Cops corner

What a community and surrounding area we live in. More blessings than I deserve come from my living and working here. Especially in the way of friendships.

What we don’t know about our community members: The passing of Carl Seifert brought to light so many contributions he made to our community. Carl always impressed me with his work ethic, his smile and wave, his maroon truck and his personalized license plates. Regarding his work ethic, we’d always see Carl around 6:30 a.m. as he arrived at work.

This was our shift change time and without fail he would be pulling into his parking space and proceed into work. The truck knew it was going to sit there for the day as Carl was not a clock watcher. When you see and hear all he has contributed over the years to Polson you readily understood it was not accomplished by an eight-to-five working guy. We indeed owe a great appreciation to one of Polson city’s cornerstones, in this our growth.

Then there are the owners of Country Pasta, Fred and Amy Kellogg, who did almost the unbelievable when they contributed $10,000 to Melinda Owens in her quest to compete in the upcoming Olympics.

Owens and her athletic accomplishments are legend, as they should be — and she only gets better. Our local Health Care Plus helped Country Pasta spearhead the Live Locally 5K fundraiser for Melinda. The participating runners added to the Kellogg’s gift by several additional thousands of dollars. Now these gifts make quite a statement directed to one of our finest athletes.

Also, there has been excellence on so many fronts this late summer and early fall concerning our local youth. The area of athletics comes to mind as we watched our Pirates continue to excel in many areas and placing well at State. Then, add that they’re just plain good citizens. We now move onto winter sports, drama and music, plus the many other curricular activities that are abound in our schools.

Oh how Main Street business owners must feel: the Main Street Project is complete. It will enhance our downtown tremendously. They are striving in many ways to make it a visitor and locally friendly five blocks. That in turn spins off into other parts of our community.

There are those merchants that have hung on by the slimmest of margins financially in these tough economic times. They need our support and encouragement as they face even tougher times as business slows because of winter. They and other business people are indeed trying their best to make this a destination community and not just a pass through city. One has to admire these people as this has been costly in so many different ways and will be in the future also. This was a project that took their participation financially to have it occur. A salute of the coffee cup to them!

Also, we raise the cup to Mr. Crossett and his team of Karen Sargeant, Ron Melvin, Becky Dupuis and Terry Gembala and their crews.

Thanks are also in order to the construction people. They were dedicated to completing this project in a timely manner. Various city workers kept watch throughout the construction directing errant pedestrians and motorists daily, plus kept watch at night to curb the vandalism, especially to the newly poured concrete.

All of this was capped off by a street celebration extraordinaire with over 1,000 participants. Now there’s a statement about the satisfaction of so many of our citizens who witnessed this project come to fruition.

Don Smith is our new City Commissioner, replacing Ron Boyce who moved out of his ward, thus resigned.

We will miss Ron but welcome Don into the fold of city government.

I’m betting he will be impressed by our city employees and their work ethic. This, under the leadership of City Manager Todd Crossett, is a team to be proud of.

Now on to some traffic tips...

Be extra careful on our roadways as the deer are definitely around. As our daylight grows shorter, more than one deer has met their demise and caused damage to drivers’ vehicles. The golf course corner by Boettcher Park turnoff is a favorite spot for them to cross, as is north of the bridge.

Frosted, fogged or snow covered windows on a moving car will no doubt cause a driver to encounter a delay as they will be stopped and not allowed to proceed until the violation is corrected. Just makes good sense.

I’ll close for now and wish all a Happy Thanksgiving and again thank our community members for the support we receive. We think this is a pretty neat place to be an officer.