So glad to say Cedar Lake, Indiana, is my home town!

Mission Statement

The Town of Cedar Lake is dedicated to providing Good Quality of Life Services, by working in partnership with individuals, neighborhoods, and businesses to enhance the quality of life and to create a healthy, vibrant community in which to live, work, and visit.

To accomplish our Mission we will:

• Respect our citizens.
• Support our employees.
• Engage residents through partnerships to resolve issues.
• Accept accountability for our actions and decisions.
• Communicate effectively both internally and externally.
• Generate new ideas to solve problems.
• Encourage actions which are linked to strategic planning initiatives.
• Embrace these philosophies on a daily basis

(kachinarealproperty picture credit)

Cedar Lake, Indiana. My home town. My hope is to demonstrate how a group of dedicated individuals, most of them Republicans, have worked to make Cedar Lake a growing, vibrant and homey community that works and works well. We'll talk about recent history and future plans, introduce you to candidates for office, talk about the 2010 census and many other events, people and things.

Republican Robert Carnahan is a Town Concilman and also our local go-to man for the 2010 census.  

Nope, you cannot make him out in this picture from the 2009 Labor Day Parade, but he is there amongst the flags.  He did draw notice in the local papers recently, to wit:

Census PR earns town notice

Cedar Lake campaign to push population count shares the stage in D.C.

By Melanie Csepiga - Times Correspondent | Posted: Monday, January 25, 2010 12:00 am

 

CEDAR LAKE | Local census guru Robert Carnahan took his show to the nation's capitol last week, spreading word of the town's census awareness campaign.


Carnahan was the only census representative from Indiana whom the U.S. Census Bureau invited to participate in the 2010 Census Advertising Campaign preview Jan. 14 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center.


Ever the Cedar Lake cheerleader, Carnahan, a Republican councilman representing the 1st Ward, went to Washington, D.C., with local census materials and a PowerPoint presentation from his Cedar Lake Census Complete Count Committee.


Carnahan told the Cedar Lake Town Council he spent his first evening at dinner Tuesday with census staffers.
"I had Cedar Lake stuff spread across the table," he said. "We didn't just do dinner. We did business."
The preview, which unveiled the national census awareness campaign, was emceed by James Brown, sports broadcaster and host of CBS' "NFL Today."


Carnahan said he presented Cedar Lake's ambitious census effort to census leaders from across the country. An Alabama representative requested copies of Cedar Lake's materials.


"The census is so important. ... It will affect how we run the town in the next 10 years," Carnahan told his fellow councilmen.


While the national campaign is spending an unprecedented $340 million on advertising and marketing efforts, Cedar Lake is spreading the Everybody Counts message in grass-roots ways.  Since May, the committee included information on the value of filling out the census form in the Cedar Lake Boys & Girls Club newsletter and displayed the message in the Lowell Labor Day Parade and Harvest Parade of Light. Members produced handouts, made information available at school events and spoke to civic and church groups.


Carnahan said the town lost a lot of tax revenue with its 68 percent participation in the 2000 census.
The town can expect to lose $826 for every person not counted, which over 10 years amounts to a total loss of $8,260 per person, Carnahan said.  "This time it's 10 simple questions. No more long forms,"
Census forms are to be mailed in late February and in March for completion by April 1.

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