President’s Corner

From the RID Oak Ridge/Anderson County President, Kelly Dagenhart

Board Status

We were saddened by the death of our long time board member Ernie Lees last Spring. Ernie had managed our DialARide program during the Christmas holidays for several years to get the drunk drivers off the road during this time by providing alternate rides. He also managed our court watch program in Clinton and Oak Ridge, scheduling the court watchers and getting them familiar with the court process.

Charlotte Lees has retired from the board and says when conditions permit she will help court watch. C. Scott Manning has retired from the board. Jasper C. Scarbrough has retired from the board because he has married a lady from Georgia after the death of his wife over a year ago. He said he is still interested in RID and may come back to this area and join us again.

We have added Will Stirling, who is retired from ORNL Fusion Energy Division. He is now managing our court watch program along with Wendy Williams, who familiarizes the new court watchers with the court process.

RID Web Site

RID of Oak Ridge/Anderson County has had an active website since Fall 2000 and has slowly been building up material on the site. Our webmaster is Buford Carter. The web address is www.korrnet.org/ridorac. Since many of our articles from each issue have an enduring usefulness, we will keep the issues on the web site for a limited time determined by the space we have and other material we wish to display. There are also several web pointers on the site to other useful material. We invite comments on how to improve the web site.

New Court Watchers

We now have about 13 active court watchers. We still need about 13 more court watchers to be able to watch all of the court sessions and handle vacations, sickness, schedule conflicts, etc. An estimated 80% of the value of a court watcher is in just being at court when the DUIs are tried (Jim Ramsey, our Anderson County District Attorney, says that the court watchers are valuable). The other estimated 20% of the value comes from the records that the court watchers provide for our trend analysis and the suggestions for changes in the court system and laws to provide increased court performance.