El Reno Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and Cub Scouts will be canvassing neighborhoods on Saturday hoping to collect canned and non-perishable food items as part of the annual Scouting for Food campaign.
The food will go to The Lord’s Harvest, a local food bank ministry that has been involved in helping the community for about three decades.
After months of planning, a new veterans medical clinic in Canadian County is nearly ready to begin seeing patients.
The clinic will be located in Yukon, a few blocks south of Integris Canadian Valley Hospital. The goal is for the clinic to be open before the beginning of 2021. The clinic is one of two that soon will open in central Oklahoma to provide health-care services to area veterans.
The other center will be in Norman.
El Reno residents were told they could haul limbs to a site at Lake El Reno after last week’s ice storm tore trees apart and left much of the town without power and water.
El Reno Mayor Matt White said residents could begin hauling limbs to the area near Reformatory Road, on the west side of Lake El Reno. He said the location would be open every day for the cleanup that will be necessary following the storm.
“The damage is terrible,” White said.
The limb drop site will be open from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m. daily.
On Tuesday, El Reno voters will select a city council representative for Ward 1. The Tribune posed questions to the two candidates, Steve Jensen and Jacqueline Stevenson Smith.
The questions were:
▶ What is your vision for El Reno and what steps should be taken to make it a reality?
▶ In your opinion, what are the two greatest issues facing the community? And how should they be addressed?
Their responses are provided here as they were received.
By Thursday morning, El Reno firefighters had responded to 111 emergency calls, one of them a house fire in Williamstown.
The ice storm that arrived Monday and knocked out power for most of the area led to a child using a candle to hunt for an item in a closet, fire department reports show. The candle apparently caught some items in the closet on fire. No one was injured in the Wednesday blaze, but damage to the house was estimated at $15,000.
Halloween doesn't mix with downed power lines and broken tree limbs, so for those reasons, the city of El Reno is telling residents to trick-or-treat only with family and friends.
Mayor Matt White said Thursday residents are strongly advised not to allow children to go door-to-door Saturday night. White made the comments during the weekly El Reno Live program that runs on Facebook.
White said the annual Spooktacular has been canceled. Main Street, which organizes the colorful event, called it off after El Reno was hit hard by last week’s ice storm.
Canadian County commissioners will seek new options for audio-visual equipment at the new fairgrounds and expo center after rejecting the bids that were submitted for the project.
Commissioners were following the recommendation of fairgrounds director Nathan Smith, who said that all of the bidders had either altered the specifications or had failed to provide the proper bonding information.
Canadian County Commissioner Jack Stewart said he is hoping grants will lead to improved roads in his district. If all goes right, four roads in his district will either be widened and rebuilt or receive an asphalt overlay next summer.
Commissioners last week approved an agreement that allows Stewart, along with other commissioners, to receive funding assistance through the Rural Economic Assistance Program fund, also known as the REAP fund.
Canadian County Election Board Secretary Wanda Armold said people voting early in the 2020 election were willing to stand in line for hours and in the cold.
The early voting started Thursday morning as lines formed outside the election board in downtown El Reno early and seemed to grow by the minute.
“A person who just voted said they had been in line for two hours,” said Armold.
Computer programmer Gradyn Wursten still updates a project he created to hack his high school homework.
As a sophomore, he used an old MacBook with a cracked screen and bulging battery to write the code that adds shortcuts to Edgenuity — an online education platform used by more than 3 million students.
