around the end of 2014. A lot depends on weather.

Before the ceremonial shovel picture, three people spoke. I think the first one, pictured on the left below, was the head of the agriculture division for MacAllister. The second was Mayor Wood, and the third was P.E. MacAllister, who is a the oldest member of the family that owns the business. He recounted the history of the company. His father began working for an agriculture equipment dealer in Wisconsin and in 1941 was offered the chance to run a dealership in Indianapolis. Then Caterpillar contacted him, and he became a dealer for Caterpillar. The main business for MacAllister remains construction equipment and they remain a large dealer of Caterpillar equipment. They got back into the agriculture business when Caterpillar developed the Challenger line of tractors. The Ag division of the business has grown rapidly in the last decade but it no longer sells Caterpillar tractors  because Caterpillar left the tractor business, selling its Challenger line to AGCO. AGCO is a company with a complicated history. It has absorbed the equipment lines for several other companies, including Allis Chalmers and Massey Ferguson. Mr MacAllister stressed how their success depends on serving their customers well, and said that would be a focus of the Rensselaer employees. (I did not bring pen and paper to take notes and I wish I had.)

 Then Titan Construction people, MacAllister people, and City of Rensselaer officials scooped up a shovel full of dirt for the cameras.

After the picture taking, people talked to each other for a while, ate some cookies, and then left.

Later in the afternoon the Rensselaer City Council held a special meeting to consider the budget. Most of the discussion was about budget cuts, but since I do not know what the baseline was, I could not understand most of what they were discussing. There will be a public hearing on the budget in September, and the budget will not be approved until October 11. At some point, and it might be after October, the budget has to be submitted to the state for its approval.

(If you want to try to make sense of the budgeting of the local governments, you can look at the information at http://budgetnotices.in.gov/. I tried to make sense of it, but most of it was not in a form I could process. However, it was interesting looking at the employee compensation by the county, school district, and city.)

Ribbon cutting and new beginnings

Castongia's John Deere dealership is 75 years old this year, though not all of those years have been in Rensselaer. In honor of the 75th anniversary plus remodeling of the front end of their building that doubled the size of the showroom, they had a ribbon cutting.

 Do you recognize what this piece of equipment was used for? I wonder if anyone still produced it.

School started this week and I noticed some kids at the RCPS enjoying their favorite class.

 New students were arriving at SJC and moving their stuff into the dorms.


Some Rensselaer businesses and organizations were taking part in a business fair, making themselves known to the new students.

 The Purdue football team has returned to their plush West Lafayette quarters. From the story that aired on WFLI last night, it sounded as if a primary reason for the Purdue trip to Rensselaer was to make the Purdue players appreciate how nice their facilities are. Today the SJC football was practicing and there were no news media to distract them.

Ribbon cutting Balloons Galore and More

Today the Chamber of Commerce had a ribbon cutting for the new business, Balloons Galore and More. The store features balloons and other party decorations and gifts.

 Tomorrow DeMotte will have its Touch of Dutch festival, which starts off with the Rotary Ramble. Maybe the middle school cross country team will go up and participate. They have been meeting for about a month getting ready for the school year. A day or two ago I saw them doing their stretching at Brookside Park and could not resist taking a picture.

Have a nice weekend, the last weekend before the start of school. Summer has been racing by.

A ribbon cutting, fuel tanks, and other things

On Wednesday Pawsitively Pets had its Chamber of Commerce ribbon cutting ceremony. Pawsitively Pets is a pet grooming business on Drexel Drive. It is open Monday thru Friday from 9:00 until 5:00 and on Saturdays from 9:00 until 3:00.

While in the area, I checked on the water level of the quarry.

In the evening there was a meeting of the Airport Authority, and on the way I passed through the Fairgrounds to see what was happening. There were quite a few folks getting things ready. I noticed that the openings on the Commercial Building were actually doors that could be shut.

At the airport meeting the main item was a discussion of the proposed fuel farm. As I understand the background, and this was picked up from the discussion, there is a program called the Airport Improvement Program through which the FAA makes money available to airports. Certain amounts become available each year. However, the money is not automatic--rather it requires a grant proposal. The airport authority would like to spend the money that is theoretically available to it for new fuel tanks because the existing tanks are split tanks which contain both jet and regular fuel, and this type of tank is no longer legal to install. The authority, working through its consultants, NGC, had a good bid on the tanks themselves but only had one bid for the installation work, and the consultants thought that that bid was excessively high. The reason they only got one bid is because of the timing--the best time to put out bids is in the spring, but grant funding is not sure until the late summer. If the cost of the project exceeds what the grants fund, the local authority, and thus the taxpayers, foot the bill.

The members of the board and two NCG people discussed the situation for over an hour. The top consultant thought the best course of action would be to order the tanks because the price of those would probably be considerably higher if they were put out for bid again, but to rebid the installation work. The two other options were to accept both the tank and the installation bid, or to do nothing. No one was in favor of doing the installation now, one member liked the option of buying the tanks now, and the others seemed content to wait. So it appears that they will start the process over next year.

It was interesting to listen to them trying to deal with risk. If they bought tanks and then could not get a good bid for installation, would they be stuck with tanks? They did not want that risk, but in rejecting that risk, they assumed the risk that the tanks might be considerably more expensive next year. What risks are you willing to take and which are you not willing to take in a situation where every option involves some kind of risk?

In other airport news, the airport has installed new fuel pumps that have a higher flow rate. The EAA 828 Fly-in had 40 aircraft fly in and the dinner had 150 pork chops sold.

Ribbon cutting Franciscan Working Well

On Thursday the newly opened Franciscan Working Well office in Rensselaer had its ribbon cutting and an open house. There were quite a few Franciscan people from the north, but few of them got into the picture.

Before the ribbon cutting, the office had a blessing, and you can see a picture of that here. Because it was scheduled an hour before the ribbon cutting, I did not attend.

Working Well is an occupational health clinic. What that means is that it is a clinic that does examinations and urgent care for businesses. Its medical services are not much different from those of any other clinic, but it tracks everything with specialized software, and that tracking makes it easier for businesses to meet the various OSHA and Workman's Compensation requirements. This type of clinic would not exist if it were not for a variety of state and federal regulations.

The local office is across the highway from the Jasper County Hospital in a building that was built by Dr. Greene and more recently occupied by Dr. Beaver. I had never been in the building before, but those who had said that it was completely remodeled and redecorated. The clinic has four examination rooms like the one below and a procedure room on the west end.

 On the east end is a room that will house the x-ray equipment when it arrives and some testing equipment for hearing. There are OSHA rules that require workers in especially noisy workplaces to have annual hearing tests. The booth is soundproof, and it would make a good place to send your teenagers who want to play their music at extremely high decibels.

 The office will start with a staff of four: the doctor who had been in their Munster office but who lives in Lowell, two technicians, and a office supervisor. Two of the staff live in the Rensselaer area and one is from Wheatfield. I did not get to talk to them until the very end because a worker from a local company came into the facility with an injury when the open house was starting and it took about an hour to get him fixed up and ready to leave.

I asked why they located in Rensselaer and was told that there was a demand for their services. There is no other occupational medicine office nearby, so they will serve the region. Though they will be only occupational medicine for the time being, they may add other services in the future.

One of their people at the event was a lady whose job it is to get new offices up and running. She has contacted many of the area businesses telling them about Working Well's services. A few weeks ago she gave a presentation to the Rensselaer City Council. This new office is attractive to businesses because it cuts their costs. It should be something that will make Rensselaer more attractive to businesses thinking of moving here.

This is as far south as the Franciscan Alliance group that is headquartered in Lake or Porter Counties has come. Their previous most southerly location is a clinic in Demotte. St. Elizabeth Hospital in Lafayette is part of the Franciscan Alliance, but has separate management.

For more information on Working Well, see their website. You might also want to look at the website of the Franciscan Alliance.

The office is decorated with pictures that are in the collection of the Jasper County Historical Society. The wagon says "Jasper County Telephone."

 There was food catered by a company from St. John. They brought this odd contraption to serve punch.

 The office is open five days a week from 8am to 4:30 pm.

At the open house I asked a city official what was happening with the solar panel farm on the east edge of Rensselaer. She said it was almost finished, but needed some kind of equipment that would act as a backflow regulator. I did not understand what that meant.