Virtually all of the exterior shots and many of the interior shots were done in and around Granville. Here are just a few of the shots from the trailer:
First 15 seconds: Granville area countryside. (The steel bridge over the river at 0:09, however,is the Ohio River, I believe.)
0:21-0:23: That’s Broadway, Granville’s main boulevard, looking west from the corner of Prospect Street. The building on the left is Town Hall; in the upper left you see two church spires, the white one being the Episcopal Church, the gray stone one from the First Baptist Church.
0:54: The man on the motorcycle enters town via West Broadway, near Plum Street, just around the corner from our house.
1:06: I think that’s the intersection of Pearl and Summit Streets.
1:07: The boy in front of the house – that could be any of several Granville homes, but I think it is the Mershons’ house at the corner of Granger and College Streets.
1;21: That’s Aladdin’s diner.
1:23: I get my haircuts at the Village Barber Shop on North Prospect St.
1:27: Interior shots of the “town meeting” are in the Episcopal Church. The church is also used for exterior shots.
1:58: Fight scene is in front of the Village Coffee Shop on Broadway.
1:59: Scooter shot outside of Taylor (CVS) Drug.

Granville was chosen for the shooting because it so perfectly evokes small town America.

You can also see the trailer here

Here was the Granville Times account during the shooting.

Granville is also featured in this soon to be released short, Killer. Our friend Joanne Geiger, who owns the Readers Garden bookstore, was such a hit with the crew when they filmed in her shop that she ended up with a speaking role as, well, “Bookstore Owner.”

Here’s the trailer: .
You can see a brief cut of Joanne in the trailer – she’ll be identifiable, and that is filmed in her store. At 0:22 in the trailer a couple is riding in a carriage – that’s our friend Diana’s carriage – we board our horses at her farm just outside of town. In the background is the Village Library on the right and the Robbins-Hunter Museum on the left (the white building with the pillars). The scene at 0:58 is the corner of South Prospect and Broadway, looking past the Post Office, Library, and Robbins-Hunter Museum. The gift store where the kid grabs the man’s bag is the Granville Mill.

Julie also understands how unchecked growth can radically change an area in just a few short years. We moved to Granville six years ago from Fredericksburg, Virginia, another small, historic town in a rural county. We watched as Fredericksburg’s charm sank under the weight of commuter traffic and outlet malls. By the time we left Fredericksburg, it had lost most of the charm that first attracted us. Even in the sluggish national economy, Licking County’s population continues to grow rapidly, and the new highway will bring more growth. Julie supports our Village’s efforts to acquire green space, and understands as well that these efforts, too, are jeopardized if the Village’s tax base is eroded by the destruction of our locally owned and operated businesses, or if the tolerance for taxes fades under the constant spending for consultants. Julie has earned the endorsement of the Granville Area Chamber of Commerce, the first time ever that the Chamber has made an endorsement in Village races.

So if you live in the Village and happen to see this, I hope you’ll think about voting for my wife, Julie Fudge Smith, for Granville Village Council.

Now a disclaimer – those are my thoughts, and why I support Julie. That’s not Julie talking. I’m her husband and biggets fan, not her brains or conscience. If you have questions for Julie, I’m sure she would be happy to answer them at julie@apositiveconnection.com.

Tami Longaberger, the CEO of Longaberger baskets, has put her home on the market. At $15 million, it may be the most expensive property in Licking County. Get a glimpse: 

I’ll get some pictures up in the next couple days.

According to the Village staff, allowing these 27 households to have separate meters for their sewer usage would cost the Village $15,000 a year in lost revenue.  This point came up several times.  Not being at the meeting, I keep envisioning council members speaking like Mrs. Bennett in the popular movie version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which she discusses the income of Mr. Bingley: “Fifteen thousand dollars a year!” (See here at the 40 second mark.) It seems to me high that these households are using $555 per year just in sewer charges, but I’ll trust the staff on that.  And of course, if the village allows these 27 to use separate meters to reduce their sewer charges, soon others will do the same and the revenue loss will increase.

The meter men insist that it is unfair to force them to pay for services that they don’t use. Councilwoman Michelle Lerner replies that people often pay for public services they don’t use, such as roads.

It strikes me that there is some sloppy reasoning going on here. Normally, the government should be relied upon to provide goods only in a handful of circumstances.  The classic circumstance is that of what we call “public goods.” These are goods that are non-exclusive and non-rivalrous.  That is, no one can be readily excluded from the benefit or good, and one’s use does not affect another’s use. National defense and law enforcement are the classic examples.  A second circumstance comes about when it is believed that positive externalities will cause an underinvestment in a good or service if left to the market.  The classic example here is education – the idea is that a well-educated populace benefits society generally, and that if left solely to the market not enough will be invested in education.  Whether this is really true is now hotly debated among economists.  Generally, there is more skepiticism among economists today about the theory of externalities than we would have seen 50 or 60 years ago.  The third circumstance for government delivery of goods and services has been called “natural monoply.” Again, economists today believe that there are far fewer natural monopolies that once thought.  Nevertheless, most people still tend to think of things such as the provision of sewer and water as natural monopolies. 

Note that even though things such as roads and water and sewer are commonly provided by government, there is often an effort to fund them through user fees, or at least some proxy for user fees.  For example, gasoline taxes are often dedicated to funding highway and road construction and maintenance. The idea is that the heavier users of roads will pay more. This doesn’t work out perfectly, but at least in general terms heavier users of roads pay more.

Similarly, by charging for water usage, the Village is charging an actual user fee in what is thought to be a natural monopoly for providing a private good. Basing sewer fees off water usage is an effort to find a rough proxy that will similarly lead heavier users of the services to be charged more.

In Granville, as in most municipalities, water and sewer services are billed individually and not paid from general tax revenues.  That is, they are not general taxes but user fees. That being the case, anything that more specifically matches the fees to actual use makes sense. Thus Councilwoman Lerner is mistaken: Sewer fees are not like roads. It is possible to charge separately, and indeed that is the fundamental principle that underlies the Village’s system of billing people for their individual water and sewer charges. Essentially, if the argument against individual sewer meters is that the city wants the revenue, then the petitioners have a point – they are essentially be charged extra tax to support city services, on no coherent basis – not use, not an even income, nothing but the ability to stick it to them. 

On the other hand, if the Village really needs the $15,000 for operations, it needs the $15,000.  So if you cut fees by $15,000, you’ll have to make that amount up. Presumably, this will have to come from higher rates for water usage.  Or the city can choose to subsidize water and sewer with higher taxes elsewhere.  But there’s not really much case for broadly subsidizing water and sewer use (note this isn’t even a targeted subsidy to assist low income people who otherwise can’t afford water and sewer).  Indeed, that strikes me as wrong-headed public policy, precisely because it will discourage saving water and increase demand on the water supply and sewer system. Conversely, if the water and sewer plants produce surpluses that subsidize other Village operations, I am not sure that this makes sense. The idea of a user charge to begin with is to charge people for what they use – not to cross subsidize unrelated government functions.

Thus, ideally, the Village would put individual sewer meters on all homes and charge separately for water and sewer, on a use basis. Rates would have to be adjusted to cover the cost of each service.

Thus, on principles of economics and justice, I am supportive of Council members Mershon and McGowan, who supported the petitioners.  However, as a practical matter, I am not sure that the best way to implement such a policy is by ad hoc petition and allowing individual meters without a broad review of rate schedules. That review shouldn’t be that hard.

Ideally, then, the Council would instruct the water and sewer departments to develop a new rate schedule that will cover costs, and at that point generally install – or at least publicize and encourage the option to install – separate meters.

The current kerfuffle began when Alison Laughbaum decided she wanted to keep some chickens in her yard to produce a few eggs and serve as pecky pets. She asked down at Village Hall if it was legal.  Turns out nobody quite knows. The Village’s Assistant Law Director, Mike King, says the peckers are prohibited. Not so, say others, including Council member Michelle Lerner. Hmm, this is a toughy

Naturally the anti-chicken forces – who seem to have some significant overlap with the the anti-free range dog forces and generally the anti-everything forces, sprang into action.  And to be fair (I love that phrase, implying that otherwise the author is not being fair), they’ve got some real concerns.

Some raised the issue of salmonella and other diseases, including Dr. DeSapri. This is not trivial, I suppose, especially in light of the problems our northern neighbor, Mount Vernon, has had with flies and disease from a nearby egg farm. Others were concerned that chickens would attract more predators into the village – one can spot coyotes now with at least some regularity in the township. Others don’t want roosters crowing at 3:f”n 30 in the morning. 

But the pro-pluckers were prepared as well. They note that we’re not talking big egg farms here, but people with a couple hens in the back, doubling as pets.

This…

Not this

They argue that a small number of chickens won’t create disease issues; that nobody wanting eggs wants roosters that would be crowing; that you’d properly fence your chickens, which, as our lovely Village Planner Allison Terry confirmed, would be required anyway by the zoning code,, and get them in at night to be safe from predators.

Sometimes the discussion got a bit humorous. As the Sentinel noted, “some residents … couldn’t reconcile the idea of chickens with an urban environment.”  Urban environment? Granville? One resident said that “moving into the village, I did not expect to be faced with the issue of ducks and chickens.”  “The issue?” It had just not really dawned on me that one would thinks of ducks and chickens as “an issue.”

Anyway, to me, again, a lot of this boils down to your basic attitude toward life. Some folks are always pessimistic, others optimistic, about their neighbors.  Some folks want to control, and are fearful if control is lacking. Others want to live and let live.

I wonder if there’s really a need to get worked up about problems that haven’t happened and may never happen. Something tells me a few chickens won’t be a big problem.  Even Columbus’s tony suburb of  Bexley allows chickens.  As Lisa Savage noted in a letter published in the Sentinel, “tourists think … that a flower-boxed chicken coop tucked behind a house in Heidelberg is worth a snapshot… there’s a quality of life inherent in these actions … [yet] when Granvillians step off a plane in Columbus, the appeal of such a way of life miraculously flies from memory and we do our best to draw up ordinances that outlaw it.”

At a minimum, surely we could allow a few chickens, no roosters, and require proper coops. How hard is that?  And if it really becomes a problem, well, we can reinstate an anti-chicken ordinance.

The Big Picture

At the common law, we had the law of nuisance.  You couldn’t use your property so as to inflict a nuisance on your neighbor, that is, to prevent him from enjoying his property.  But not every little discomfort constituted a nuisance.  Nuisance law might prevent my neighbor from never mowing his front yard, but it doesn’t require him to mow it as frequently as would make me happy.  It might prevent him from operating a scrap yard in his back yard, but it doesn’t prevent him from buying ugly patio furniture that I can see. Some people seem to feel that if their neighbors – or maybe we should look upon them as strangers living nearby – do anything that they themselves would not do, they have a right to stop that behavior.  At least if they can get 50%+1 of the populace, or just the Village Council, to agree. In my mind, that’s not really neighborly.

The urge to codify everything further chips away at community. Under the C0mmon Law, you had to sue to stop your neighbor from doing something. That meant that it was costly. And that encouraged neighbors to sort things out, and sue only if it was really a problem that couldn’t be resolved to mutual satisfaction. Nowadays, everything is an ordinance. And that means you can complain to city hall. Sitting on the Village Board of Zoning and Building Appeals, I am often surprised at how many times people who have a complaint about a neighbor’s application will not have discussed that with the neighbor.  Instead, they just show up at the Board and launch their complaint.

There is also an odd sort of bias built into a heavily regulated system. It leads to the notion that people ought to have a right to ban their neighbor’s activity if it bothers them at all. But if people are worried that chicken coops will bother them, that means someone else must get some enjoyment from having a few chickens in the back. If people are concerned about dogs running off lead, that must mean that some people get enjoyment from walking their dogs off lead. We seem to focus only on the complainers, not on those whose lives would be made richer by the activity in question. And thus there seems to be little balance. The complainer seems to start with a presumption of validity, with others having to defend their actions, rather than the complainer being required to carry the burden of demonstrating why the behavior is so intolerable as to rise to the old level of nuisance.

So put me down with the pro-pluckers.  Live and let live.