Neighborhood group focuses on community improvement
For the town’s east side residents, community action is about more than reporting nuisance parties to the police.
The East Side Residential Neighborhood Group met for its second meeting of the year Nov. 8 in the Wooster Street Best Western to hear about the city’s development plans directly from its Municipal Administrator, Lori Tretter, and Assistant Municipal Administrator, Joe Fawcett.
“(We) love to spend time with citizens interested in the city of Bowling Green,” Tretter said before starting a presentation about the Community Action Plan.
She said the plan, a thick pile of papers that can be found on the city website, was made early 2018 to update the town’s policy on land use to focus on neighborhoods.
To prioritize the plan, she said the town came up with 10 items to focus on first, a number of which the city has started work on:
- Zoning Code edits to help revitalize the East Wooster Street corridor, which allowed The Art Supply Depo’s opening in a garage.
- Micro-grant program to invest in community members’ and groups’ projects, including the Firefly Nights and Downtown BG’s markets.
- Bicycle use investment – including more education about proper city biking and planning for bike paths.
- Pedestrian Hybrid Beacon installation – state-built special crosswalks on Wooster Street.
- Encouraging renovations on homes through tax increment financing.
- Historic Preservation Commission installation.
- Carter Park revitalization planning.
- Introduction of plans for and analysis of compulsory rental registration.
The two administrators answered questions from the group afterward, addressing concerns about the town’s lack of an additional code enforcer or a centralized code enforcement center but not giving exact details of the city’s responses to these issues yet.
Fawcett also revealed a reason why the micro-grant money had been given only to community event groups so far – the town had only received two applications. He clarified most individuals can put in an application for the money as long as it is focused on property use and improvement but that applications are weighed by the impact of their projects.
The group, made of various members in the town’s eastern neighborhoods, also updated its members about the group’s recent actions.
It has been a “quiet year” Rose Hess said, filling in for a sick John Zanfardino. She explained the group’s most pressing concerns so far were met when the city’s Community Action Plan came into being.
However, she also said number-crunching on a survey held in fall 2017 had concluded, and the group knew more about what east side residents were concerned about for upcoming years. Among the greatest issues were the problems posed by the city’s use of a single code enforcement officer and desires to compare the city’s residential methods with that of other college cities.
Hess promised the organization would be working with Kroger and Lutheran Social Services to supply Christmas dinners to families in need. She also said it would be donating items for landscaping at Habitat for Humanity’s bungalow construction project near the corner of Clough Street and Manville Avenue.
The assembly also heard more updates about the city’s recent lawsuit with landlords about an ordinance stopping more than three unrelated people to rent a property together; the city looks to combat the suit on its language and placement in the federal court system.
It also received updates on the city’s list of nuisance party reports from Police Chief Tony Hetrick; the number of reports rose from seven to 14 from this time last year.
Hess said, despite the group’s notoriety for reporting many of these parties, they had a responsibility to “tell it like it is.”
The group will meet again in the spring, but a date is not set.