Page 5 - Overview Winter 2019

Avoid scammers, save your money and mind
You’ve put one set of holiday decorations away, but it’s time for another.
Halloween has come and gone but preparations for Thanksgiving, Christmas or Hanukkah are not so far off.
Holidays are a festive time for kids and adults, but just underneath the surface of fun lingers despicable financial scams.
If you have a phone or computer, it’s extremely likely you’ve been contacted by a scammer.
One typical scam involves a call from a Social Security Administration “representative” to let you know your account has experienced unexplained financial transactions. The real SSA has said repeatedly it will not call you about your account.
How about that credit card company that wants to offer you incredibly low interest rates? Maybe it’s a computer service company that detects some sort of virus hiding in your computer and wants to help you “clean” your system.
Other avenues for scams include suspicious emails or dangerous websites.
This holiday season, in the rush of all activities, take time to monitor your bank and credit card activities. Do not ever give out secure personal information, including your social security number, bank or credit card account numbers to strangers. Verify before you trust
an organization.
If in doubt, stop and take
time to evaluate
what is occurring.
Talk to
family
members or friends and
see what
they think. There’s strength in numbers and it does not hurt to ask for help.
Does a wet spring, summer, fall mean a snowy winter?
Your guess is as good as ours.
It’s been a wet spring, summer and fall. Is that an omen for a snowy winter?
Last snow season, a little over 11,000 tons of salt was spread on Overland Park’s more than 2,000 lane miles of roadways.
While City trucks can plow snow, it takes road salt to keep ice off of streets. Salt use is tied to the type of winter precipitation, not necessarily the amount of snow.
When temperatures fall into the single digit freezing range or
worse, below zero, salt is generally not effective.
Last winter, the City recorded over 33 inches of snow, with 11 inches falling during the single biggest snowstorm.
What can you do to assist snow operations?
A standard plow blade is 11 feet in width. Park your car on the driveway rather than a street. It helps drivers navigate residential roadways.
Cars parked on both sides of a neighborhood street truly create a narrow pathway and may hinder or prevent snow operations. Each season there are a handful of streets that don’t get treated right away because the big trucks are unable to safely maneuver past cars parked on neighborhood streets. Overland Park will attempt to notify residents, time permitting, and ask if cars can be moved to allow for treatment.
Training of snow plow drivers began in October. Drivers learned how to mount front and side plow blades, as well as how to use the onboard digital “automatic vehicle locator” that tracks each truck and assists supervisors observing the progress of an operation.
When snow season starts, you can keep track of the snow trucks too, at www.opkansas.org/snow.
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