Government

Sometime over the next few months, all businesses in the southern Hardin County town of Sonora will be smoke-free.

That decision came out of a Sonora City Commission meeting in August and links the town to Elizabethtown, Radcliff and the unincorporated areas of the county as being smoke-free.

Sonora Mayor Larry Copelin said the county ordinance, which went into affect April 1, 2007, has been adopted by Sonora. He said a decision on when Sonora will go smoke-free “hasn’t been determined yet.’’

 The future of Fort Knox, problems with the Veteran’s Administration and frustration at the misuse of welfare programs were among the topics discussed at the Aug. 21 town hall meeting with U.S. Representative Brett Guthrie.

The congressman recently wrote a letter to the Pentagon in opposition to potential reductions – as many as 4,100 jobs – at Fort Knox.

Guthrie said the army post is as important to the local community as it is to the nation’s defense.

After he’s spent 30 years in Washington, U.S. Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes no longer believes Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is the best candidate for Kentucky’s farmers.

  “Never has a senator been paid so much for doing so little for the people in Kentucky,” Grimes said at Kentucky Farm Bureau’s “Measure the Candidates” forum, held at its headquarters in Louisville on Wednesday. 

LaRue County magistrates approved a 2014-15 tax rate of 19.65 cents per $100 of assessed property value as they met at the courthouse in Hodgenville Aug. 12.

Tommy Turner, judge-executive, explained that the increase is below the permissible 4 percent increase, but slightly above the compensating rate that yields an amount of revenue approximately equal to that produced in the preceding year from real property.

Fiscal Court also approved an across-the-board 2 percent increase in county salaries not set by state statute.