Home Care In Thorntown, IN

Artist and writer Topher Kearby moved from Carmel to Dover to return to his rural upbringing and grabbed a new life for himself in the process.

He bought a place west of Western Boone Junior-Senior High School and took a job teaching English at the high school two years ago.

“I decided to get out, back to my roots,” he said. “I wanted a place in the country where I could breathe. It’s given me all the inspiration I need to paint and create out here, and I just love it.”

He loved teaching by day. “They were just fabulous kids,” Kearby said of his 10th-graders. And he painted and wrote poetry in his off hours at home. Kearby is the author of several poetry/art books, such as his latest, Life isn’t made for perfect people.

“The idea is, yes, life is a struggle and there’s pain and all those difficult parts we want to skip over to get to the good stuff,” he said. “But without those experiences, we don’t grow into the person we’re meant to be. I don’t shy away from the tough stuff. I focus on the light behind it.

Kearby’s art and poetry career took off after he started at Western Boone, and soon he had to make a choice.

“This part of what I did with my life (art) was to the point that I couldn’t keep up with both,” Kearby said. “So I made the decision and I’ve been going forward ever since.

“I love teaching, but I know this is my path in life,” the father of two daughters said.

“With belief and passion I feel anyone can tap into their energy and create the life they choose,” he said. “It just takes a while to build a path that is beautiful and yours.”

Kearby had more than 200,000 social media followers and now needs more room for his art than just his home and Etsy.com shop.

“People want to see the work in person,” he said, adding that he chose to open a gallery in Thorntown as it is emerging as a fine arts community.

“Thorntown has such a great presence and energy,” he said. “My heart is here.”

Kearby classifies his mostly acrylic paint and ink pieces accompanied by poetry as “contemporary art” but said, “It’s hard to label it, because, at the end of the day, it’s your own work.”

He pairs visual art with poetry. “I’m part writer and part painter,” he said. “And I combine poetry with all of my pieces. There’s always a written aspect with my canvases.”

He rented a storefront in a historic building at 108 E. Main St., Thorntown, and will soon begin renovating and hanging his art. The 1,200-square-foot space goes straight back and is a visually good space in which to showcase canvases and other merchandise to its best advantage, he said.

He’s planned a grand opening for Nov. 13 and promises to showcase plenty of original canvases and other merchandise and also to accept works on commission.

Kearby’s books are available online at amazon.com and he’ll sign them for those who order books from his online Etsy shop: https://www.etsy.com/shop/topherkearby/?fbclid= IwAR2kKq_v1qLktWkpRWya7jJ4vC-4dYqGPYFxcumJGquX8GbFVJJFSu56CNU.

He also posts poetry and paintings at https://www.facebook.com/TopherKearby, where messages can be posted for him.

Because of an internal system, landlords and tenants who have won tribunal cases at the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) have sometimes had their cases recorded as lost, according to a report by consultants Grant Thornton.

It is one of several issues flagged in a review of the dispute resolution process, as managed by the RTB and its outsourced helper, Capita.

“A particular issue was highlighted relating to appeal cases reverting from approved to rejected status,” says the report, referring to the board’s findings at the tribunal stage.

Staff at the RTB had to work manually to re-apply the approval status to those cases but the interviewee feared they may miss some, says the report.

Neither the spokesperson for the RTB nor the Department of Housing directly answered questions as to whether this has now been rectified.

The review, which is dated September 2023, also noted that there is a large queue of cases at the rental regulator – and predicted based on trends that this was going to grow.

A spokesperson for the RTB said: “This review has been finalised and is with the Residential Tenancies Board Executive Leadership Team to review its recommendations.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Housing said: “The hearing of disputes is an operational matter for the RTB.”

Following recommendations in the RTB Workforce Plan (2018-2021), the RTB received sanction for significant additional staff during that period, said the spokesperson.

“The Department continues to work with the RTB to ensure it is sufficiently resourced to deliver on its mandate,” he said.

A growing backlog?

When a tenant or landlord files a dispute with the RTB, it goes through an assessment process outsourced to the company Capita.

The case is then channelled onwards, either as a mediation or an adjudication – and if either party appeals the adjudication decision, the case is heard by a tribunal.

An RTB spokesperson said in October 2023 that the average wait time for that first stage of an assessment was around two weeks. But the report says longer.

Capita’s agreement with the RTB sets a turnaround time of a week, but they were taking six or seven weeks to be assessed, the Grant Thornton report says.

The spokesperson for the RTB didn’t respond directly to questions about whether and how it resolved that issue.

The backlog is because staff were redeployed “to respond to issues the public were raising with the RTB’s annual registration process online last year”, the report says.

In May 2023, there were 1,548 cases waiting for assessment, the report says – predicting that it would grow to 2,208 cases by December 2023.

The report predicted that the queue for mediation and adjudication cases would fall over the second half of this year, but the caseload queue for tribunals and assessments, would grow.

According to an RTB spokesperson, the average waiting time for a tribunal in 2022 was 31 weeks, and in 2021 it was around 33 weeks.

The impact of delays

RTB staff referenced in the report said they were concerned about the impact of delays in getting a tribunal hearing. “For example, the accumulation of rent arrears while an appeal is pending.”

Delays can also leave tenants and landlords living longer in stressful situations. Tenant Joe Kennedy had to attend three hearings to get his deposit back over 16 months, from June 2021 to October 2022.

That impacted him, he said. “The RTB is not fit for purpose because of the length of time it took.”

It was a straightforward case, so he doesn’t think it should have ended up with three separate hearings, two adjudications and a tribunal, which all relied on the same evidence, he says.

Kennedy says he thinks that deposits should be held by an independent agency like they are in the UK. “We’re in a lucky position. But some people are really relying on getting their deposits back.”

Tenants may bank on getting their deposits back, to cover a deposit on a new place or for costs such as furniture.

But he says he found the whole thing really stressful.

Kennedy filed his case in June 2021. The first adjudication hearing was four months later, in October 2021. He won, but his former landlord appealed the decision.

The tribunal took place in April 2022. The determination order was issued in May 2022.

In the meanwhile, the landlord also lodged a separate case for alleged damages, which he said the tenants had done to the property. A second determination order was issued in October 2022.

Its unclear why it wasn’t all dealt with in the single case. Alleged damages were the reason for keeping the deposit.

Neither the Department of Housing spokesperson or the RTB responded to queries about this, as to whether this should have taken place within one hearing.

Kennedy got his deposit back in the end, but he says that the whole process was extremely stressful and unnecessarily protracted. “It’s so unfair,” he said.

Beyond the backlog

Customer service at the RTB is supplied by Capita, a business solutions company.

At the time the research behind the report was done, the average wait time for a caller trying to phone the RTB was 45 minutes.

It had since fallen to three minutes according to Capita, the report says. Three weeks ago, a call took about 20 minutes to get through.

In the report, an RTB staff member raised concerns about the impact of high staff turnover at Capita on the assessment process, that they have been sent on cases that hadn’t been properly assessed, among other technical difficulties that made the assessment process harder.

When it came to the process for dealing with illegal evictions, RTB staff also raised concerns that high turnover meant training for Capita staff wasn’t frequent enough.

Also, if Capita staff note down contact information for a letting agency rather than a landlord, that could result in data breaches, the report says.

An interviewee also noted shortcomings among adjudicators , those appointed to RTB panels to hear and rule on cases at the adjudication stage. “Some of the adjudicators do not return their reports on time, while others repeatedly have errors in their reports,” the report says.

Tribunal appeals are mostly dealt with internally by the RTB.

An interviewee in the Grant Thorntown report spoke about tribunals and “the current resourcing levels being insufficient to meet demand and the misalignment with the RTB Customer Charter”.

The interviewee “was concerned that training needs are not being met and that there might be risk of a data breach occurring due to the high workload across the team”, says the report.

There was a lack of written policies and procedures, it also found. The interviewee “noted there is a lack of policy and procedural documentation capturing the work undertaken by the team and there is concern that important knowledge and information could be lost upon staff departure from the organisation or team”.

Tagged: housingrenting

Jordan Moody ignited a trend in Thorntown when he commissioned a mural on the side of his apartment building.

Moody, a Realtor, grew up in Thorntown and now manages property in the small town, including a four-unit apartment building at 108 S. Market St.

“There’s a giant, blank wall there, and I thought it would be a great place for a mural,” Moody said.

The building features an exposed south-facing façade that looks over the area where children walk to and from school daily and where a food court sets up during the town’s annual Festival of the Turning Leaves.

“I think it’s good to give back to the community, and I had local artists do the work,” Moody said. He hired fine arts painter Anita Gordon to design and complete the mural. Gordon is the resident artists’ representative at the Sugar Creek Art Center in Thorntown.

A Western Boone High School graduate, Gordon called on her former high school art teacher, Terri Gavin, who rounded up eighth-grade students who wanted to share in the experience of painting a public mural.

“They were super fast,” Gordon said with a chuckle.

The design features vibrant colors and Thorntown history.

“Thorntown doesn’t have a ton of public-facing art,” Moody said. “I had a vision of what you see when you drive through some bigger cities with the ‘welcome to whatever town’ pieces, and I thought those were really cool.

“But this one is in the middle of an historic, 1830s town, and we made a nod to Thorntown’s history and its famous fountain.”

It’s designed to look like a vintage travel postcard, and the autumn leaves represent the festival.

“We really want to give back to the community that gives so much support to us,” Moody said. “Something that will hopefully last beyond our time. I hope this catches fire.”

Two businesses and a private organization have approached Gordon to do their own murals since she began Moody’s this month.

“Jordan has sparked something,” she said.

Moody and his wife Ali Moody own Moody & Co. Real Estate Services in Carmel. They now reside in Zionsville and Boone County is their primary real estate focus.

DOVER — A torn ACL in her senior year of high school changed Laura Bragg nee Lawson’s volleyball career in more ways than she could have predicted.

Bragg had never really thought about coaching volleyball before, but when she was unable to play in her senior year, her mom had her start working some volleyball clinics at Thorntown and she got the coaching bug and hasn’t looked back.

Now 15 years later, she is leading Western Boone into the state championship game.

“When I tore my ACL, i had to do something else that brought me joy with volleyball,” Bragg said. “In college, I started coaching club, then Western Boone opened up and it was the perfect opportunity.”

That urge of her mom to get involved in coaching turned out to be great not just for Bragg, but the Western Boone program as well.

Bragg became the head coach of the Stars fresh out of college in 2011, and has become one of the most successful coaches in Western Boone history in any sport.

The Stars are 267-101 under Bragg, winning seven conference titles, eight sectionals titles and a regional and semi-state this year.

She said earlier this week that it still hadn’t sunk in that the Stars would be playing in the state championship match.

“I have dreamed about this since I started coaching,” Bragg said. “There have been many teams that I thought had the capability, and it was just a couple points here and there that didn’t go our way. This team has been special since their younger playing days, and are really proving themselves.”

More than all the wins and losses, it is the sense of family within Western Boone volleyball that the Bragg appreciate’s the most.

“It’s not just the coaching, but after the girls graduate, having that impact and being in their lives,” Bragg said. “There are so many of our former players who texted me on Saturday night, or messaged me on social media, that makes me even more proud. I want to have that relationship with our former players, more than a lot of wins.”

Some of those relationships are evident on the Stars’ current coaching staff.

All of Bragg’s assistant’s – Alex Burns, Lexie McCloskey and Katie Whitaker – are former WeBo players and have deep connections to the school.

“We all went to WeBo and played and we are all great friends,” Bragg said. “I couldn’t have done it without them. We all have our unique positions. Katie works with the blocking, Lexi works with our setters and then Alex and I do the passing and hitting. We all have our own roles to impact the team.”

Coming into this season, Bragg had a feeling this could be a group of girls that could do special things.

Bragg said from watching them from a young age, that this was a group that fit well together.

There was a point a few years back that she considered stepping away from coaching, but knew this group could be one to break down barriers.

“Three or four years ago, I was really considering stepping back from coaching and starting my “adult” life,” Bragg said. “But it was these girls that really made me want to continue. I remembered them in fifth and sixth grade, and even Janie and Raegan in second grade, just seeing what tremendous athletes they were. I knew I left at that point I would regret it. Especially going through this run, I know it would be a huge regret and I love coaching these girls.”

The Stars have had teams that have been really close to making deep runs before.

In 2013 the Stars led Brebeuf 2-1 in the regional, eventually losing in five. In 2016, the Stars traveled to Northview for the regional and led 2-0, before losing three close sets to drop the match.

Bragg said there was always the “what if?” factor with those matches, looking back a little details that could have swung in the matches in the Stars favor.

But those disappointments have helped shaped Bragg as a coach and helped get this team ready for the big matches.

“I have grown so much as a coach,” Bragg said. “Looking back at some of the really good teams we had, I know if I could coach them now, it would be totally different. I have coached a lot of club, I have assisted a lot of great coaches and I learned from them all. I have grown with my knowledge of the game and my coaching style.

“(With this team), we just peaked at the perfect time, which was that Tri-West match to clinch conference. Since that match, we haven’t looked back. That match gave us the confidence we needed and every weekend since, we go in knowing that we can do it and that keeps our confidence growing.”

Bragg said that the experience is even more special doing it at her alma mater.

She teaches at Brownsburg East Middle School, but she said her heart is always with Western Boone.

And she hopes she can help lead the team to the state championship on Saturday.

“It is so special here, and I wouldn’t coach at any other place,” Bragg said. “I teach at Brownsburg, and a lot of people ask why I teach at one school and coach at another, but it’s always been WeBo for me. My family recently moved back to Thorntown because I want my daughter to go to WeBo and the community support is like nothing else.”

Will Willems is the Sports Editor of the Lebanon Reporter. Follow him on Twitter @Will_Willems.

In 2004, University of Melbourne (Australia) professor Shelley Mallett asked the question: What do research studies tell us about the idea of home? She discovered the word home has many meanings for people around the world. Home is a place–an actual dwelling; or a location, like a country.. Home could be a feeling. Home could be a place where something was invented. Here in New Jersey, home is often an unattainable dream because of the cost of housing.

But thanks to a partnership forged between Bordentown Township and Habitat for Humanity of Burlington and Mercer Counties, 10 families will make their own discoveries about the meaning of home in 2022. That’s because the township and Habitat have inked a deal to provide five affordable housing duplexes on a 1.3-acre site on Thorntown and Crosswicks Rd.

This story takes its beginnings from the 1975 Mount Laurel decision on affordable housing, a decision which resulted in many lawsuits and complicated specifications. Suffice it to say that all townships in NJ are required to provide a certain number of affordable housing units based on a formula. And as part of that decision, developers who build non-residential units in a township must pay a fixed 2.5% of the cost of the project to a township. Those funds are then kept in what is called an Affordable Housing Trust Fund. Those monies can only be used for the construction of affordable housing.

Entering into this picture is Bordentown Township Administrator Michael Theokas. Each day, on his way to work, he would pass the properties on the corner of Thorntown and Crosswicks roads. “There were three multi-family homes there. Two were listed for sale, and they were not in great condition, said Theokas in an interview. “They were older homes beyond repair. They were an eyesore. I would see them all the time as I drove to work.” Two of the homes were listed for sale.

The township was in the middle of finalizing its compliance requirements for affordable housing, said Theokas, and that’s when he came to an aha moment.

Theokas came to his Bordentown job having been the City Administrator for Woodbury. During his tenure in Woodbury, he worked closely with Habitat for Humanity-Gloucester County.

“I made a cold call to Habitat for Humanity of Burlington and Mercer County and asked if the organization would be interested in doing a project in Bordentown,” Theokas said. Subsequently, the third house became available and the township bought all three properties using money from its Affordable Housing Trust Fund.

Annie Fox, Chief Development Officer with Habitat for Humanity of Burlington and Mercer Counties, said her organization jumped at the opportunity. “We have seen more and more townships reaching out to Habitat because of the affordable housing ruling,” Fox said in an interview.

Habitat for Humanity of Burlington and Mercer Counties has built 276 homes since its founding in 1987. Despite the pandemic, last year the organization built nine homes and helped to rehabilitate many more. But Fox says those projects, called one-offs, involve building one unit on one piece of land. The Bordentown project is different.

“This is our biggest development in one location,” said Fox. “Habitat is building ten units in five different buildings.”

The 3-bedroom, 1.5 bath duplexes will face Thorntown Road. Driveways for the units will hold two cars. The Bordentown Planning Board agreement notes: “each lot is large enough to allow each residential unit a ten foot by ten foot shed” for the storage of things like lawn mowers. Trash containers will be enclosed by a four foot fence at the side of the units.

Fox said, “when we are designing the homes, we look at the neighborhood and how our buildings will fit into the neighborhood. We want the homes to fit into the neighborhood.” To that end, Theokas said the township agreed to help landscape the project.

“The part fronting Crosswicks Rd. is going to be a landscaped public area,” noted Theokas.

“There will be a stormwater basin at the back. Each unit address will be Thorntown Rd.”

Theokas, Fox, and Lori Leonard, the CEO of Habitat for Humanity of Burlington and Mercer Counties, all agreed that this partnership was a win-win at all levels.

“Habitat brings such a strength in their reputation and a great track record with their projects,” said Theokas. “This is going to give ten families the opportunity to own a brand-new home for a reasonable number to raise a family in our township.”

Fox and Leonard spoke about the application process for families who might want to own one of the ten units.

“It’s almost the same as qualifying for a mortgage,” said Fox. “Families have to have to show a need. For example, are they living in subhousing situations? There can be no foreclosures in the last three years.”

Habitat works with potential homeowners on personal finances. Each family gets a mentor to help them learn about the responsibilities of home ownership. Families have to raise money for a down payment on the property. And, those lucky enough to secure a home must remain in the home for at least 30 years.

“We talk about budgeting with them,” said CEO Leonard. “We connect them with other agencies all in an effort to help them learn how to manage their money. There are also grant programs where people can apply for funding.” In the end, noted Leonard, “this is a scary and overwhelming step for some families. Habitat is not going to set people up for failure.”

The township committee voted unanimously on December 13th to deliver the property to Habitat. After ironing out a few more details, Habitat will bring in crews to build foundations. The homes are pre-fabricated and every home has to meet EnergyStar requirements.

“We are really lucky to have a partnership with Whirlpool,” said Leonard. “Every Habitat Home in the country gets a free stove and refrigerator. Other appliances are offered through Whirlpool at a discount”.

In fact, much of Habitat for Humanity’s success lies in the ability of the organization to leverage private, public and volunteer partnerships, in addition to cultivating relationships among businesses both local and nationwide.

Future Habitat homeowners don’t only invest dollars in their property. With the help of volunteer labor, future homeowners also put sweat equity into their properties. “Families are ideally selected before the building begins on the foundation,” said Fox. The homeowners “work alongside us, as do area volunteers.”

The application process for the Bordentown houses has opened. People begin the application process here: hfhbmc.org/services/available-homes.

Volunteers are also needed. Habitat welcomes individual and group volunteers. Volunteers must be 16 and older. More information can be found here: hfhbmc.org/volunteer.

Theokas says he expects the project to be completed by the first quarter of 2022.

And one fun side note to this story: Soon the workers at Rockefeller Center will be taking down the annual Christmas tree which looms over the skating rink. And since 2007, the Center’s Christmas tree has been milled into lumber and donated to Habitat for use in constructing affordable housing.