Monday, January 31, 2005

The Northside Neighborhood Survey

We’ve got it!

David Cockrell, the city’s Senior Neighborhood Planner, has passed me a limited number of copies of the finished survey.

We’ve asked him for the document in PDF format so we could pass it to anyone who wanted it electronically. If we have to, we’ll scan the document in and generate something that way. However, it would be best if we could have that done via Acrobat, just to make it easy to search it for words and terms.

We’ll keep you apprised.

Friday, January 28, 2005

OHNO Victories

The Night of January 24th.

It’s an Ayn Rand classic, come to life!

Last Monday night, at the regularly scheduled meeting of the City Council, the Historic Preservation Commission (HPC) and Old Historic Northside Organization (OHNO), inadvertantly combined forces in order to give the City Fathers an opportunity to do the proverbial ‘right thing’, vis a vis a proposed modification to the city ordinance regarding historic landmarks and the establishment of Mineral Palace Park as an historic district.

It’s rather interesting that the two items came up together like this and the story is certainly worth telling of how that happened. But we’ve got a lot of other things to do before this day is over; so maybe another time. Suffice it to say that these two matters were related. The fun part is trying to understand the why’s and wherefore’s. But, as I said, that’s another, rather long and ‘paranoid’ story. And one better described over fine scotch and tobacco.

So, back on track. The people won a good fight last Monday night. The City Fathers wisely chose to amend the proposed ordinance so that the City Council would not be ‘above the law’, vis-a-vis other private and/or corporate entities. It also agreed to declare Mineral Palace Park an historic district. Both of these decisions will go far in maintaining a quality of life for the general population, well above that realized on Gedi Prime (see classic science ficition series by Frank Herbert).

A round of applause and drinks for all those who participated, either by communicating to the City Fathers via phone or e-mail, attending the meeting itself, and testifying on the matters.

THIS is what makes this land and this community a great place to live.

Artists Wanted

Looking for a few good kids. Age is not an issue.

Last Monday night, while waiting for the opening of the regularly scheduled City Council meeting, we were regaled with the introduction of a group of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed eager beavers, i.e., kids. These were members of the Pueblo Teen Council. We’re not exactly sure what their charter is but it looked to us like they were primed and ready to sink their collective teeth into something juicy.

I remember those days myself; the heady days of youth when I discovered that adults might actually listen to me, if I made sense and was focused on something outside of my own nihilistic benefit. We need more kids like that. Actually, we probably shouldn’t call them ‘kids’. They’re acting more like adults than all too many adults actually act.

But, getting to a point, if we had some people like that, particularly of the artistic persuasion, we could do some interesting things here. But we shouldn’t limit it to artistic pursuits either. We could benefit from the talents of any ‘adults’ who think they could do something for Pueblo. This being either visual, audio, written or other talents.

So, if you know someone hankering for an opportunity to ‘express’ themselves for the benefit of not only their own development, but the rest of us denizens of Pueblo….please….direct them here.

The Old OHNO Pueblo Entries

What’s become of all those entries of time gone by.

We’ve managed to save the main entries from OHNO Pueblo. In due time, we’ll resurrect them and have them available for future reference. This will be particularly useful when we start looking at what happens with regards to water and transportation issues in the county. But that will take some time to implement.

In the meantime, the old blog side, www. ohnopueblo.org, is still accessible. We’re not sure what is going to happen with the domain name, but we’ll see. And, if you REALLY need to have some information from the old site made available, please contact the Adminstration and they’ll see what they can do.