Gathering local government salaries from across Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee was not only an arduous exercise of fiscal oversight for this newspaper, but also showed that localities routinely fail to follow open records laws.

Glade Spring’s top cop manages raise, but still earns less than peers in region

WJDG serves Wytheville and surrounding areas

They marched, rode and walked in the holidays on Saturday in Wytheville, Max Meadows and Ivanhoe.
All three communities held their Christmas parades over the weekend, and organizers had mixed feelings about the turnouts.

Max Meadows firefighters are getting a car opener for Christmas.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced Friday that the volunteer department had been given a grant to buy tools for getting motorists out of wrecked vehicles.
“(It’s) something we’ve never had,” said MMVFD Chief David Morris.

Jessica Allen has dreamed of working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration since she was a child. She calculated she would be in her 40s before that happened.
On Jan. 14, the Wythe County resident will begin a 15-week research position at the jet propulsion lab in Pasadena, Calif., as part of the NASA Undergraduate Student Research Program. Her primary work will be programming the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer telescope and taking data from a satellite searching for the origins of planets, stars and galaxies.

So far, state budget cuts to area senior programs have caused only minor ripple effects. But the District III Governmental Cooperative is not out of the line of fire just yet.

Timber the German Shepherd and Molly and Stubby, both Boston Terriers, rough-house in the yard between repeated tail-wagging greetings given a visitor. Inside Bonnie Quesenberry’s house, a couple of Yorkshire Terriers are equally as welcoming.Out back, in a long kennel building, Boston Terriers and Yorkies yip and scramble toward Quesenberry, noses poking through gates, as she walks between the two rows of kennels and houses. The dogs are much happier than their owner these days following the publication of a Humane Society of the United States report on investigations of Virginia puppy mills that said one had been found in Atkins.

The race to Costa Rica has kicked into high gear.
Two local high school teachers – one each from Bland and Wythe County Public Schools – have been recognized as semi-finalists for the 2008 McGlothlin Awards for Teaching Excellence.
And each of them now is one step closer to their tropical dream. 

Wythe County’s most influential governing bodies met together Tuesday afternoon to discuss proposed construction projects at Rural Retreat High School and Rural Retreat Middle School and the possibility of using biodiesel fuel in the county’s school buses.