Stories from Tuesday, February 11, 2014

GREEN FOREST -- Brad Bettlach, of Harter House supermarkets, attended to Monday night's City Council meeting to share his plans for possibly opening a new grocery store in the city. "I came to the meeting to see if they could implement a TIF program, which means tax increment financing, to see if we could put together an offer on a vacant building," Bettlach said. "It's sales tax that my company would generate, and we would split it with the city until it reached a certain amount."...

BERRYVILLE -- Detective Robert Bartos was recently promoted from sergeant to lieutenant in the Berryville Police Department. Bartos has begun assuming new responsibilities and administrative duties and will continue to work as a criminal investigator...

CARROLL COUNTY -- Students may be enjoying the extra days they're getting to play in the snow, but at the expense of going to school on Saturdays and for at least part of spring break, snow days might lose their appeal. As of Feb. 10, the Berryville, Eureka Springs and Green Forest school districts had all racked up 17 snow days for the 2013-2014 school year. However, none of the three superintendents indicated this was a record-breaking number...

EUREKA SPRINGS -- Local resident Martha Peine has filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission alleging that American Electric Power subsidiary Southwestern Electric Power Co. improperly charged its customers for thousands of dollars the company spent in lobbying, advertising, charitable contributions and other non-transmission expenditures -- totaling $92,511...

EUREKA SPRINGS -- The Eureka Springs School of the Arts is offering several workshops for the spring. The instructor for basket weaving, Billy Owens, is a second-generation White Oak basketmaker who harvests, cuts and splits by hand all of the white oak that he uses for his student kits. ...

RUSSELLVILLE -- Green Forest High School senior Collin Kilbourn, of Berryville, has received an Arkansas Tech University Honors Scholarship. To be eligible for University Honors, a student must have a minimum ACT composite score of 28 and a cumulative high school grade point average of 3.5 or higher. Arkansas Tech awards a maximum of 20 of these academic scholarships each year...

BERRYVILLE -- Mercy Auxiliary is now accepting applications for $1,000 scholarships, open to any graduating Carroll County high school senior who plans to enter any area of the medical field. This is also open to graduating students in private or home schools. Two scholarships will be awarded...

My parents bought a 640-acre tract of wooded land in 1922 to raise their growing family. They began to clear the woods from where they wanted a garden, pasture, and hay fields. They loaded logs to be sold for stave bolts and logs to be sold for lumber or cut for wood to sell. They cut the trees with two man cross cut saws...

There you are typing away at your kitchen table or curled by the fire with your tablet. Your other world is coming together. Your characters are saying and doing interesting things, your setting is vivid and filled with sights, sounds, and odors, and your plot is... well... plotted. You lack nothing and your book will surely be a bestseller...

On Jan. 24, we came very close to losing our home to fire. Without the rapid response of the Berryville Fire Department, a fire that was accidentally started from some hot ashes in a plastic bucket on our back porch was very quickly getting out of control...

As I write this, I'm sitting at the intersection of Trimble and Wal-Mart. If the traffic on Trimble stops, I'll finish this at the light by Stubbs' Grocery. There's something wrong here. If more than four people are in Stubbs' Grocery, it's a crowd. But the light works. It makes it look like traffic. It takes a long time, and traffic stacks up. It was much better with the four-way light. The danger is most locals treat it that way and forget the new red stays red for a while...

CARROLL COUNTY -- After two years of discussion and debate, the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate have passed the Agriculture Act of 2014. "I was on the conference committee that worked hard to try and get the differences in the senate bill and the house bill resolved so that we can actually get something passed," said Sen. ...

Water main breaks are always a pain to city workers, but especially so when it's spitting snow and the temperature is well below freezing. On Monday afternoon, Berryville Public Works employees were called to repair a broken 6-inch water main line ruptured on Elm Street, between Jefferson and Bobo. Workers repaired another break over the weekend. Here, Johnny Baldwin, Berryville Public Works supervisor, inspects the break on Monday...