Editorials

Marion High School is presenting a two-day program this week that is worth pointing out to the rest of the Guadalupe County community — and in particular its students.

An election has been set for Saturday, May 9 in which the residents of a proposed city of Kingsbury will have the opportunity to decide whether to embrace cityhood.

Guadalupe County Commissioners voted Tuesday to cut a check to Comal County for $125,000. The money is the latest installment on a half-million-dollar agreement this county made with our upstream neighbors a couple of years ago to help pay for a flood-retarding structure (FRS) — some would call it a dam, but it’s a very unique kind of dam — designed to reduce the impact of a flood on the Dry Comal Creek west of New Braunfels. The FRS, located in Krueger Canyon west of town, was one of five Comal County wanted to build in the wake of the 1998 and 2002 floods with help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and would have augmented a series of similar structures located upstream from New Braunfels on the creeks that feed the Guadalupe River that were built beginning in 1959. The idea behind an FRS is that it is built in a choke point along a creek prone to flash flooding, and it’s basically a big wall with a little drain at its base. In a severe storm or flooding event, it fills with water which is gradually released from the drain over the course of days or a few weeks, cutting the impacts downstream.

Anybody who ever thought that a Chamber of Commerce exists solely or even chiefly to forward the interests of the business community has probably not lived in a community that had a good Chamber — or if they did, they certainly haven’t belonged to one.

After experiencing the high of reaching the state tournament in 2014, the Navarro girls basketball team saw its follow-up campaign end all too quickly on Tuesday night, bowing out against a very good Burnet team that looked more like a fellow district champion than a No. 4 seed.

Get pulled over for speeding or rolling through a stop sign and it’s easy to lose patience and wonder whether our police officers don’t have something better to do.

There are dozens — perhaps a few hundred — non-profits in Seguin and Guadalupe County. Some are better known than others, but one thing many have in common is their good work. There’s the Guadalupe Valley Family Violence Center, the Guadalupe County Children’s Advocacy Center, the Seguin Education Foundation and Seguin Youth Services among many others too numerous to list. There is one, though, that’s been here since 1994 and has become so much a piece of the fabric of this community — so much its center — that many of us wonder what we did before we had a Silver Center.

Guadalupe County Commissioners Tuesday voted unanimously to support an effort by State Senator Judith Zaffirini to launch legislation that would create a state-chartered water-oriented recreation district for the San Marcos River downstream from San Marcos, where the river constitutes the county line between Guadalupe and Caldwell counties.

This week, local residents and their students at Navarro or Seguin High School and the Mercer-Blumberg Center will have an opportunity to hear a very unique speaker with an uncommon expertise: teen murderers and serial killers — this just more than two weeks after two local teens came under investigation in the stabbing death of a 31-year-old Vermont woman.

About five years or so ago, a city councilman asked the city to consider a ban on using cell phones in school zones, and some people rolled their eyes.

Drive up Interstate 35 to Austin any morning or back any afternoon and it’s not at all difficult to imagine that something — almost anything — must be done to relieve some of the worst highway gridlock anywhere in Texas.

For a second time in recent months, Guadalupe County Commissioners denied Cool River Ranch a mass-gathering permit for a concert. And just like last time, the promoters are going to put on a concert anyway.

H-E-B dropped a major bombshell on the community Tuesday.

Seguin is a vibrant community, and one of the reasons for that is the number of people here who go out of their way to serve their neighbors. This happens every day in churches, in service clubs, in local non-profits, on city, county and school district boards and in places too countless to mention here.

At Tuesday’s City Council meeting, Seguin City Engineer Joe Ramos gave a detailed multimedia presentation on the progress of the ongoing River-San Marcos-Heideke streets drainage and utility phase 1 reconstruction project.

Were Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. alive today, what progress would he see toward the realization of the “dream” he outlined in his famous 1963 speech?

Birmingham.

Texas Lutheran University has sold the Vivroux property along South Court Street to a San Antonio developer who envisions a mixed use project that includes retail space, professional offices and apartments.

Monday, religious extremists or terrorists attacked the Paris headquarters of a well-known satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, which has been criticized and threatened in the past over drawings of the Prophet Mohammed, the spiritual leader of the world’s Muslims.

What are your New Year’s resolutions?

As surely as San Antonio is called America’s military city, Guadalupe County has always enjoyed a close relationship with the military. 

The flu season has arrived — hitting hard in the Midwest and the South and Seguin is no exception.

The rip of wrapping paper. The squeals of delight. The rapid fire string of shrieked thank yous as that perfect gift comes into view. The soaring carols echoing off the rafters of the church. The clatter of cutlery meeting dish as a holiday meal is enjoyed, memories shared and new memories forged.

Three police officers won’t be home with their families this Christmas — their lives cut tragically short by madmen with guns.