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<< Previous   of   Next >>   ADVERTISEMENT   CONTACT THE HERALD Mike Benbow, Business Editor benbow@heraldnet.com   Published: Monday, August 4, 2008 In my hometown in Ohio, it's the same problem: costly gas By Mike Benbow You can go home again. You just need more gas money and an extra dollop of patience these days. That was the lesson I learned last week while visiting my hometown in the Cleveland area for the first time in 20 years or so. It wasn't much different than being in Everett because it seemed like the only thing people wanted to talk about was the price of gas. In Elyria, Ohio, it was $3.61 a gallon last week. "I'd better gas up," my friend, Tom Chernitsky, kept saying every time we went by a pump at that price. Neither of us could explain why gas was so less expensive in Elyria, Ohio, than it is in Everett. Unlike Washington, Ohio doesn't have a state full of oil next door (Alaska). Unlike Everett, Elyria doesn't have a refinery just up the road. Everything is relative, though. I found that out my first morning in town, when I dropped in at a Wal-Mart in Elyria for a box of Cheerios. Mike Elbert, who owns a Convenient Food Mart in town, was also there buying cereal. But it wasn't for his family or even for himself. Elbert was loading up to stock the shelves in his convenience store. As he explained, when he orders goods for his store these days he has to pay a fuel surcharge for the trucker's extra expenses. If he just needs a few items, it's actually cheaper for him to just buy them at Wal-Mart and resell them. A week ago today, Paul Ray, 64, became the first man in Elyria to make a golf cart street-legal. For about $1,000 and three weeks of work, he added seat belts, a rearview mirror, a horn, turn signals, headlights and brake lights and was able to get an Ohio license plate that allows him to take the vehicle on the road. A story in the Chronicle-Telegram of Elyria said it was all legal as long as Ray stays on streets that have 25 mph speed limits so he wouldn't impede traffic. Ray said he can barrel along his neighborhood on Bell Avenue at 20 mph. It's a electric vehicle, so I don't know the cost per gallon of Ray's ride. Suffice it to say, it's not much. While Ray's got a good thing going, Isaac Stutzman can't say the same thing. Stutzman lives in nearby Fredericksburg and is a member of the largest Amish community in the world. If you don't know, the Amish shun cars, tractors and electricity, so I was thinking they might be feeling pretty smug right now. But it turns out that the horse-and-buggy community, which coincidentally makes the best baby Swiss cheese on the planet, does use fuel for things such as irrigation and factory equipment. Stutzman, who does not have electricity in his home, makes his own power to run his furniture factory, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He has an 80-year-old band saw that he uses to rip timber into boards, feeding it 140 gallons of diesel fuel each day. "I remember when it was 60 cents a gallon," he told the Cleveland newspaper. "Now it costs $4 a gallon or more. It's pretty bad." At Elyria High School, they're drilling 288 wells through the rock to created a geothermal energy system that will cost $1.7 million but is expected to pay for itself in just a few years. The idea is to use the Earth's consistent temperature to heat and cool the school. I say let them freeze in the winter and sweat like a pig in the summer, as I did. As I left Cleveland last week, even the United Airlines pilots were talking about fuel prices. As we sat on the runway for 45 minutes because the GPS didn't work in the Airbus jet, we were advised to close our window shades and to open our air nozzles to keep the plane cool and to help save fuel. They didn't tell us to do that in Chicago, where we sat at the gate for 90 minutes while they fixed a leak in the hydraulic system in another Airbus jet, but they did give us some free water. You can go home again, but if things keep worsening on the gas front, you may have to legalize your golf cart to get there. Mike Benbow: 425-339-3459; benbow@heraldnet.com.

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