he county commissioners at the end of their three-day retreat on Friday gave themselves a hand following a report that showed the county’s financial health is strong. Chairman Noah Woods then encouraged the commissioners to spread out in the community, engage residents, and share the good news.
We will provide an assist here today.
Robeson County, despite being No. 1 in the state in poverty, its high unemployment rate, a sorry — but impro...
ity Councilman John Cantey wants what Jerry Stephens has, the District 1 seat on the county Board of Commissioners. So we don’t expect Cantey and Stephens to be Facebook friends, but we also don’t expect them to disrespect their offices by acting like children in public.
We will work hard to straddle the fence on this matter, as an election is up ahead, and we don’t want these words to sway a single vote in either direction. So we will begi...
One out of three adults in this country is obese, and about one in six of our children is as well. That adds up to more than 90 million Americans who are risking their health.
But if you are starving for good news, the percentages of obese Americans are unchanged since 2003. So while Americans aren’t getting any fatter, they aren’t getting any skinnier.
The average American adult is an inch taller than in the 1960s, but more than 20 pound...
Don’t fall for being stubborn Two men looked through the bars. One saw mud and one saw stars. That sounds pretty fundamental when heard by members of “the Greatest Generation” as labeled by Tom Brokaw.
And yet one wonders if they had better protoplasm, better genes, or better DNA than previous generations. Or was it related to their background, with a large percentage of them raised in farming communities or on farms during the Great Depression. At that time, the farm f...
There has been no better friend to Robeson County and Lumberton than Interstate 95.
The highway, which runs from Canada to the tip of Florida, is the single reason why Robeson County and its county seat have not gone the way of Scotland County and Laurinburg. The loss of farm and manufacturing jobs that sustained this county for decades has been debilitating, but the money I-95 travelers leave here during their pit stops has buoyed the tour...
It might be a bit early in the game for a Hail Mary, but Gov. Bev Perdue’s surprise decision earlier this week to propose an increase in the sales tax as a way to boost education suggests that she understands the challenge of being re-elected to a second term.
Perdue said she will include in her 2012 budget an increase of three quarters of a cent in the sales tax, which would boost it from 6.75 percent to 7.5 percent, costing the average ho...
Lost leader Two decades and some change have blurred recollections of the merger of five school systems in Robeson County in 1988, and we doubt that all these years later there would be much agreement on whether education has prospered or suffered as a result.
For those with short memories, and those who were not yet born or were too young to notice, trust us when we say it was a turbulent time, when a lot of forces conspired to put this county on edge...
We would stand up and applaud the Public Schools of Robeson County’s open-door transfer policy that has resulted from evolution except for this: It is failing.
We appreciate the Board of Education’s default position of accommodating parents with requests for transfers, whether they are prompted by convenience or a pursuit of better teachers and school resources for their child. And the value of education, being what it is, weighs in favor o...
It seems unfathomable that North Carolina once had a program that called for the forcible sterilization of people who were considered “feeble-minded,” mostly epileptics, the mentally handicapped and poor black women.
This week, a special task force put a price on that government-sanctioned abomination — $50,000 for each person who was sterilized, a figure that could add up to as much as $100 million for the state. The good bet is that money...
What if your 911 call went unanswered?
What if there was no one to protect you should a burglar invade your home, to help you escape from the upstairs of a burning building, to administer first aid to your injuries following a traffic accident?
Contemplate that for a second, and if it doesn’t scare you, it should.
In Robeson County, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of first responders — police, deputies, paramedics and firefighter...
About time Today’s Our View should have been written a lot sooner.
Credit to the Lumberton City Council, which on Monday is expected to approve a curbside recycling program that should be operating in a few months. When it does, the city will offer the only such program in Robeson County.
It’s shameful that it took so long. There are approximately 10,000 curbside recycling programs in the United States, an average of 200 a state, so it’s clear that ...
Couldn’t it be cool if Robeson County could profit off a naturally occurring gas that is produced by decomposing organic material and use that money to defray future costs at the landfill for expansion and maintenance that would otherwise be subsidized by county residents and, at the same time, reduce dirty air?
Robeson County’s landfill is among a handful in the state that is turning trash into cash by trapping methane gas, which happens t...
Plainly, our wish in this space a year ago today for a Happy New Year for Robeson County was not granted.
The search for good-news stories from Robeson County to include in today’s Page 1A story was difficult, although it wasn’t totally unrewarded.
The decision by Steven Roberts Original Desserts and Ticklebelly Desserts of Denver, Colo., to pick Pembroke as the site for a bakery will put hundreds of Robesonians to work; Southeastern Regi...
here were, according to officials with the Department of Social Services, 1,059 Robeson County children ages 1 to 13 who opened Christmas presents on Sunday morning because of the benevolence of hundreds — perhaps thousands — of Robesonians who opened their hearts first and then their wallets and purses. That is 86 more children than benefited during 2010 — but, and here is the only bit of disappointing news, 824 fewer than were deemed eligib...
Hands off hands-free There is growing evidence that motorists who are talking on cell phones are a road hazard, with some studies concluding that their threat is similar to — or even greater than — that of a drunken driver.
But a recommendation this week by the five-member National Transportation Safety Board to ban all cell phone use by the driver of a vehicle goes too far as it didn’t distinguish between hands-free and hand-held phones.
The board appears to...
