Neighborhood meeting attendance

No matter where you live you are probably part of a neighborhood and that neighborhood very likely has regular meetings.  They may be quarterly or they may be monthly.  Some are casual while others can be more formal.  Some can be very productive while others never seem to move forward.  I personally have a low tolerance for neighborhood meetings.

The poll this week asks how often you attend your own neighborhood meeting?  Are you at every meeting or do show up rarely for the hot topic?  The poll is in the upper side sidebar.

In the comments below I’d like to hear some of your personal experiences. What do you like, dislike?  Any suggestions on how to get more people involved and how to set & accomplish goals for the neighborhood.

I’ll start.  I think Robert’s Rules of Order should be dumped.  Nobody likes to sit through meetings where people butcher the rules (“I motion that…”).  Instead the leadership should work toward decisions based on consensus.  Discuss.

– Steve Patterson

You can always go downtown

45 years years ago, November 1964, Patula Clark released Downtown:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHNGvEdTwBQ

In January 1965 the song made it to #1 in the United States.  This was a time that downtown needed a positive image.

Linger on the sidewalks where the neon signs are pretty

Except that sign laws in many cities made these great signs disappear — they were visual “clutter.”  Very glad to see the projecting blade sign make a return.  Although in St. Louis you must jump through hoops to have one.

This classic song has been covered by many artists, I’m fond of the B-52s version.

– Steve Patterson

Local elected officials and social networking

Knowing what our elected officials are working on used to require attending monthly neighborhood meetings.  Not bad if you are free when the meetings are held and patient enough to sit through the entire meeting to hopefully get a clue what they are up to.  Not good if you care to know about more than a single ward.  How many meetings can one person reasonably attend per month just to be an informed citizen? Then add in the issue of just trying to know what meetings are held when, where and who will be there.  If you are parochial you only care about that which is within your ward — across the street doesn’t matter.  In St. Louis that means your 3.6% (1/28th) section of the city.  Many of us, however, take a broader view of issues and problems facing not just the city but the entire St. Louis region.  3.6% is not enough.

For a number of years now I’ve complained that too few of our elected officials blogged.  If you wanted to know what they were working on you had on track them down at a neighborhood meeting.  Even then you got the same old boring stuff, no real news about what they are working on.

With the rise of Twitter, the 140 character micro-blogging site, our elected officials can now easily reach those interested in knowing what they are working on.  Some of them have embraced Twitter as a way to easily communicate.

The following are elected officials from the City of St. Louis on Twitter:

• Francis Slay – St. Louis Mayor
• Lewis Reed – President of the Board of Aldermen
• Dionne Flowers – 2nd ward
• Kacie Starr Triplett – 6th ward
• Donna Baringer – 16th ward
• Antonio French – 21st ward
  
• Jeffrey Boyd – 22nd Ward
• Shane Cohn – 25th Ward
• Gregory Carter – 27th Ward
  
• Lyda Krewson – 28th Ward
  

The list above includes all ages, races & both genders.  It includes senior members and two elected earlier this year.  My apologies if I’ve left anyone off the list.  The use by those listed above varies.  Mayor Slay does not personally tweet. Others can go weeks between tweets.

The above is just for the City of St. Louis.  Our region includes hundreds of units of government.  St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley is also on Twitter.  But what about members of the St. Louis County Council?  Hundreds of mayors in the region? Heads of other counties in our 16-county region?  Newly elected State Senator Joe Keaveny is on Twitter.

I started this post a couple months ago.  Since then Twitter has added a lists feature.  So for this post I created a list with elected officials that represent part of the St. Louis region.  Right now the list has 20 persons from both sides of the river.  You can subscribe to the entire list or pick and chose.  If you know of others that should be on the list let me know.

With only 20 on this list this means that most of our elected officials are not on Twitter.  Many of you are probably not either.  Not everyone needs to follow every official.  What is important is that they are putting out ideas and asking for feedback.  The other day I sent feedback to Lt. Gov Peter Kinder.  I’ve sent a message or two to Senator Claire McCaskill as well as numerous local aldermen. With the local press following them as well you are likely to get better reporting.

If you go to your ward/neighborhood meetings keep doing so.    But I’m interested in the entire region.

UPDATE 11/13/09 7:50am: Just got word that Mayor Slay does do some personal tweeting – those with #fgs at the end. Good to know.

– Steve Patterson

An argument in favor of shared parking

Last Sunday I was walking from my place to the London Tea Room. I went the long way to look at old cars lined up on 17th for the Veteran’s Parade.  So I crossed through CPI’s parking lot which is just North of my building.

I noticed a driver get into an SUV after pulling two notes off the window.  Pulling away I saw the car pictured above with the same notes. Basically CPI doesn’t like residents from surrounding buildings parking on their lot overnight.  I was very pleased to see the notes could be easily removed rather than those requiring elbow grease and a razor blade.

But it brings up a question about how we use our land.  The above image shows their parking lot thinning about 4pm on Monday. Washington Ave runs left to right in the background.  !7th Street and CPI’s building are on the left.  This is one of four parking lots for CPI.

The parking lot continues over to 16th Street (right).  The massive Ely-Walker building is across 16th. It has underground garage parking but I think some residents have more than one car per unit.

What I’d like to see is shared use of the lot.  For a fee, a fixed number of residents could be allowed to use CPI’s lot from 5pm -7am weekdays and 24/7 on weekends. I hate seeing this lot sit mostly vacant evenings and weekends.

Ideally CPI would do well to explore ways to reduce the number of employee’s vehicles each day. Offer employee’s $25/month if they didn’t bring their car to work.  This would prompt some to look at transit or carpooling.   The money paid out to employee’s would come in from fees collected from others using the parking on off hours.

A CPI-sponsored WeCar vehicle (car sharing from Enterprise) could help employees that use transit or carpool if they need a car to run errands at lunch.  The many residents living in this part of downtown might become members as well.  The nearest WeCar to us is 7-8 blocks away.  With a close WeCar some 2-car households might drop down to one and some one-car households might go to zero.  A sponsor covers the cost each month if a vehicle is not rented by members often enough each month.

Promotional video from Enterprises’ WeCar program:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDhHo3bJ9bM

Know that I’m not picking on CPI — they are a good neighbor.  I’m just suggesting ways in which they might alter how they view the land around their building used for car storage.

– Steve Patterson

Repairs underway at Citygarden

Cities are very good about finding money for capital projects. Money for operations and ongoing maintenance, however, is often scarce.

But when a leak was discovered under a portion of the splash fountain at the new Citygarden downtown there was no cause for panic to find the funds for repairs.

Citygarden was generously built by the Gateway Foundation.  But they didn’t just build it and hand the keys to the city, they are responsible for maintenance on the two downtown blocks.  The fountain repair is probably covered under warranty but it is nice to know this garden will not fall into disrepair like so much of our public infrastructure.   At the end of Summer crews were busy replacing quite a bit of the grass that got worn out due to the huge crowds of people that visited the new spot.

I say new but the use of these two blocks as public park space goes back to 1993 when we had two blocks of… grass.  Yawn.

Watching Citygarden change from Summer into Fall have been a pleasure.

Any infrastructure we have (highways, bridges, transit, etc) we need a plan to pay for the operations and maintenance once built. Some of our existing MetroLink light rail stations are looking a bit shabby — rusty railings and such.  Maybe each station needs a corporate sponsor to help with maintenance?

Kiener Plaza & the Morton May Amphitheater, just East of Citygarden, are in disrepair as is much of the Gateway Mall.  When any project is new it has decent maintenance.  But a decade or so later, and two or three administrations later, existing infrastructure takes a back seat to ribbon cuttings on the next big thing.  We don’t have enough generous foundations in town to build and maintain our infrastructure.  We must figure out how to do it ourselves.  Part of the solution is in building less infrastructure.

The Cross County MetroLink extension cost far more than originally planned  — miles of tunnels rather than at-grade service will drive up the capital budget. But in 20 years those miles of tunnels and flyover structures will require far more maintenance than the simpler original designs.

This is not to say we should never again build expensive infrastructure.  I think we need a system of streetcars to pull together city neighborhoods and the inner-ring suburbs.  Property taxes along the routes should help fund long-term operations and repairs.   So build what we need just have a means to fund it through its lifespan.  In the meantime I’m going to keep enjoying the well-maintained Citygarden.

– Steve Patterson