Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Pueblo Neighborhood Partnership Meeting — 050405

The monthly gathering of the guys and gals in the ‘hoods.

Yesterdays meeting of the Pueblo Neighborhood Partnership (PNP) was well attended.

Here’s a round up of what transpired.

Hyde Park

They’re as pleased as punch with their new computer education center. The classes seem to be going well and other people are pointing to it as a model of how other neighborhoods should be doing something like this.

I tend to agree as I think good communications is essential to most of what we do in life. [Note: More on that, in the form of an essay on my own experiences with such, later.] And computers are the tool of choice for communicating without having to chop down and grind up all kinds of trees.

Eastside

They’ve got a computer thing going too.

Bessemer

The folks are planning a get-together in their annual effort to make their place look spiffy. They’ve probably got details up on their BAND web-site, so I won’t bother to repeat it all here. Just go there.

The big discussions revolved around the following issues:

[1] Clean-Up: What does anyone, or perhaps EVERYONE, have to do in order to keep the community clean.

The principle thrust I got out of this was that EVERYONE has to do THEIR PART in order to eliminate the trash that seems to prevail in parts of town.

There was a bit of polite finger-pointing going on in the meeting, but no one got on their ear about it. And that’s a good sign. And it is what causes me to have (1) the opinion that it’s something everyone needs to be involved with and (2) hope that we’ll all do what we need to in order to accomplish this.

Some of the discussion here involved:

    • Mandatory trash service for everyone in the town.

It seemed to me that this would be a big step in the right direction. There were many reports of people slacking off and taking advantage of their neighbors with respect to that.

    • Education programs.

Not a particularly immediate remedy, but a long term approach.

    • Public Health Department overseeing the total effort, no matter what the venue.

Well…after all…trash IS a ‘health’ issue. Even moreso than being an eye-sore, it is a threat to health.

We’ll see what the City Fathers decide on in the near future about this.

[2] CDBG Funds: Well…there’s good news and that brings about bad news.

First the good news. According to the Feds, Pueblo is not quite as poverty stricken as it has been. Things, apparently, are looking up.

Now the bad news. CDBG funding is being reduced in proportion to the good news (above). Such is ‘life’. The Fed giveth and the Fed taketh away. You just can’t ‘count on the Fed’.

Because of some difficulties with respect to actually spending some of the CDBG funds received last year, this years application program is going to be a bit more ‘detail-oriented’. This means that there will be workshops on how to fill out the forms. There will be staff reviews of applications to make sure all the t’s are dotted and the i’s are crossed…which, if I know the Feds very well, eveyone’s will be by the end of the process.

I think I’ll sit in on the workshops, just to see how things are going.

That pretty well wrapped it up.

Sometime soon, I think we’re going to dedicate a whole session to clean-up efforts. Some of the discussion will be on how often do they need to do it. Some of it will be on the ‘interesting’ economic pressures that cause our trash trucks to be hauling garbage up to El Paso county landfills instead of using those in Pueblo.

It should be interesting….