Small towns are rightly known for their kindness, but they also have a real susceptibility to cliquishness, to wariness of outsiders, and that’s something that has to be overcome if they are to attract new people to live there.

The crane migration in Central Nebraska is virtually unique — one of the Plains’ signature natural events. It draws observers from around the country and the world, yet relatively few from our own area.

Aventine Renewable Energy has announced its plans to finish the Aurora West ethanol plant sometime in 2011.

I have apparently become the gatherer of Central Nebraska top-story lists. NTV ran its top 10 stories of the year over the weekend, and I thought it might be interesting to get another perspective on the issue.
NTV, which is based in Axtell, covers a larger area than the Independent, including Kearney and a quite a few places [...]

Looking for the area’s story of the decade? A few stories were longer-lasting than others: Ethanol has appeared on every top 10 list since 2001, the Comstock music festivals appeared in five years, school bonds appeared in four years, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan appeared in three years.

Could tolls be down the road for Nebraska? A new study says they could be an answer for the state’s roads funding shortfall.
The Platte Institute for Economic Research, a fiscally conservative thinktank based in Omaha, released a study last week calling for Nebraska officials to look at public-private partnerships  (read: toll roads) to help the state get [...]

In this month’s Essent (PDF – it’s on page 6), the newsletter of the Nebraska Municipal Power Pool, I ran across some fun little factoids that illustrate just how closely linked many Nebraska towns are with their railroad-generated past.
Corrinne Pedersen, NMPP Energy’s manager of member development, noted a few Nebraska towns named after railroad officials. [...]

The Platte Institute for Economic Research, a conservative Omaha thinktank, commissioned a study (very large PDF) by two UNK professors released this week proposing that Nebraska consolidate its 93 counties into 28. The Omaha World-Herald has an interesting story on the plan, along with a map of what county would go where.
The study doesn’t analyze how [...]

As usual, Roger Welsch summed it up best: “I’m not sure there can be a Dannebrog without Harriett. It seems like she’s been there forever. She’s become an institution.” Welsch is the famous Dannebrog writer and folklorist, and the Harriett he’s referring to is Harriett Nielsen, longtime owner of Harriett’s Danish.
Harriett retired on Halloween, and [...]

Caleb Pollard, the executive director of Valley County Economic Development in Ord, wrote a post on his Ord Sunshine Pumpers blog last week about a fascinating Newsweek interview with Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas, the authors of the new book “Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America.” It’s [...]