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Corbin named a best town for sportsmen by Outdoor Life Magazine

Times-Tribune Staff Report

For the second consecutive year, Corbin has made the Outdoor Life magazine list of top 200 U.S. towns for hunters and anglers to live in. The list in its entirety is published in the June/July 2009 issue. The magazine used extensive data to score the towns on available sporting opportunities and Quality-of-Life.

Corbin is currently ranked No. 170. The only other Kentucky city to make the list is Paducah (ranked 150). Neighboring Indiana has three towns on the list — Bedford (181), Mt. Vernon (154) and Madison (138); Ohio has three — Port Clinton (37), Ashtabula (103) and Portsmouth (166); and Tennessee also has two on the list — Cleveland (135) and Knoxville (141).

To determine the 2009 “Best Places to Live,” Outdoor Life started with the 200 towns from the previous year’s list and added 50 additional locations from readers and colleague suggestions. Towns were ranked based on more than 20 criteria, with outdoor-related factors given slightly heavier emphasis in computing the results than Quality-of-Life factors. Outdoor factors considered included gun-friendliness of each town’s state, huntable and fishable species nearby, the town’s proximity to public hunting land and fishable waters, and the potential for taking a trophy-caliber game animal or fish nearby. Quality-of-Life factors considered included population growth since 2000, median household income, median home value, cost of living, unemployment rate, mean commute time and amenities (schools, hospitals). Certain socio-economic categories were weighted more than others to determine the overall Quality-of-Life score, which was combined with the overall outdoor score to reach each town’s rank.

“Outdoorsmen want world-class hunting and fishing, but like everyone else, they also want to have a high quality of life,” says Todd Smith, Editor-in-Chief of Outdoor Life. “The towns on this list offer the best of the outdoors as well as decent homes and schools and good-paying jobs. They are truly dream towns for sportsmen.........