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Neighbors talk projects during rally(Daily News, The (Bowling Green, KY) (KRT) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) May 30--Presentations on disaster training, city grants and Mayor Elaine Walker's positions in her re-election campaign greeted about three dozen representatives from neighborhoods around the city, organized as the Coalition of Active Neighborhoods, Thursday night at the BGMU Annex. The neighborhood leaders met with officials from several nonprofit groups and city agencies, plus city commission candidate Bill Carter, for the annual discussion on improving their residential areas. Janarae Conway of the Warren County Citizens Corps Council urged them and their neighbors to get free training as members of Community Emergency Response Teams. Those give people basic disaster training to care for themselves and their neighbors for 24 to 72 hours, in case they're isolated or emergency services are overwhelmed by a major disaster, she said. Conway can be contacted at 781-8039, Ext. 155, or by e-mail at [email protected] for training sessions and times. Participants will learn how to make disaster plans, deal with emergencies and assemble a disaster supply kit, she said. The second annual "preparedness summit," with emergency services from the 10-county region displaying their skills and equipment, will be from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sept. 13 at Phil Moore Park, Conway said. People will be admitted with the contribution of one item for the "Supply Our Seniors" program, which puts together disaster supply kits for low-income elderly, she said. City Neighborhood Action coordinator Karen Foley said this year's city budget will include $55,000 for Select Neighborhood Action Plan grants, down from $60,000 last year. SNAP grants of up to $5,000 are available for various neighborhood improvement projects; the application deadline is June 13, Foley said. Walker answered questions from the crowd; her opponent, City Commissioner Brian Strow, was out of town, but Foley said he will reply to written questions submitted to her. Walker, asked about her long-term goal for the city, said continuing job recruitment is the key to affording good services and improving the local quality of life. Recreation and good city services can be maintained so long as the city keeps growing, she said. She was asked what purpose the City-County Planning Commission serves, with the allegation that it rubber-stamps the intrusion of businesses into neighborhoods. Walker said the planning commission does block many such intrusions, but some are inevitable due to the continuing growth. She urged residents to show up and tell both the planning commission and city of any objections to annexations or rezoning. "There are a lot of times when we get a case, and we don't hear from anybody," Walker said. Walker said check-cashing and payday-advance businesses are "terrible," but that the city can't regulate them directly. What can be done is encouraging financial literacy through things such as the mayor's DollarWi$e campaign, seeking to keep young people from getting into the credit trouble that drives them to high-interest check-cashing outlets. To a question on her view of landlord-tenant legislation, Walker said she supports it since landlords have failed to police their own ranks. She and her husband Dorian are landlords themselves, but maintain their property and deplore the conditions some local slumlords allow. Landlord-tenant legislation would protect landlords too -- good ones, she said. On the most serious problem facing the city, residents have for years consistently said traffic is their top concern. Commissioners have responded, but to build all planned roads locally would cost a half-billion dollars, money no level of government has available, Walker said. "We have committed more money to address streets and roads than any other commission, in these three and a half years," she said. But just the planned widening of Old Morgantown Road will cost $9 million to $11 million, about 10 percent of the city's total annual budget, Walker said. The city can't spend that every year, and eliminating the city's $1.3 million annual subsidy to its three golf courses -- Strow's favorite target -- is "not going to cut it," she said. "We can't buy ourselves out of this problem," Walker said. The solution will have to be cutting traffic at peak times, she said. Walker said she pushed to establish a task force that's talking about incentives to get businesses to stagger their work shifts, seeking to spread out travel times. Other ideas are offering incentives to carpool, or establishing park-and-ride lots on major routes, she said. Pressed on who's backing a 4,000-seat minor-league baseball stadium downtown, Walker said that's just a small part of an expected $250 million revitalization project. She said an earlier drive to sell season tickets to show prospective teams and developers that there was sufficient local interest was "extremely successful." In 2005, backers of the baseball idea tried to sell 2,000 season tickets. After months of trying, they managed to sell 1,400. The big advantage of the downtown plan, Walker said, is that for the first time a huge proportion of state tax money can be redirected to pay off the development bonds, meaning local taxpayers won't bear an undue proportion of the cost. "We are not going to raise people's taxes to pay for this," Walker said. The state tax money will only be available if there's $200 million total investment in the area by the end of 2014, of which half is expected to be committed by private developers. So far only about $49 million is committed, practically all of it from public sources. Another question was whether the redevelopment could include a downtown swimming pool. Walker said that's indeed part of the long-range plan for the new Kummer/Little Recreation Center, when the local economy perks up enough to afford it. Asked how the city can help established city neighborhoods compete with new subdivisions, she said it needs to keep houses divided into college-student apartments out of single-family neighborhoods, promote neighborhood organizations and address residents' concerns on Summer Strolls. Finally, Walker said there's no groundswell of citizen support for metropolitan government, and combining city and county would make it difficult to provide city services in rural areas. "I don't see us having a metro government in the near future," she said. To see more of the Bowling Green Daily News, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.bgdailynews.com. Copyright (c) 2008, The Daily News, Bowling Green, Ky. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email [email protected], call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA. |