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January 30, 2011

Northridge

Budget cuts topic of special meeting By MICHAEL J. MAURER ThisWeek Community Newspapers

of the district’s 1 percent income tax, first denying a permanent renewal in May, then a five-year renewal in November. Earlier this month the board approved placing the five-year renewal on the May ballot, but the income tax expired Dec. 31, and cuts must be made to fill the funding gap. Treasurer Jim Hudson has made clear that this expiration means the district has lost $1.7-million that cannot be recovered.

The Northridge Local School District Board of Education has scheduled a rare end-of-the-month meeting for Monday, Jan. 31, to discuss three budget cut scenarios. The cuts are being proposed to trim staff in anticipation of a May income tax levy and expected cuts in state funding. Voters twice last year rejected renewals

“We have three different scenarios to implement,” Hudson said. “We are going to have to compensate for the $1.7-million that we lost. We’re going to try to make that up through budget reductions. Then we have scenarios if (the levy) passes and if it fails, and if the state exceeds a 20 percent threshold (in cuts in state funding).” In the worst case, the district would have to begin cutting into staff to the point that it would approach operating

at state minimum requirements, rather than the broader service that most families expect, Hudson said. “There is not a lot of fluff in the district,” Hudson said. “When I worked for the state auditor’s office, that’s what I did, was performance audits. I could go into a number of districts and identify reductions that could tally a million dollars or two million dollars,” he said. “Here it is extremely difficult to do that without div-

ing into programs that really define how we operate.” Under a worst-case scenario, were the income tax to fail again, the district would probably lose vocational agriculture and consumer science (formerly home economics) altogether, along with reductions in art, technology classes and other programs. “We still have to meet graduation See BUDGET CUTS, page A2

Bypass SUPER SPELLERS likely, but probably not for 20 years

Plans well under way for village’s fourth Relay

Traffic questions throw wrench into comprehensive plan

The Johnstown Relay for Life committee will meet at 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 3, in the village administration offices at 599 S. Main St. to continue planning its June 24 overnight walkathon to raise money for the American Cancer Society. This will be the fourth year for the event in Johnstown, which has exceeded its fundraising goal every year and has set a target of $47,000 for 2011. “Our first year our goal was $30,000,” said committees chair Mary Wiswell. “But since we hit goal each year, they raise the goal. We ended up at $47,000 for this year, which I can tell you is not going to be easy. But that’s what we shoot for, and it’s all volunteers. “Last year was the first year we hit goal at the event itself, so we could announce it at closing ceremonies,” Wiswell said. “The previous years we hit our goal in August, after the event.” The committee is especially focusing on students this year, and so far the largest team that has registered for the Relay is made up of about 14 students, Wiswell said. “One of our big pushes is to try to reach out into the schools,” she said. “We want to be a kind of presence in the schools. “You go to this event at 3 o’clock in the morning and there are kids running around throwing footballs and kicking soccer balls. They love it,” Wiswell said. “We are starting to form a reputation, it’s the last weekend in June, so people can plan their vacations but still know when Relay is.” Thursday the committee will discuss what it can do to encourage teams to register now. Wiswell said registering is the act that starts participants thinking about the event and planning their activity, which is crucial to successful fundraising. “The bulk of our fundraising needs to happen prior to the event,” Wiswell said. “The website gives teams and participants a lot of tools to fundraise, so if they get registered they can start using the web site to reach out and fundraise and plan. Once they get registered, people will follow that lead. It gets the ball rolling.” The registration site can be reached at www.relayforlife.org/Johnstown. In past years, most of the participating teams have been small-town oriented, with a family and church focus. See RELAY, page A3

By MICHAEL J. MAURER ThisWeek Community Newspapers

By MICHAEL J. MAURER ThisWeek Community Newspapers While the village of Johnstown Planning and Zoning Commission has been working hard for many months to update its 2005 comprehensive plan and expects to continue to do so until at least summer, one issue demonstrates the difficulty of planning: A highway bypass for the village of Johnstown. Construction will begin this spring on changes to the downtown intersection of state Route 37 and U.S. Route 62, including the addition of turn lanes and changes to traffic signals. The work should help reduce growing congestion, but in the long term the only solution to heavy downtown traffic is a high-speed bypass. Jim Lenner, village planner and acting administrator, told The Independent that the idea of a bypass has been floated since at least 2005, when the current comprehensive plan was developed. At that time, the general belief was that heavy traffic would be to the northwest side of the village, toward Sunbury. “I think this first appeared in 2005 in the original strategic plan,” Lenner said. “A lot of the assumption at that time was that state Route 37 up to Sunbury and then down to state Route 161 was going to be the more heavily traveled roadway, and they were going to try to connect those sections.” Today, however, with the opening of the high-speed, interstate quality throughway on state Route 161, the picture looks different. “Seeing how traffic has increased on U.S. Route 62, a lot of people are using 62 to get to New Albany to Columbus,” Lenner said. “What we will see now is a See BYPASS, page A3

By Lorrie Cecil/ThisWeek

Adams Middle School eighthgrader Madison Krstich gets a hug from eighth-grade language arts teacher Miranda Stroud after winning the JohnstownMonroe spelling bee Jan. 25. Krstich will represent the district in the regional spelling bee in Columbus in March. (Left) Adams Middle School seventhgrader Anna Hatcher concentrates during the spelling bee. She finished second.

In business for 60-plus years, meat market still a Perfect business By MICHAEL J. MAURER ThisWeek Community Newspapers While some butchers go upscale with foreign chocolates, wines and other packaged goods that appeal to urban markets, and other butchers close down because times have changed, Johnstown’s Perfect’s Meat Market is doing just fine. Perfect’s, founded at 80 E. Coshocton St. in 1947 by John and Hope Perfect after John got out of the army, has also had a retail shop since 1974. Son Bill joined the company in 1972, after he got out of the army himself.

Today, Bill runs the business with his daughter, Jenny Hollis, while John, 86, and Hope, 85, are retired. Hollis said about a third of the business is retail, with the rest being custom meat processing. “We do custom butcher processing of hogs, cattle and lamb,” Hollis said. “We also do deer processing during the hunting season. That’s big. We process quite a few, probably more than 1,000.” Bill and Jenny have four other employees, while Jenny’s brother Zeb works for a meat company in Columbus. Jenny said the business is changing, but Perfect’s has products that are sell-

ing, including venison sausage and her dad’s beef chipotle sausage, which won national recognition in 2004. “I would say they (small butcher shops) are getting few and far between,” Hollis said. “There have been stores around us that have closed. “But in the last two or three years,” she said, “we are finding that people are wanting the quality of the beef. They don’t want anything injected. They’re going back to the old school way of bringing it in, getting it processed, no growth hormones. On the processing side it is getting better and better.” On the retail side, Perfect’s buys beef

— to a butcher, a beef is the animal, not the processed meat — from two local farmers, buying only grain fed Black Angus. On the processing side, Perfect’s will sell a half or a quarter to someone, accumulating orders until they have enough to buy a whole beef. “It depends on the farmers,” Hollis said. “Farmers will sell their customers the beef. Someone might buy a quarter or a half, and the farmer brings it to us and we slaughter it, butcher it and provide the service of processing it. We’ll cut to their specifications, vac pack it

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Johnstown’s Perfect’s Meat Market, founded at 80 E. Coshocton St. in 1947 by John and Hope Perfect after John got out of the army, has also had a retail shop since 1974. Son Bill joined the company in 1972, after he got out of the army himself. Bill currently runs the business with his daughter, Jenny Hollis, while John, 86, and Hope, 85, are retired.

See MEAT MARKET, page A2