Monthly Archives: December 2010

Who knew roads, viaducts, and bridges were this cool? The Nebraska Department of Roads has posted a 3 1/2 minute rock video on their web site called On Ramp
http://www.vimeo.com/17765904
The video was produced entirely within the NDOR, without spending extra funds. On Ramp features “John O and the Roadtones”, AKA employee and composer Zach Broshears dressed in work gear and hard hat, playing guitar. Photos and video clips of road projects like the Blair Roundabout, Columbus Viaduct, Platte River Bridge, and Yankton Bridge accompany the music. The videographer is fellow NDOR employee Clint Mangen.
The NDOR plans to use the video for promotion and recruiting. Rock on!

A 69-page Legislative report, titled LR 542 Listing of Options was released in December and is available on the Nebraska Legislature’s web site http://nebraskalegislature.gov/pdf/reports/committee/select_special/lr542final.pdf

LR 542, adopted by the Legislature on April 13, 2010, created an ad hoc committee chaired by the Speaker of the Legislature, and comprised of the Executive Board Chairman and the chairs of the Legislature’s fourteen standing committees to review all programs of state government and each agency’s budget authority. Each committee was charged with identifying programs within their subject-matter jurisdiction that should be considered for reduction or elimination during the Legislature’s enactment of a budget for the following biennium during the 2011 Session.

Speaker Mike Flood notes in his introduction to the report that
“these lists are not recommendations of the committees, but, just as their title implies, are “options”—items that the committees believe need to be carefully considered when the Legislature crafts a budget during the 2011 session”.

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) and Google have entered a partnership to offer the public, for the first time, Federal Government titles in an e-book format. The titles will appear on Google’s recently launched Google ebookstore http://books.google.com/ebooks
which can be searched, purchased and read on any connected device with a capable browser. Currently the public can search for titles such as the appendix for the “Budget of the United States, Fiscal Year 2011”, “Remembering the Space Age”, and “Borden’s Dream” (a history of Walter Reed Army Medical Center). GPO has about 100 titles in the catalog and will continue to add titles in the next several months.
Read more about GPO’s partnership with Google on the FDLP Desktop http://www.fdlp.gov/component/content/article/19-general/864-gpogoogle

The American Community Survey is a wonderful thing. Annual surveys are taken in every community and rural area of the country. Because it is sample data, results have been rolled out gradually for the past five years, starting with state and county level data. Finally after 5 years we have detailed estimates for the smallest communities, which is most of our towns in Nebraska. The reason for the wait is the need to have years of data to make results more accurate and preserve confidentiality.
The quickest way to get a profile for your community is to go to the American Factfinder site
http://factfinder.census.gov/
In the Get a Fact Sheet for your Community box type the name of your community and choose Nebraska. You will get a profile of social, economic, housing and population estimates. And here’s the really cool part. If you click on any of the show more links it will bring up more data, still for the town you specified.