Recent editorials published in Nebraska newspapers

Omaha World-Herald. Nov. 27, 2015

Nebraska is well worth exploring.

Nancy Giorgi had a remarkable spring and summer. She and her husband made an extraordinary trek across Nebraska, visiting all 80 stops on the Nebraska Passport tourism promotion list.

Along the way, the Hemingford resident discovered the notable variety of tourist experiences around the Cornhusker State.

Giorgi learned about Nebraska’s growing winery and microbrewery industries by visiting Schilling Bridge Winery & Microbrewery in Pawnee City and the Kincaider Brewing Company in Broken Bow. She enjoyed the creations at the Bone Creek Museum of Agrarian Art in David City and the Carnegie Arts Center in Alliance.

Giorgi sampled confections at The Gering Bakery and, in St. Paul, at The Sweet Shoppe. She explored the sights at Cody Park Railroad Museum in North Platte, Lee’s Legendary Marbles and Collectables in York, and the Woodland Trails Art & Learning Center in Winnebago.

And she learned that fun and relaxation can be found at locales as varied as Arthur Bowring Sandhills Ranch State Historical Park in Merriman, the Balcony House Bed and Breakfast in Imperial, and the River Inn Resort in Brownville.

Giorgi was named the grand-prize winner this year for the Nebraska Passport program. Begun in 2010, the program this year featured 80 attractions on 10 themed tours across the state.

More than 24,600 travelers, including visitors from 23 other states, participated this year in the program, sponsored by the Nebraska Tourism Commission. That was the highest participation yet, according to Kathy McKillip, the commission’s executive director.

The average number of stops completed this year was 36. Cass County is home to the mostvisited stop, Baker’s Candies in Greenwood.

Tourism not only is important to individual communities across the state. It’s also a significant Nebraska industry. Visitors spend more than $4.4 billion here each year, directly generating more than 44,300 jobs.

As Giorgi’s wide-ranging itinerary showed, when it comes to tourism, Nebraska has much to offer.

From Chadron to Nebraska City, Valentine to Red Cloud, ours is a state well worth exploring.

____

The Kearney Hub. Nov. 25, 2015

Let’s sign up KPD Chief Lynch for another 40 years.

Congratulations to Kearney’s Chief of Police Dan Lynch, who is celebrating his 40th year with the Kearney Police Department. Under Lynch’s leadership, Kearney’s crime rate is low, and most of the time crimes involve theft of belongings, not physical harm to others. The by-product of those statistics is that Kearney is a place where people feel safe - so safe, in fact, that many residents aren’t compelled to lock their homes or cars. That’s a bad habit that Lynch and the 54 other law officers in his department would like to see residents correct.

Lynch joined the Kearney Police Department at age 22. Although he had studied to become a teacher, he learned that being a cop paid a little more, and so he chose to wear a badge. Most of the technology that’s used today - radar speed guns, tasers and Breathalyzers - weren’t used in 1975, but as Lynch believes, it’s not the tools and technology that make a police department effective, it’s how individual officers think and communicate.

The result of proactive policing is a city in which officers frequently are able to prevent crimes before they’re committed and solve the big ones. That would include the recent robbery of the Kearney Federal Credit Union. KPD officers tracked down the three suspects in the case: one from the Kearney area and two others from Chicago.

Lynch said it is a difficult time to be a police officer, and we would agree, given the public’s high expectations, especially in cases in which officers must make snap decisions with lives hanging in the balance, and then answer for their actions afterwards. No, it is not easy being a police officer, and the public frequently is not grateful for the sacrifices made by officers and their families to protect and serve their communities.

Thankfully, despite the challenges, Lynch has completed 40 good years in Kearney. He’s assembled a highly effective department. He’s pushed hard to see his officers and leadership team acquire the best training, and worked cooperatively with the Buffalo County Sheriff’s Department in their shared headquarters at the Kearney/Buffalo County Law Enforcement Center.

Lynch speaks about the difficulty in replacing his top commanders, but he is 62 and soon may retire, leaving Kearney with the challenge of replacing a police chief who knows and loves the community that he’s served for four decades. Naturally, Lynch has made some enemies along the way, but for the rest of us, we owe Kearney’s top lawman a debt of gratitude.

___

McCook Daily Gazette. Nov. 27, 2015.

Let’s save the dollars we spend minting worthless pennies.

Cartoonists and comedians have a way of making a point that serious commentators can’t.

Take the Charlie Hebdo cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad for example, with repercussions continuing today.

Or Hannibal Buress, who outed Bill Cosby for sexual assaults Cosby allegedly had covered up for decades.

On a lighter note, John Oliver, who delights in pointing out absurdities on his HBO show, Last Week Tonight, recently took on the lowly penny.

How low is it?

A couple of television crews decided to do an experiment, throwing 150 pennies on a busy street. You can guess what happened. By the time they stopped filming passers-by, all the pennies were still on the sidewalk.

Not only do most of us not bother to pick them up, many of us throw them away as annoying trash.

We have to admit, since the post office took out the stamp machine, we’re at a loss as to what to do with our 1-cent coins.

Throw them in the Ronald McDonald House basket at McDonalds’ drive through?

That’s a good idea, and one of the most popular arguments for keeping them in circulation is that they are used in charitable contributions.

That wasn’t proven when New Zealand and Australia eliminated the penny; charitable contributions held strong.

Penny proponents say eliminating the coin would disrespect Abraham Lincoln, but they ignore the fact his face remains on the $5 bill.

They also say retailers would take advantage by rounding up prices 5 cents, but inflation in New Zealand and Australia negated any such effects in a short amount of time.

Speaking of retail, what can you buy with a penny? Most people who pay bills with pennies are doing it as some sort of a protest.

There might be some merit in the argument that sales taxes, 7 cents total in McCook, for example, might be too easy to round up to, say, 10 cents. A 3-cent jump might be a hard-sell to the taxpayers, however.

But anyone taking a hard-nosed look at the penny would have a hard time justifying keeping it in production.

Two thirds of them, for example, are not even in circulation.

It costs nearly 2 cents to produce a 1-cent coin, and we’re spending $136 million to make $80 million worth of zinc-copper currency, and mints spend as much time making pennies as they do all other coins combined.

We waste nearly two and a half hours per year handling pennies or waiting for someone else to do so, did you think of that while you were waiting in the Black Friday checkout line?

They’re also heavy and wasteful to transport.

The main argument for keeping the penny in circulation is nostalgia.

We once had half-pennies, but stopped producing them when they no longer made sense.

That time arrived long ago for the lowly penny.

It’s time to leave the numismatic past behind.

____

The Lincoln Journal Star. Nov. 26, 2015.

Joining the gigabit club.

There’s a hipster cachet to being a gigabit city. The availability of ultra-fast 1 gigabit broadband speeds puts a city in elite company.

So hometown pride that Lincoln will be joining that group is justified. Big bandwidth is vital to economic development in the 21st century.

A handful of cities were fortunate to be chosen by Google to roll out its 1 gigabit service. Lincoln is doing it the old-fashioned way, with Nebraska-based talent.

As announced with much fanfare, the new provider will be ALLO Communications, based in Imperial, which was purchased by Nelnet for $46.25 million. The company plans to sign up its first Lincoln customers next summer and provide access to the whole city sometime in 2019.

ALLO’s franchise agreement received unanimous approval from the city’s cable advisory board and approval by the City Council almost seems like a formality. What’s not to like?

No installation fees. No service contracts. No modem fees. No introductory offers. President Brad Moline says the company’s core values are to be “exceptional, hassle-free, honest and local.”

Assuming the company delivers on its promises, Lincoln residents will soon have an attractive new option for internet, television programming and telephone service.

But actually the story of how this came to be goes back decades to a little-known immigrant from India who labored for 40 years in the Lincoln’s Public Works Department.

It was Virendra Singh who came up with the plan in the 1970s to connect all of Lincoln’s traffic signals with conduit in the city’s right of way. At first it was copper cable. In the 1990s the city started putting in fiber optic cable in the conduit.

In 2012 the city invested $700,000 in downtown fiber conduit from the city’s Fast Forward Fund established by Mayor Chris Beutler. The city now has more than 300 miles of fiber conduit.

When ALLO and other providers came to Lincoln, there was space available in the fiber conduit for the backbone of a provider’s system, making it cost-effective to lay fiber cables to homes and businesses.

“But for the conduit system, this wouldn’t be considered,” Moline said.

David Young, who was hired as Lincoln’s right-of-way manager for fiber installation after he successfully leased space in fiber conduit in Tulsa, Oklahoma, says that Singh was “being a good public servant and building something he knew was of value.”

Singh was not among the dignitaries assembled for the announcement that Lincoln would soon join the ranks of the gigabit cities. He passed away earlier this year at the age of 69. His legacy lives on in the Capital City’s 21st century future.

_____