Monday, March 30, 2009

Mayor Carty's Balanced Budget Proposals

Brief blog today.

The mayor plans to reduce city spending by:
- 10% across the board pay cut for all employees
- 40 police officer layoffs
- privatize solid waste collection
- reduction in fire department overtime
- suspend payments to public employees retirement system

At the same time he plans to bring more money in by:
- reciprocity tax credit change
- trash fee increase
- increase back tax collections

-Billau

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Flooding Here, Flooding There...

Hit the road yesterday with Greg Bilazarian to cover area flooding. Our first stop was Defiance. We did a noon live shot where the Maumee and Auglaze rivers meet. That was kind of rocky. We hit at the top of the show, but we didn't get to Defiance until 11:30 and our live truck arrived at 11:50. We pulled it off. Had a live interview with Defiance police chief Tim Tobias. That really wasn't our first live shot, chief. Really.

We spent the first part of the afternoon getting flood video for our six story (sorry, no link on this one, 13ABC didn't post it on the web) and looking for characters. We saw a couple standing on their porch surrounded by flood water. I had chest waders on, so I decided to walk through the 200 yards of water that separated us. I got about 3 doors down and couldn't walk any further. The water was midway up my chest. What I learned on my way back to drier ground was I was walking down the street with a slight current at my back. Though much of the walk back wasn't in deep water, I felt like I was in a lap pool. We ended up talking to the couple after they kayaked out from their house.

We did our live hits from Grand Rapids, Ohio, where the water was still rising. That was a pain. The first problem is our big, giant satellite truck doesn't have non linear editing capabilities. What does that mean? Glad you asked. Instead of editing my video (shot digitally onto a disk cartridge)on a computer (like you might some home video), we had to edit tape to tape (like hooking two VCRs together) after I dumped my digital video to an analog tape. What brought the fun to a new level was even though I was told that they would try to get another photographer to G.R. (ask me about they some other time), when Kristin Emery and Bill Spencer arrived at 4:30, a photographer did not arrive with them. They!

Good Lord, this is getting long, time to wrap it up.

Somehow got all the the video edited, quality took a slight hit. And here are the final liveshot numbers.

5pm - Kristin and Greg live
5:30pm - Bill live
6pm - Kristin and Greg live - Bill 2 lives for 13 ABC, a live for The Weather Channel and 2 look lives for The Weather Channel.

Wonder what's in store for today. When are you coming back Sobo!?!