July 9, 2009

There has sure been a lot going on, and I apologize that it has kept me from blogging.

Our last meeting (July 1) was fairly productive. The minutes will be posted soon, but until then here are some highlights:

Steve B. discussed his work with the Great Streets program in SENA. He suggested we adopt the Great Streets framework and adapt it to fit out more residential areas. Personally, I agree. The program stems from the Main Street program put out by the National Trust for Historic Preservation .

The bonus is that this framwork is tried and true. It's standardized and adaptable... and currently the city of Minneapolis is funding projects like this through its Great Streets program.

The con (in my mind) is that it doesn't deal with the traffic planning and infrastructure issues that desperately need to be dealt with.

I think it will be quite simple to re-tool the framework to our needs. For the time being we have two main parts to the group; Me on the traffic, safety and environment and Steve on the business environment and development. It's a yin and yang relationship that really seems to work out well for CAU.

A group of 4 volunteers from our last meeting will soon be setting up a meeting to look at the re-working of the policy to see if we can make it work.

We have recently decided that there is a need for an events committee. One thing that many in the group have expressed interest in doing is a corridor cleanup, but there are many other things. A boulevard garden competition/club etc.

We also talked t-shirts. Michelle at dragonfly promotions (and Cedar Ave resident!) is looking into the pricing to get us some lovely green Cedar Ave United! t-shirts. Thank you Michelle, I'm excited to see how this goes. The T-shirts will help identify people handing out information door to door and at events. They will also help increase our visibility when we start organizing events like a cleanup day, or boulevard garden day or whatever we decide to get together.

I'm really excited because green is also my favorite color. Hooray!


Recently found a great tool:

www.seeclickfix.com is a website that allows people to locate a place on a map and post a comment about the area. In this case the site focuses on transportation. Steve B. created a watch site that covers the Cedar Ave corridor. If you follow the watch site you will get a notification whenever a spot is posted withing the selected zone. Here is ours: http://www.seeclickfix.com/watch_area/1076

Read more about how this has been used by other cities here: http://downtownnewhaven.blogspot.com/2009/03/seeclickfix-transportation-safety.html

I encourage everyone to post issues here. It will be an easy way to keep track of what needs doing. It will also help me locate areas that need some serious consideration. Try it, and remember to follow the watch zone if you are interested!

So more will follow, remember to keep an eye on the big website for minutes. I will post something here when they are up.