June 11, 2024: Area delegation travels to Illinois to tour hydrogen production used by Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District to power a dozen buses
A long-form edition of the newsletter that documents the journey to a different time zone
There are many choices to be made about the future, a future in which new systems are being implemented to help communities further reduce the amount of fossil fuels emitted into the air. One purpose of journalism is to help inform the public about some of the decisions by providing detailed accounts of some of the decision-making process.
Charlottesville Community Engagement is not an organic entity, but the metaphorical DNA seems to occasionally lead to the spiraling out of long accounts such as this one. I’m Sean Tubbs, and today’s edition is one of the reasons Town Crier Productions exists. Back to normal programming tomorrow.
In this edition:
Appointed and elected officials from Charlottesville and Albemarle County traveled in mid-May to a central Illinois community in to learn about how hydrogen fuel cells are used to power some buses
Charlottesville City Council has agreed with a recommendation for Charlottesville Area Transit to test out hydrogen fuel cell vehicles beginning in 2027
The Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District produces 420 kilograms of hydrogen a day, enough to power a dozen buses
You will most definitely have to click through to Substack to see the entirety of this 5,000 word edition
First shout-out: Black Business Expo coming up on June 15
In today’s first Patreon-fueled shout-out, the 8th annual Charlottesville-Albemarle Black Business Expo is back for 2024 with a new date and location. This year's Expo will take place on Saturday, June 15, 9 a.m. - 3 p.m. The event is co-located with Charlottesville's Juneteenth celebration at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. The event is free and open to everyone.
This year’s Black Business Expo includes an exhibition of dozens of booths operated by Black-owned businesses, three panel discussions by leading professionals, a business pitch competition with cash prizes, live music entertainment, a kids play area, and more. The Black Business Expo is co-organized by WTJU 91.1 FM.
A trip to a peer community
All across the world, public transit fleets are planning to transition away from fossil fuels to help their communities reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
One community in central Illinois has chosen a path that includes the use of hydrogen gas to power a dozen large buses each day.
“I can put the bus out at 6 a.m. in the morning and that bus can come back at 2 a.m. in the morning, one trip, a couple drivers” said Charlie Lutz, Master Technician and Foreman for the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District (MTD).
In mid-May, the city of Charlottesville spent $16,000 to take a delegation of elected officials and staff from both Charlottesville and Albemarle County to visit Champaign-Urbana to see the system up close.
“This project fits into the city’s climate goals which are 45 percent reduction by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2050,” said Kristel Riddervold, the director of Charlottesville’s Office of Sustainability. “So it is a big deal.”
To hold up their end of the emissions reduction goal, Charlottesville Area Transit (CAT) has been studying what will replace diesel buses that continue to remain in the fleet. In February, Council authorized CAT to pilot four battery-electric vehicles in the near term and to test out three hydrogen vehicles beginning in 2027.
Some in the community have expressed skepticism over whether the hydrogen option is ready or realistic. Where will the fuel come from? What kind of energy is required to produce and transport? Is it safe?
In Champaign-Urbana, MTD recently expanded their pilot to add two sixty-foot long articulated buses that run on hydrogen. They’re the first agency in the nation to do so. “Articulated” means they bend in the middle to allow the vehicles to go around corners while carrying more passengers.
According to Lutz, one full supply of hydrogen gas allows the 40 foot buses to go 350 miles and the 60 foot buses to go about 200 miles. The hydrogen’s job is to charge the battery throughout the day while vehicles are on the road.
But where does the MTD get their hydrogen from?
They make the gas on site.
I’ve been covering Charlottesville’s planning for some time and paid for my own travel to Champaign-Urbana to take a look myself and to share with you. For more background, here are some previous articles:
Charlottesville Area Transit to study alternative fuels, March 14, 2022
Sanders addresses community feedback on fuel for public transportation, September 11, 2023
Charlottesville Area Transit fuel study recommendations delayed until January, November 10, 2023
CAT fuel study recommends purchase of two battery-electric vehicles in 2024 for pilot, January 16, 2024
Charlottesville to pilot two types of alternative fuel buses beginning with two battery-electric vehicles, March 19, 2024
A journey to Champaign-Urbana
CAT’s study of alternative fuel sources has taken place at a time when the agency is still recovering from both the pandemic and a longer trend.
“Our ridership has been on the decline the last seven or eight years,” said Garland Williams, the director of Charlottesville Area Transit. “We went from about 2 million and really plummeted during COVID and are on the uptick now and back to about 1.5 million or 1.6 million. We should hopefully next year be back to a pre-pandemic level of service.”
CAT is putting the finishing touches on a transit strategic plan, a document mandated by the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation that explains what each transit agency in the Commonwealth hopes to do in the next ten years. CAT currently has 51 vehicles and the plan anticipates adding another 25 to the fleet by 2034 to provide more frequent service to boost ridership. (review the transit strategic plan)
To allow decision-makers and decision-implementers to have more information, Williams reached out to the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District (MTD) to arrange a tour to get a close look at the technology.
Because three Councilors were on the trip, their time together was technically an official meeting with minutes kept by Kyna Thomas, the clerk of City Council. Councilors Michael Payne and Lloyd Snook joined Mayor Juandiego Wade on the journey.
Albemarle County Supervisor Diantha McKeel attended in her capacity as chair of the Regional Transit Partnership. No one from the University of Virginia took part in this journey, though a second is expected later in the year.
From Charlottesville to Champaign-Urbana
There are a lot of aspects worth studying between the Charlottesville area and Champaign-Urbana, but the latter is a much more urbanized community.
“Champaign-Urbana is the home of the University of Illinois which is a Big 10 university with about 57,000 students,” Gnadt said. “We do all the public transportation for the community but also for the university.”
In comparison, the University of Virginia had about 23,721 students in Charlottesville in the fall of 2022 and runs their separate transit system with almost no overlap with Charlottesville Area Transit except a trolley-style bus that makes a circuit around the central campus,
In contrast, MTD covers the whole community and is governed by a seven-member Board of Trustees appointed by the Champaign County Board.
“We have 118 buses, 18 or 19 of them are 60 foot articulated buses,” Gnadt said. “The rest are 40 foot standard buses. Twelve of our buses are hydrogen fuel-cell and the remainder are diesel-electric hybrids.”
For now, the system has no battery-electric vehicles, though that will likely change over the next ten years.
Gnadt said the University of Illinois pays MTD for the cost of an extra hundred thousand hours of service each year at a cost of about $7 million a year. Before the pandemic, the system carried between 12 million and 13 million passengers each year. As with CAT, ridership dropped.
“We’re closing out this year and we’ll be nipping at the heels of ten million so we’re also coming back but we took a blow with the pandemic,” Gnadt said.
MTD is ISO-14001 certified, which means their policies meet a set of standards for environmental sustainability that are audited every year and recertified every three years.
“When we started about zero emission and making that a part of our sustainability plan, we wanted to be intellectually honest when we said we were zero emission,” Gnadt said. “So while I think there’s a place for battery electric vehicles, that removes the emissions from an urban center but it does not remove them from the energy source.”
For central Illinois, that means burning of coal that is high in sulfur. Gnadt said MTD wanted to truly work toward being emissions free.
“We wanted to produce our own energy on site that we use in the vehicles so that we can say with a clean conscience that we really are zero-emission,” Gnadt said.
Gnadt acknowledges MTD’s system is not yet zero-emissions but reliable service leads to increased ridership which provides people with choices of how to get around the community.
“The greatest thing that can be done in our country for sustainability efforts is mode-shift,” Gnadt said. “Getting people out of their private automobiles and getting them into a collective vehicle, even if that’s a diesel-powered collective vehicle like a bus. You’re still better off having 50 people on a bus than 50 people in cars.”
How do you make the hydrogen?
During Charlottesville’s public’s conversations about alternative fuel sources, City Councilor Michael Payne has reflected the views of skeptics about a recommendation from the consultant Kimley-Horn to include hydrogen in CAT’s future mix.
“I think hydrogen we included because of a recognition that battery electric vehicles have a lot of questions in terms of maintenance, how they’re actually going to perform on the road over time,” Payne said at a luncheon in the basement of the Hyatt Place in Champaign.
Payne said many in the Charlottesville community are skeptical the technology will be in place in time. The trip to Champaign-Urbana offered a chance for him to ask questions.
“I’m very curious just from a practical level, what were the funding sources that you tapped into to make it financially feasible for the locality, what kind of partnerships were in place?” Payne asked. “What’s going into your decision about how fast you’re transitioning the fleet to hydrogen and is there a long-term goal of what percentage of the fleet would be hydrogen?”
Gnadt said the Federal Transit Administration is encouraging the purchase of low- or no emissions vehicles through a funding program their 5339(c) program which goes by the colloquial name of “LowNo.” The federal government has $1.5 billion available in the current fiscal year, an increase from $55 million in FY16.
MTD no longer has any diesel-only vehicles in the fleet having begun the transition to hybrid-electrics many years ago.
“A hundred percent of the vehicles that are not hydrogen fuel cell for us are diesel-electric hybrids so they operate like a Prius, only on a bigger scale,” Gnadt said.
In fiscal year 2017, the MTD received $1.45 million from the LowNo program to purchase “New Flyer 60 foot zero-emission fuel cell electric buses with supporting hydrogen infrastructure.” MTD’s standard buses are 40 feet.
Gnadt said the total cost for that project was about $20 million and a portion covered the cost to install the electrolyzer that allows for the hydrogen fuel to be produced.
“The LowNo awards now are $16 million to $18 million so they’re dramatically larger awards,” Gnadt said. “The funding pot is significantly larger.”
For instance, in FY2023, MTD received nearly $6.64 million to purchase hybrid-electric vehicles to continue replacing some of those with diesel engines. That’s allowed them to transform their fleet since purchasing their first one in 2009 from Allison Transmissions. In 2016, they began purchasing hybrids from the firm BAE Systems.
Gnadt said both firms are constantly upgrading systems, and issues with the drive-train in earlier generations have been fixed.
Before starting work in Charlottesville in 2019, Williams worked for the Greater Richmond Transit Company and has experience with how that agency and CAT have experimented with alternatives to diesel.
According to the draft transit strategic plan for CAT, Charlottesville’s system bought its first pair of diesel-electric hybrids manufactured by Gillig in 2010 that used the Allison drive-train. CAT purchased nine more over the years with the most recent in 2023. Williams said the older models are often in the shop for repairs.
“When we first bought the vehicles, they worked really well for the first six years,” Williams said. “Once the first set of batteries had to be purchased after that, then all of the problems started to occur and we haven’t been very successful.”
To assist MTD’s desire to increase sustainability and ween the fleet off of diesel, the MTD decided that hydrogen was worth exploring. The $20 million project was a long-term investment.
“We installed an electrolyzer and a solar array that powers the electrolyzer to produce the hydrogen,” Gnadt said. “So that produces about 420 kilograms of hydrogen a day. We can store in the neighborhood of around 1,000 kilograms. That allows us to fuel 12 buses. We have 12 buses.”
That solar array is on eight acres of land leased nearby and generates twice as much energy as needed to perform the electrolysis and anything they don’t use goes back onto the grid.
As more hydrogen buses are added, MTD will need to expand its fueling station to add room for more electrolyzers, or can begin to have liquid hydrogen delivered.
“Rough numbers, to get another electrolyzer is going to cost us $10 million or $12 million,” Gnadt said. “To get the liquid delivery it will cost us $9 million to $10 million and we can fuel 12 more buses or we can fuel 90 buses.”
If they opt to go that route, MTD will get their liquid hydrogen from Chicago, about 90 minutes away from Champaign-Urbana. On site, the liquid hydrogen is vaporized into gas form before being dispensed into vehicles.
Gnadt said the liquid hydrogen can be produced at a nuclear power plant as a by-product. Though it would be expensive, he said having liquid hydrogen on site would allow the fuel cell vehicles to still function on days when the electrolyzer is down.
One critique levied against hydrogen is that some of the ways to produce it may not come from clean sources. Gnadt said he discourages the use of a color wheel because what matters the most is getting vehicles to run so he can provide service.
“It doesn’t matter whether it was produced by burning natural gas, by using an electrolyzer, by using nuclear, methane reformation, it doesn’t matter how it is produced as long as it is pure,” Gnadt said.
Another critique has been that more space might be needed to keep the fuel sources separate. Gnadt said that was not the case at MTD.
“We have our hydrogen production station right next to our underground [diesel] storage tanks,” Gnadt said. “Right next to that is our above-ground storage tank for gasoline. On our fueling island where we actually pull the buses in, the hydrogen dispenser is right next to the diesel dispenser.”
Is it safe?
When many people think of hydrogen fuel, they think about the Hindenburg disaster on May 6, 1937 a tragic event that killed 35 people. That fire produced one of the most iconic images of the 20th century and this came up at least twice during the tour.
Gnadt reminded the delegation that gasoline and diesel powered transmissions can explode as well with fuel tanks that are under a vehicle’s carriage. Hydrogen is stored differently on a vehicle.
“Hydrogen is above you and it is 17 times lighter than air so if there’s a leak it goes at 45 miles per hour straight up away from the passengers, away from the driver,” Gnadt said. “It can ignite, but it goes away from you.”
For safety, there are over 50 hydrogen monitors in the ceiling of the bus storage facility that are tied into a system that will sound alarms, boost exhaust systems, and will shut down any gas-fired ignition in the facility such as heaters.
Gnadt said battery-electric vehicles can catch fire as well. For instance, a parked battery electric bus owned by the Connecticut Department of Transportation caught fire in July 2022 two days after being taken out of service for a faulty charger. (NTSB report)
Second shout-out: League of Women Voters seek entries for poster contest
In today’s second Patreon-fueled shout-out: Every election is important and every vote matters. To get out the word and increase voter registrations, the League of Women Voters of Virginia is holding a poster contest for middle and high school students on one of four themes;
1. Voting is Important in Our Democracy
2. Voting Requires Following Specific Laws
3. Voting and a Vote Should Depend on True Not False Information
4. Every Vote will be Handled Legally, Carefully and Counted Correctly
The deadline is June 30, 2024.
Entries must be non-partisan and support no campaigns or political parties. Entries must also look visible when blown up to 22 by 28 inches. For more detailed information on the themes and how to submit, visit the League of Women Voters website at lwv.org.
Where will CAT gets hydrogen for its pilot?
Williams does not yet know where CAT will get its hydrogen for the three pilot vehicles that are expected to go on line beginning in 2027. He said he wants to get the cleanest version of hydrogen possible from within three to four hours of Charlottesville. Another will be to try to generate the hydrogen onsite as Champaign-Urbana does today.
“I’m willing to take it any way I can get it,” Williams said. “What I have seen and what I am hearing confirmed today is the reliability factor is there.”
While hydrogen fuel may not be commonplace now, the federal government is making investments in the infrastructure. Last October, the Biden Administration announced $7 billion in funding to build seven hydrogen hubs around the country. One will be located in the Appalachian region.
“The Appalachian Hydrogen Hub will leverage the region’s ample access to low-cost natural gas to produce low-cost clean hydrogen and permanently store the associated carbon emissions,” reads the announcement. “The strategic location of this H2Hub and the development of hydrogen pipelines, multiple hydrogen fueling stations, and permanent CO2 storage also have the potential to drive down the cost of hydrogen distribution and storage.”
For more information on that process, one can look at the FAQ for ARCH2 last updated on May 13, 2024.
Trying out “Pollution Reducktion”
After an hour and a half of discussion, the delegation was invited to board one of the 12 hydrogen buses for the three mile journey to the MTD’s facilities on University Avenue from downtown Champaign. Each of the vehicles has its own unique wrapping to promote the environmental benefits. The one the delegation took read “Pollution Reducktion.”
Upon getting off the bus and standing at the rear, Supervisor Diantha McKeel noted how odd it was to be so close to a gigantic bus and not smell any fumes. Someone from MTD explained.
“Well, and you can see that all that you’ve got here is essentially water that comes out of the cell and it drops down so that’s basically it and you’ve got a little but that comes out of the tailpipes on the roof,” said Josh Berbaum, the maintenance and facilities director for MTD.
On the day the delegation visited, a technician with the firm Trillium was on site to perform maintenance on the electrolyzer. In November 2021, the MTD entered into a partnership agreement with Trillium to provide operational support. The delegation of about 15 people entered into an enclosure on the MTD site.
“Everybody can get in,” said Garrett Langan, a field technician with Trillium. “Stay off the raised platform.”
Pictures of the electrolyzer were not allowed but audio recording was and at some point, there will be a podcast version of this story.
The electrolyzer itself is made by the firm Nel, a Norwegian company formed in 1927. The entire area used for production and storage is about the same as a basketball court.
“This is the entire electrolyzer,” Langan said. “This is what makes 420 kilograms a day of pure hydrogen. You can think of it like a gigantic nine-volt battery essentially. It’s a bunch of plates and membranes. You’ve got a positive side and a negative side and then as the water comes in, we put a large amount of DC voltage to it and that causes it to separate into oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen we vent off and the hydrogen goes on to further drying processes then goes down into compressors to storage, to fueling.”
In addition to Nel, there are two other companies that make electrolyzers in North America.
The water itself has to be deionized first, a process that Langan said is a lot like electrolysis itself.
In all there are four cell stacks at the location with each providing 105 kilograms a day. This is an earlier model and Langan said a newer system produced by Nel can produce double the output in the same amount of space. (learn more about the M series of electrolyzers)
Berbaum said it takes around four gallons of water to produce a kilogram of hydrogen. The compressors bring the pressure of the hydrogen gas to over 6,000 psi, or pound force per square inch.
The hydrogen is stored in cylinders steps away from the electrolyzer and there is currently capacity at the Champaign-Urbana MTD to store 800 kilograms.
The hydrogen buses are fueled in the same space as the diesel buses but the dispenser is a lot more complicated and expensive. Langan said there’s a camera around the shaft of the dispenser that helps ensure a connection with the bus.
“That’s what gives us our handshake and this nozzle itself is $22,000,” Langan said.
Langan said the hydrogen gas is dispensed at a rate of about 2.4 kilograms per minute which translates into an average of about ten minutes to fill. He said the nozzle may feel hot initially but because the hydrogen gas expands as it flows into the bus, giving off heat. The gas is then cycled through another unit that cools it to minus 15 degrees Celsius or 5 degrees Fahrenheit.
“With these buses, they can go on any route,” Berbaum said. “We don’t have to delineate that hydrogen do these routes because they’re shorter or longer. We just run these buses like we do any other bus. It doesn’t matter.”
Fire departments require transit agencies using hydrogen to install systems in case there is a fire. Hydrogen fire burns blue and may not be visible to the naked eye. That’s why there are infrared cameras that monitor for any sign of ignition.
“The other thing is combustible gas detectors,” Langan said. “The lower explosive limit of hydrogen is about four percent in the atmosphere and because of that four percent, it changes by volume but you have to make sure that that four percent is consistently what your set point is so you have to calibrate it based on the space, so on and so forth.”
If the limit exceeds four percent, exhaust fans will be turned on to vent the gas.
At this point of the tour, Gnadt said the iconic image of the Hindenburg in flames is misinterpreted.
“There’s that really dramatic film footage of the big ball of flame,” Gnadt said. “That’s not hydrogen burning. That’s the dirigible burning and not the hydrogen so even when people think of that disaster and it’s so dramatic in their mind, what they’re seeing that’s dramatic has nothing to do with the hydrogen. The hydrogen did burn but that’s what they’re seeing.”
For now, much of the MTD fleet operates on diesel-electric hybrids. The two types of buses use the same space to fuel.
“Just ahead of these hydrogen dispensers, we have one on each side, and then our diesel dispensers are right up there, so two diesel dispensers in the front, two hydrogen in the rear,” Berbaum said. “It doesn’t matter what kind of bus we have, they all flow through here every night and they all get parked in storage the same every night. They all get maintenance the same. This bus is no different than any other bus. All treated the same. One for one.”
Councilor Payne asked what would happen if a hydrogen bus gets into a crash and catches fire.
“The worst case is if you have a battery fire either on a fuel cell bus, a battery-electric bus, or a hybrid bus,” Gnadt said. “The battery fires are the most difficult to extinguish. You essentially can’t. They have to run their course and you’re going to lose the bus. So battery fires are bad. Diesel fires, not good. It’s underneath the passenger compartment so that’s not good. The hydrogen tanks are on the top. They can ignite but it is going away from the passengers.”
Lessons from the MTD’s decision to pursue hydrogen
Like CAT, MTD has to tell other levels of government what its plans are for transitioning the fleet’s fuel source. The agency is currently applying for funding to expand hydrogen storage for either truck delivery or electrolysis on site.
“Once we do that, our intention is to have about 70 percent of our fleet be hydrogen fuel-cell electric and about 30 percent will probably be battery-electric,” Gnadt said.
Gnadt said MTD has held off on that route because he said hybrid-electric battery-electric systems have had reliability issues that require more buses to be purchased to ensure system reliability.
“Battery-electric vehicles are not a one for one replacement for a diesel bus,” Gnadt said. “They don’t operate under the same conditions if you have varying temperatures in your community, and they have about half the range of a diesel bus.”
Gnadt said when MTD first announced they would be including hydrogen fuel cell buses as part of their fleet, there was the same skepticism that accompanied the recommendation from the Kimley-Horn report.
“The University of Illinois is quite literally a world-renowned engineering school and so we have really high-end scientists, nuclear physicists, rocket scientists, you name every kind of engineer that there is on the planet, they’re here,” Gnadt said. “They were coming out of the woodwork calling me, sending me emails, letters to the editor, you name it, like ‘why are you doing this? You’re making a mistake and you should go with battery-electric.’”
Gnadt made a practice of reaching out to all of the skeptics to take them to lunch to explain why the choice had been made. He told those who would listen that his job is to run a transit service and that means he needs vehicles that can run.
Gnadt said a problem with battery-electric vehicles is the need to charge them during the day and that could mean pulling buses out of service while on their route to top up. He said some of the lunches got a little tense and not everyone agreed with him but he claimed they understood why the decision was made.
“We had a little negative bump early on and then it became all positive after that because I had a group of people who were well-respected and were academics and when they talked about the project, people really listened,” Gnadt said.
Gnadt said with a hydrogen fuel cell, the battery on board never gets depleted unlike the one used in a battery-electric vehicle.
“That stresses a battery out, it shortens the lifespan, and so the batteries are only lasting about half of the lifespan of a bus, and so you’re guaranteed to have to change out the battery pack at least once, maybe twice depending on what the working conditions of that bus have been,” Gnadt said.
Gnadt said the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District has a transition plan that will phase out the hybrid diesel vehicles out in favor of them battery-electric vehicles. Just not yet.
“We want to give it some time,” Gnadt said. “We’re not even thinking about doing it for another ten or so years. We want the battery technology to continue to improve. We want to see solid-state batteries. We want to see batteries that can be recycled. People are working on this and I think over the next ten years we’ll see batteries improve and the range will improve with solid-state batteries so we think we’ll bring them into the system.”
Another trip will be held later in the summer to take another group to see the work.
What would you want to know?
Reading material:
Trillium partners with Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District to provide clean energy, Trillium, November 2, 2021
Champaign-Urbana MTD Partners with Public and Private Sector to Implement Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Technology, Mass Transit, Megan Perrero, December 21, 2021
Champaign-Urbana MTD: Transit agency transition to fuel cell buses, Ballard Bus Blog, February 23, 2024
All aboard at the end of #687
I’m writing this on board a Northeast Regional bound for Charlottesville after time up north. I know that no one will get these words in the email because it cuts off. I also know I’m traveling quite fast on a train powered by electricity. Where the electricity comes from I do not know, but that would be because I’ve never written about this particular stretch of Amtrak’s service.
I decided to go on the trip to Champaign-Urbana because I wanted to have a better sense for myself of how a hydrogen vehicle would work. I want to go back again because I have more questions, and more questions about what it’s like to be in Champaign-Urbana. The University of Illinois is a land-grant college, just like my alma mater of Virginia Tech. That’s where I realized I wanted to write to explain things.
This edition of the newsletter took a lot more time than most. It also cost a lot more as I paid for my own travel and my own hotel. I ate one communal meal off a buffet, but barely touched it as I was nervous about how to gather sound in the wild. I skipped the two dinners they all went to as a group so I could explore Champaign, a twin city with Urbana, and I very much want to go back when a new delegation goes.
I’m able to do this because of paid subscribers. There are almost 650 now, all paid through Substack. The total number of subscribers is very close to 3,000. I know that a long article like this won’t be read by everyone, but I also know that it’s very easy to skip things.
You didn’t skip this. You stuck through to the end. I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing, but it is a thing.
There are many choices to be made about the future, a future in which new systems are being implemented to help communities be informed about what is happening. In years past, the daily newspaper might have sent a reporter. That doesn’t happen now, in part because ownership of the daily paper isn’t local. I’m local, even though I seem to travel as much I can now to learn as much as I can about what this 21st century is actually like for communities.
Maybe I’ll find a way to write about all of the CH communities, somehow? Thank you to paid subscribers for at least giving me some sense that it might be possible.
And, thanks to Ting for helping to really provide a major source of revenue to allow me to dream of heading out to something like this.
If you’d like to join those paid subscribers, Ting will match your initial subscription, whether it be at $5 a month, $50 a year, or $200 a year. It is quite generous of them to do so, and I appreciate their investment in this style of community journalism.
Ting can help you with your high speed Internet needs. If service is available in your area and you sign up for service, enter the promo code COMMUNITY and you will get:
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A $75 gift card to the Downtown Mall
