Thursday, August 9, 2018 • Vol. 134, No. 6 • Oregon, WI • ConnectOregonWI.com • $1.25
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Oregon Observer The
Village of Oregon
Flooded trail vexes board
About 500 feet of 3-year-old path is under water ALEXANDER CRAMER Unified Newspaper Group
Photo by Scott Girard
From left, Adilynn, 2, and Olivia Lee, 5, and Asher Tilley, 2, all of Brooklyn, pose for a photo in front of one of the fire trucks on display at the Aug. 2 Brooklyn Night Out event at Legion Park.
A night out in Brooklyn The Village of Brooklyn held its annual Brooklyn Night Out Thursday, Aug. 2, with booths for vendors and local businesses, a mini-petting zoo and emergency vehicles on display to take pictures with in Legion Park.
Way leads a library in transition Oregon resident excited for second ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ opportunity ALEXANDER CRAMER Unified Newspaper Group
On the one hand, Jennifer Way seems disinclined to change: She got her first job at the Prairie du Sac library when she was 16 and eventually worked there more than 20 years, including the last 14 as director. And she’s kept up her second job as a karate instructor since 2002. On the other hand, she embraced change when she oversaw the Prairie du Sac library during its transition into the Ruth Culver Community Library, reinventing itself in a new building, a challenge she’s excited to take on for the second time as the new director of the Oregon Library. Still, starting a new job, which she did July 2, came with some
challenges, Way told the Observer. “I’d been doing (my last) role for 14 years,” she said. “Now I don’t know how to turn the computer on or where the pencils are.” But Way said “everyb o d y ’s b e e n r e a l l y great” helping her with transition since she started as director. “It’s been a really Way busy month,” she said. “The staff has been really welcoming (and) community members have been really welcoming and helpful.” Way had visited the Oregon library for years as a customer, having lived in the village since 2010. She’s taken her daughter Amelia, 5, to storytimes, and would head in whenever she needed to print something, so she “knew the staff a little bit.” Way is taking over a library in transition, slated to move in to a new building in 2020 and in the wake of the abrupt departure of its last
Meet the director The library will host an open house from 4-6 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 14 in the Sue Ames room at the library, 256 Brook St. The meet and greet will be an informal chance to meet new director Jennifer Way and chat about the library. For information, visit oregonpubliclibrary.org/open-house.
Parts of the Oregon Rotary Bike Trail have been closed because of flooding for more than a month, and village leaders are taking steps to figure out how to reopen it. T h e Vi l l a g e B o a r d approved a plan Monday to have a consultant survey the flooded segment of the path to figure out a fix. When the nearly $900,000 trail opened in 2015, people had to walk “several hundred feet” off the trail before they hit any open water, public works director Jeff Rau said at Monday night’s Village Board meeting. But now, after record rainfalls, 500 to 600 feet of the trail is under water, in some places to a depth of almost 20 inches. That led the public works department to close the
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– Jeff Rau, village public works director trail June 26 about two miles from its eastern terminus at Cusick Parkway and about a mile from its western trailhead on Fish Hatchery Road. Village President Steve Staton said he’d spoken to a farmer in the area who told him he’d never seen water this high in the 40 years he’d been working the land. Village administrator Mike Gracz noted that snow continued into April, and then May and June rainfall totaled 17 inches,
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Building a brighter future OHS’ Prahl gets hands-on at STEM Educator Solar Institute SCOTT DE LARUELLE Unified Newspaper Group
director, Nikki Busch, who left in January citing a hostile work environment with some village officials. Busch wrote she felt discouraged to speak at public meetings and threatened by intimidating behavior during the budgeting process for the new library.
‘It’s not like there’s something out there that’s damming it up that we can go and remove, at least that’s our understanding of the situation.’
Someday in the nottoo-distant future, Oregon High School graduates may be on the cutting edge of delivering new solar power technology around the country. And if they do, chances are they’ll have Chris Prahl to thank.
Prahl, an OHS building trades teacher, was among around a dozen educators from around the country selected to attend a national STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) Educator Solar Institute at Madison Area Technical College last month. At the threeday clinic, funded by the National Science Foundation, he gained valuable hands-on experience in a fast-growing industry that he’ll soon be passing along to his students.
Turn to Prahl/Page 10
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