Content about transportation

For as long as anyone can remember, the Lion’s Club has invited Santa to visit Morgan County.  The Boy’s and Girl’s committee puts the event together, but everyone pitches in to help.  Candy bags from the Sweet’s factory are put together during the regular Lion’s Club meeting to pass out to each child and after they visit with Santa, hay rides are provided by the Thurston family and their Clydesdales.  The Lion’s Club would like to thank the fire department for providing Santa’s transportation to the event, Morgan County for the use of the building and for taking care of clean-up and The Morgan County News for advertising. See photos on pages 6 & 7.

Morgan County is a buzz with worries of tax increases and what is the School Board going to do to pay for all their expenses.  This is not a fun time to be on the School Board, but I admire them for attacking this problem head on.  I think, I can stand for the county school bus drivers and say “Thank You” to the County for the new Bus Garage.  We have been in need of this facility for years.  The debate is over if it should have been built at this time.  I don’t know how it was paid for but it will be put to good use.  We now have the capability of lifting a bus to do repairs and inspections under it.  This is a huge time savings and cost savings over what the transportation had in the past.  Along with these savings comes the issue of safety.  We have a safe facility to work in.  Thanks to everyone in the county as this facility has become a reality and we “Thank You.” 

District employees are racked with cuts, and the school board is threatening an inevitable tax increase.  But where did things go wrong?

The dedication of a bus garage is not normally an occasion where there is great emotion expressed, but the dedication of the Morgan School District’s new transportation facility was certainly an exception.  School Board member Neil Carrigan spoke of his experiences as a young man working with his father on the district’s busses. His eyes misted a few times as he reminisced about time spent with his father in the old transportation facility. “It was a wooden building ... in that building there was a rest room.  It was a small rest room.  It was so small it could only hold one roll of toilet paper, if you had two you were crowded.”  He related the early work by his father to acquire the tools necessary to maintain the busses.  He continued, “You could put three busses in the garage if you did it right.  You could put one on the left hand side as far as you could get and then you took the other one and drove it up about three quarters of the way and then you could drive the third bus up behind the bus on the left... you had to do it just right or your couldn’t get them in. “  He spoke of his experience of measuring the gas remaining in the tank on the site.  “When I was a kid that was the funnest job I had.  I used to go out and measure how much gas was in there.  You drop a big thing down there and go tell dad that you had 500 or 100 gallons in there.” 

Morgan School District would like to announce the dedication of the new transportation facility.  It is located at 94 South Commercial Street. 

In the State of Utah voters are able to select fellow citizens to positions on local district school boards through non-partisan elections.  This system allows many decisions regarding public education to be determined on a local level.  These representatives add real meaning to the term “Grass Roots”.

By Mike Shope, Transportation Director and Robert Kilmer, District Transportation

For more than half a century the Morgan School district bus facility has been located on State Street between Larry’s Spring Chicken Inn and Steph’s Drive-in.  Before dawn each morning, you see the parking lot full of buses warming up and getting ready for a day of transporting students. There is a precession of buses leaving in every direction alerting citizens that school will soon be in session. 

Garth Day, former County Council Administrator has been charged with forty three criminal charges.  Day has been being investigated for the past few months, and the investigation has finally reached the point at which charges are being filed.  Day has been served with 38 felony and 5 misdemeanors.  He has been subpeonaed to appear in the Second District Court in Morgan on Monday, October 4, 2010 at 9:00 a.m.