Thursday’s thumbs

County makes sure it doesn’t let down public

A short and sweet edition of Thursday thumbs today so we can stick our hands back in the pocket with the handwarmer.

The elevator in the Benton County Administration Building in downtown Bentonville will soon be down for maintenance for about a month, making it impossible for people who can’t walk the stairs to get to the upper floors of the building. Our thumbs up goes to the county’s efforts to make sure the short-term inconvenience doesn’t become a major barrier to conducting business with the county. County employees will make the trip downstairs to help people who need it. And the county made sure to move the scheduled public meetings during the elevator outage to the courthouse so that the lack of the elevator won’t stand in the way of people attending those meetings.

Bentonville residents can listen to our podcast interview with Stephanie Orman, candidate for Bentonville mayor, which was conducted Wednesday in Springdale. The same opportunity was offered to her opponent, Jim Webb. Orman’s interview is available at (sorry for the long URL, folks) https://www. nwaonline.com/news/2018/nov/28/ podcast-bentonville-mayoral-candidate-stephanie-or

We appreciate that the city of Fayetteville has entered a contract with a private firm to use technology to evalute the condition of city roads, on the surface and below. It should provide vital information to help the city prioritize how it spends money for street repairs. On the down side, though, keep this in mind: Several of the main streets people travel in town are state highways, which are not the city’s responsibility, but city residents nonetheless feel the bumpity-bumps just the same.

How bad are things when a one video camera ends up documenting a theft — of another video camera? It happened on Frisco Springs Road in Benton County, a place where illegal dumping has been known to occur. A man in a blue Dodge Ram pickup was recorded taking the other camera. What’s he need it for, deer hunting? Sometimes, people do the darnedest things.