the graham leader · 2021. 1. 30. · lady blues win in iowa park pae 10 eee eo • saturday, jaay...
TRANSCRIPT
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PALO PINTO
COMMUNICATIONS, LP
In this issue
Calendar 1Classifieds 6-7Entertainment 3Obituaries 2Opinion 4,7,9Sports 10
GHS DECA
students advancePage 3
Hot Shopolicious
winnersPage 1, 8
Lady Blues win
in Iowa ParkPage 10
WEEKEND EDITION • SATURDAY, JANUARY 30, 2021 | VOL. 145, NO. 48 • SINGLE COPY $1 WWW.GRAHAMLEADER.COM
THE GRAHAM LEADEROldest business institution in Young County • Established August 16, 1876
Tuesday, Feb, 2
5:30 p.m. - Open Door Chris-tian School is having a kick off and meal for their Feed the Need fundraiser at 5:30 p.m. at the Oak Street Bap-tist Church Sanctuary. The fundraiser helps the school raise money and send 10,000 meals to Haiti.
Saturday, February 13 -
Sunday, February 14
The Texas High School Rodeo Association Region III rodeo 9 and 10 will be held at the Young County Arena in Graham at 8 a.m. each day. A 7:15 a.m. church service is held before the rodeo on Sunday.
Saturday, February 20 -
Sunday, February 21
The Kids Junior Rodeo As-sociation is hosting a rodeo at the Young County Arena Saturday, Feb. 20, and Sunday, Feb. 21. The Rodeos begin at 9 a.m. each day.
Reoccurring notices
• The Fresh Start NA (Nar-cotic Anonymous) Group meets at 601 Indiana St. in Gra-ham from 7-8 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.
• Grief Share meets Faith Center’s Education Center located at 1601 North 380 Bypass from 6-7 p.m. Every Monday from Sept. 21-Dec. 14.
• The Eliasville RVFD is hosting one gun raffle per week with 2,000 tickets being sold at $50 per ticket.
Community
Calendar
BY THOMAS WALLNER
The Graham Chamber of Commerce has had to adapt in many ways during the last year for events, and their annual Chamber Banquet hosted Tues-day was no different. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the cham-ber hosted the event digitally at multiple venue locations to honor six community members for their service within the city.
The event was held as a virtual,
in-person event at multiple loca-tions around Graham and incor-porated a model for those who wished to stay home and watch the event. Graham Chamber of Commerce and Convention and Visitors Bureau CEO, Krisa De La Cruz, said in a previous interview that the group was looking to keep the event, but change it in a way that was safe for attendees.
“We knew that we still want-ed to have a chamber banquet where we could offer some type of networking, where we
could give our sponsors benefit in the form of advertising and exposure and where we could feature our restaurants and then of course honor our Grahammy recipients,” De La Cruz said. “In thinking about (...) those goals (...) and thinking about some of the restrictions or guidelines that we have seen put out by the CDC and other health organiza-tions, we didn’t think that it was wise to bring 400 people in one
BY THOMAS WALLNER
The U.S. Department of Agri-culture announced Thursday that due to the COVID-19 pandemic the agency is temporarily suspending past-due debt collections and foreclosure for distressed bor-rowers under the Farm Storage Facility Loan and Direct Farm Loan programs by the Farm Ser-vice Agency until further notice.
The USDA is temporarily suspending non-judicial fore-closures, debt offsets or wage garnishments and is referring foreclosures to the Department of Justice. Additionally, the USDA said it will be working with the U.S. Attorney’s Office to stop ju-dicial foreclosures and evictions on account previously referred to the DOJ.
According to data from the USDA, more than 12,000 borrow-ers, or approximately 10% of all borrowers, are eligible for the re-lief announced by the USDA, with the organization lending to more than 129,000 farmers, ranchers and producers.
“USDA and the Biden Adminis-tration are committed to bringing relief and support to farmers, ranchers and producers of all backgrounds and financial status, including by ensuring producers have access to temporary debt relief,” said Robert Bonnie, Dep-uty Chief of Staff, Office of the Secretary in the release. “Not only is USDA suspending the pipeline of adverse actions that can lead to foreclosure and debt collec-tion, we are also working with the Departments of Justice and Treasury to suspend any actions already referred to the applica-ble Agency. Additionally, we are evaluating ways to improve and address farm related debt with the intent to keep farmers on their farms earning living expenses, providing for emergency needs, and maintaining cash flow.”
According to the USDA, the most common loan types are farm ownership, farm operating and farm storage facility loans which have sub microloans for each. Microloans are defined by the USDA as any of the three most common loan types with a short-ened application process and reduced paper work for smaller, niche operations.
Farm ownership loans can be used by producers to enlarge a farm or ranch, construct new
Chamber hosts banquet, honors community members
See Banquet, Page 9
BY THOMAS WALLNER
The Graham Chamber of Com-merce announced last week the winning student teams in their Hot Shopolicious program, an educational event which served as entrepreneurship training for the six student teams involved.
In the past, the Hot Chocoli-cious event welcomed Graham Junior High School students from 6th through 8th grade and served as entrepreneurship training with the basics of how to start and manage a business. The program was changed to the Hot Shopolicious event this year and focused on 6th grade students in the Builders Club which formed teams that purchased products
from a local retailer and sold them in an online storefront.
“We are really proud of the success of the program again. Of course the main objective is to educate junior high students on entrepreneurialism, some of those main components of when it comes to starting a business,” Graham Chamber of Commerce CEO Krisa De La Cruz said in a previous interview. “This last year of course was different than previous years because students sold hot chocolate on the square in previous year when we did Hot Chocolicious, but of course with a global pandemic we did not think that was a wise idea so we switched it to Hot Shopolicious.”
USDA suspends debt
collectors, foreclosures, activities on farm loans
See Winners, Page 8
Graham Junior High School sixth grade students in the Builders Club who participated in the Graham Chamber of Commerce Hot Shopolicious event this year. The students competed to win one of three prizes for the nonprofit organization they chose to sponsor. Six student teams took part in the competition which had an online storefront for student to sell products.
Contributed photo
See USDA, Page 5
Hot Shopolicious winners announced by Chamber
Action impacts several thousand borrows due
to COVID-19
BY THOMAS WALLNER
The city of Graham will be submitting the new recreational trails grant to Texas Parks and Wildlife, which has a deadline of Feb. 1. After reevaluating aspects of the previous grant, the group is hopeful about be-ing awarded the grant this year.
The city of Graham received $1.3 million from the Brazos Riv-er Authority for park improve-ment projects in June 2018. Graham City Manager Brandon Anderson said during the Jan-uary City Council meeting that the city has $1.2 million of the seed money available, with some spent in the past to get a tractor and shredder to take care of the area and additional expenses for engineering fees.
The trail grant was submitted last year and the city fell just below the cutoff from TPWD for the matching grant award, according to Graham Parks and Recreation President Lee Boyd. Boyd said he, Laura Taylor and Clark Miracle have worked for a few months with the engineering firm contracted on the project Jacob & Martin to resubmit the parks grant application this year.
“We came close last year and then there were a lot of things that weren’t in the grant that we’ve added that kind of fill a lot of those gaps and we had a guy go out yesterday and fly a drone of the trail. I think we are going to include that with the application and I helped them clean up their map,” Boyd said. “They had a map
(...) and I do lots of maps so I’m pretty good at editing maps and helped them improve the map quite a bit. The engineer came down and took some photos yesterday. I mean, it’s a good project, and they said that the project was good. We just had too many gaps in our application last year.”
In the new trail proposal at Fireman’s Park, the trail will follow a portion of the existing pathway at the park, but will be expanded. The trail will move under the FM61 bridge and loop around the soccer fields coming back around and passing by Redeemer Church and moving back under the bridge. From there it will move along the opposite side of the
City to submit TPWD trails grant, establishing projects in interim
A map of a trail at Fireman’s Park which will be submitted with the Texas Parks and Wildlife recreational trails grant program. The red dashed line is the proposed trail, the yellow dashed line is the existing trail, the dark blue dashed line above the baseball fields is the prosed nature trail, the solid orange line is the boundary of Fireman’s Park and the black dashed line is the property line.
Contributed photo
See Trail, Page 3
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