A quick tip of the cap to John Higgins, longtime member of the Platte City Board of Alderman, who was saluted by the mayor at Tuesday night’s meeting. Higgins did not seek reelection, so he is stepping away from alderman duties. Mayor Steve Hoeger has said he’ll appoint Higgins to a seat on the city’s parks board and Higgins told me he will also serve on the city’s seldom-needed board of zoning adjustment, so he won’t be disappearing completely.
Higgins served the city with dignity, pride and a calm demeanor during two periods as alderman. He was alderman from 1987 to 1993 and then again from 2009 to 2025. You’d be hard pressed to find a nicer person or higher quality human than this guy. I’ve never heard anyone speak a negative word about the man.
We thank him for his service to the community and his consistent voice of reason through the years.
Another sign that summer music season will be here very soon. The Platte City Board of Aldermen has officially approved the special event permit for the Platte City Friends of the Arts to hold its annual summer concert series. The concerts, traditionally held on/near the steps of the Platte County Courthouse, will be hosted on the second Saturdays during the months of June, July and August. If you don’t have a calendar in front of you, no worries, I’m out here for you delivering the goods. Those dates will be Saturday, June 14, Saturday, July 12 and Saturday, Aug. 9. Concert times are from 7-9 p.m. As in the past, the city has approved the closure of Main Street from Fourth to Third Street for the concerts.
A remaining big question: who will be the performing bands? Don’t have that answer yet, but I’m sure the Friends of the Arts are finalizing the list (if they haven’t already) and will be distributing that info fairly soon.
Here’s another spring-summer-fall activity to make note of for your personal calendar, or at least keep in the back of your mind. Plans call for a Platte City Farmers Market in Downtown Platte City. Aldermen have given approval for a special event permit for this weekly market. Scheduled every Saturday from May 17 to Sept. 27, the Platte City Farmers Market will be held on Third Street from Main Street to High Street. Third Street, by the way, is that side street between the former Farley Law Office building and the courthouse.
The event permit application was submitted by the Downtown Platte City Association. “Platte City Farmers Market is a devoted group of farmers working to provide fresh produce for our community,” says the Downtown Platte City Association’s application paperwork.
Hours for the Platte City Farmers Market are planned to be 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. on the above mentioned dates. Should be a nice offering for the community and a nice addition to Downtown Platte City activities.
The Landmark’s amazing technology specialist–to this point known only as Tech Guy Schneider, though negotiations are underway in hopes that someday he’ll allow me to reveal his actual name–has been busy fighting off attempted hackers on our very popular website at plattecountylandmark.com. Some hacking attempts were being made early in the week, but they were no match for Tech Guy Schneider’s prowess. “I’m busy fighting off hackers and communists,” Schneider said mid-afternoon Tuesday when he called with an update. After he was done fighting off this attempted round of hacking from wannabe criminals, Schneider upgraded our site to a bigger/stronger/faster server. This will further speed up your page loading pleasure when you’re perusing all the journalistic excellence and whatnot that we load onto plattecountylandmark.com on an almost daily basis.
Though I haven’t yet been authorized to reveal Schneider’s true identity, I can tell you that in addition to being a successful cage fighter against hackers and communists, Schneider in his past has very successfully battled a municipality or two, and may be looking ahead to doing so again in the near future.
I have in the past deservedly boasted on Tech Guy Schneider and his skills in providing the major upgrade and modernization to plattecountylandmark.com. He worked his technological tailfeathers off in the early days of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, and the new and vastly improved electronic Landmark went live on May 1 of that year. Schneider built it and quickly trained yours truly and office manager Cindy Rinehart on how to make the frequent news updates. A short time later Cindy said, “Nah, Foley, this website stuff is all yours. I’m remodeling my house.” It’s been five years so I’m assuming the remodeling work is done but Cindy never came back to web duties. Well, that’s mostly true, but not totally true–while Cindy doesn’t do any of the website updating she does fit-to-size and visually prep many of the photos and graphics you see on our site, which saves me a lot of time.
Anyway, back to Schneider. He made the process as simple as possible, and aligned us with the advertising system that puts some jingle in our pocket as the website counter rolls, hitting 290,000 page views per month. You’ve no doubt seen ads from retailers and professional service industries on our site who want your attention and your views. Patronize them when you find something of value.
Now it’s time to praise former Landmark reporter Alan McArthur, a Park University grad who busted his butt as an outstanding reporter for us while on staff in the 2007-ish to 2009-ish Landmark era. He continued in a freelance role after that, covering certain meetings for many years as it fit his schedule. In the spring of 2017, Alan convinced me it was time to finally take The Landmark to Facebook, a move I had resisted up until that time. Alan’s real job was in IT, so he was more than skilled at creating Platte County Landmark on Facebook and turning me loose to take it from there. I can’t thank Alan enough for being gracious enough to construct our page and to convince me that putting up with the occasional wackadoodles who show up on Facebook (you know what I’m talking about) would be worth it in the long run. We generate significant news content and interactions on Facebook, and Meta sends us a modest monthly payment for the news content we provide on their platform and for the traffic it generates.
Even though we were late to Facebook, the party didn’t start till we walked in. We were very aggressive with it, and our news and our Landmark Live videos were a hit to the point our follower count grew very rapidly and overtook outlets who had started years ahead of us. We now surpass competitors by a significant margin. This week we hit the 10,000 follower mark.
(Find Foley making Farmers Market plans)
