What happened in the Midlands on this day? Here's a sampling from the World-Herald archives.
CIGARETTE TAX STAMPS HERE
Feb. 7, 1946: Four million cigarette tax stamps arrived at the City Hall. Finance Commissioner Carl Jensen and Comptroller Charles Stenicka announced, "Cigarette tax stamps are now on sale." The 2-cent-per-package question, however, was: Would the stamps make their debut in Omaha February 15th as scheduled? Messrs Jensen and Stenicka said there was nothing at present to prevent the proposed tax from going into effect. In the week to come, however, there was to be a court hearing on whether the city should be prevented from placing the tax in effect.
1977: The Omaha School Board may pay teachers part of the salary increase which had been in dispute for several months. A board committee voted to offer members of the Omaha Education Association the amount proposed by the board when negotiations broke off in the previous year. Any further increase would have been subject to later litigation. OEA Executive Director John Thies said the proposed offer seemed to be a "token" designed to calm teachers, but he said he does not know whether the OEA would accept the partial raise. The schools officials said the raise would amount to an average increase of 7.1 percent paid retroactively to September 1976.
1990: Mayor P.J. Morgan and his staff began to sort through the city's recycling options. City officials said those options might be limited because the City Council voted 6-1 to extend a garbage-hauling contract with Watts Trucking Co. without seeking a rebid. Morgan had hoped to solicit new bids on a contract that would encompass the garbage-hauling duties as well as other programs such as citywide curbside pickup of newspapers and yard waste. Since Morgan's recycling "master plan for the 1990s and beyond" was based on the assumption that the city would seek new bids for hauling residential waste, the recycling plan must be changed.
1997: The Environmental Protection Agency ordered a Fairbury, Neb., plant to take immediate steps to clean up environmental and health concerns posed by its metal recycling operation. The agency inspected the American MicroTrace Corp. plant off Nebraska Highway 8 in September and October. The EPA found that the way the plant recycled dust containing lead, zinc and cadmium "was dangerous to public health and the environment." The plant property, including a wetland, had been contaminated with heavy metals. An EPA review of the company's medical monitoring data indicated that some employees had elevated levels of lead in their blood, which can cause health problems. No information was available on how many employees had elevated blood-lead levels or how high those levels were.
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