“This may sound crass, but if you choose to live at the end of Marion Road or end of Miller Street or someplace else, you’ve made a decision because you know there’s not a fire station there. You’re taking a degree of risk, as an individual, and in some cases asking us to incur a half a million dollars across [...]

2,311 Middleboro residents spoke and spoke loudly: It’s time for change. Starting Monday, April 4, 2011 Middleboro’s Board of Selectmen is going to look very different. The incumbents – Muriel Duphily and Marsha Brunelle – lost their seats on the Board by a shockingly large margin. The vote tally is as follows: Candidate Number of Votes Allin Frawley 1,773 Ben [...]

Steve Rohleder, group chief executive of Accenture’s Health & Public Service operating group, makes an argument for towns and cities across the United States to look at shared service model for some of their functions. Does every town in America really need its own police force, fire department, and dog catcher? Must every municipality have its own back-office administrative bureaucracy [...]

Middleboro’s election season is ramping up and soon will be in full swing. As a marketing/communications professional, however, one candidate stands out from the rest of the pack. Allin Frawley has launched his campaign for Board of Selectmen with – GASP! – a website. A really nice website, at that. It tells you who he is and what he stands [...]

For the past couple of weeks I have been sick with some ungodly cold/flu/plague. It’s been a battle to try and recover and nothing seems to be doing the trick. After two weeks, I’m starting to feel like maybe I’ll be better soon but I just can’t seem to get there. I’m telling you this because this morning a story [...]

I generally don’t write about personal things on the JoryPepper.com blog, but there are some people and local companies that I would like to celebrate and could think of no better way to do that than on this public forum. So bear with me on this slight deviation from my normal rantings and musings about Middleboro, communications and genealogy… At [...]

Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows that I’m a chatty soul. Because I work at home, with only the dogs and rabbit to keep me company, I use Twitter as my virtual office water cooler. I learn new things, I get breaking news and it helps me get questions answered. To me, it’s a useful resource for information, laughter [...]

Small businesses often live and die by word-of-mouth advertising but often don’t think about conducting more formal advertising programs or campaigns. Often, small business owners don’t think that they can afford to advertise because they are operating on shoestring budgets as they get their business off the ground and advertising is simply a cost that is beyond your reach at [...]

I have been having a lot of conversations lately about blogging. Many of the people I run across in my life are really hesitant to try blogging. Some of my team members – while they are supposed to be blogging in my company’s social collaboration system – have not yet started. The reasons are varied: They feel like they don’t [...]

In a poll conducted at the end of last year, Pew Research asked about online connections to communities and neighbors and found that in the 12 months preceding their survey: 22% of all adults (representing 28% of internet users) signed up to receive alerts about local issues (such as traffic, school events, weather warnings or crime alerts) via email or [...]