Have you practiced your family emergency plan lately?

Hurricane Irene passed Georgia by with not even a wisp of disaster. But you can be sure that a new emergency will arise soon. So let me suggest that this would be a good time to begin family emergency planning or, if you already have a plan, to practice it.

Emergency preparedness starts at home. You should have a personal/family disaster plan, and it should be written down and practiced. At a very minimum, you should have a family fire disaster plan.

Some things (probably not exhastive) that need to be in your plan:

• · Be prepared to exist for at least 3 days without outside help.
• · Prepare your home—secure all outside accessories—they can become missiles.
• · Prepare for electricity outages.
• · Videotape or take pictures of the contents of your home, and store them off-site.
• · If you are told to leave your home, plan beforehand where you will go.
• · Have a week’s supply of non-perishable foods for your family and pets.
• · Prepare 2-liter bottles for an emergency supply of water.
• · Make sure you have a flood-insurance rider to your homeowner’s policy.
• · Determine where the safest place in your home is for wind and water emergencies.
• · For fire emergencies, have a rally point where everyone in the house reports as they exit the house.
• · Make sure you have at least a 30-day supply of prescription drugs, ask your physician for nonperishable prescriptions for necessary drugs.
• · Stock plenty of batteries for your flashlights, radios, cameras, phone and the like.
• · As a situation develops, charge all cell phones and the like.
• · Be sure you have a battery powered or crank weather radio for warnings.
• · Locate valuable papers and put them in a safe, off-site location, or secure them in a watertight envelop to take them with you.
• · Equip you home with working smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors.
• · If your bedrooms are on a higher floor, make sure you have emergency ladders and know how to use them.
• · Determine environmental factors, such as trees overhanging your home that need to be addressed before disaster.
• Try to have an emergency supply of cash on hand, ATM won't work without electricity.
  

Having a plan is only the beginning. Family discussions and practice are needed. Some disasters are slow moving and give time to get ready. A fire in your home at 2AM is a catastrophe in the making, giving little time to act to save yourself and your family. Prepare your own plan, and have a fire drill some dark night.

It might save your life.

August Weather, Crazy Cats, Nearly deliquent tax payers

Moving from a hot, muggy July to a hot/muggy August isn’t going to be any fun at all. I don’t know about you , but I’m kind of like my neighborhood cats. I don’t want to do much on these hot days except to lay around in the shade.

I thought maybe July would be a slow month at the city, but I’ve been busy almost every day meeting with different groups and looking at the construction that is improving the city’s infrastructure. So unfortunately I haven’t been able just to laze around like the cats.

There is an old adage about death and taxes. Simply put the only two sure things are death and taxes. And we face these possibilities every day. Stretching the analogy, cats pay their taxes by chasing away (or eating) annoying creatures like chipmunks or mice, and there are a number of cat predators around like coyotes not to mention the lesser pests like ticks, fleas, and mosquitos.

Paying taxes is never pleasant. They are an inevitable part of our lives. So the other day, I took a sample of the parcels that make up the 2010 tax digest for the city. The idea was to see if the property taxes had been paid on the parcels. Since the county collects our property taxes along with the county taxes, we don’t have a good way of determining when a parcel’s taxes have (or not) been paid. So I took a sort of random sampling of the 10 tax digest parcels, looked them up on the county’s website. Guess what I found. Of the ten parcels, taxes have been paid in full on eight of the parcels. Two of the parcels have not had any 2010 taxes paid, but they are not yet considered by the tax commissioner’s office to be in default even though the taxes were fully due and payable by November 2010.

Of the $20,195 assessed by the county, $1,886 remains unpaid. Of the $2,499 assessed by the city, $194 remains unpaid. Maybe the heat got to these taxpayers, or maybe the economy.

While my survey is in no wise valid as a predictor of total tax collections, I found it interesting. Like my neighborhood cats, I find early morning and early evening the time to get things done. Yesterday evening, I saw one of the neighborhood cats running full out across the backyard. I couldn’t tell if the cat was running from a predator, chasing prey, or just being a cat.

I’m looking forward to fall, and I bet the cats are too. Maybe cooler weather will inspire our nearly delinquent taxpayers to action too.