March Block Club Meeting

I just got back from the March Professor/Thurman/Valley View block club meet­ing. Coun­cil­man Cim­per­man was present to lis­ten to our con­cerns and to tell us a bit about what is going on with Steel­yard Com­mons and oth­er items of Tremont inter­est.

As for Steel­yard Com­mons the devel­op­er has to break ground by May 31st, and even once the expan­sion is com­plete appar­ent­ly it will be around a year before good roads can be built to acco­mo­date traf­fic flow. The Coun­cil­man has under­stand­able prob­lems with that. He stressed that it is a tough bal­anc­ing act to attract new retail busi­ness with­out putting local places out of the run­ning. Now that Wal-Mart is out, the devel­op­er is still look­ing at big box retail, per­haps Cost­co, which does­n’t car­ry per­ish­able items.

Oth­er stuff about that floor-space restric­tion leg­is­la­tion:

• The leg­is­la­tion was pulled before Wal-Mart’s rejec­tion of the site
• The eight-year mora­to­ri­um before expan­sion into gro­ceries was accept­able to Wal-Mart.
• The let­ter The Coun­cil­man received from Wal-Mart con­tained three para­graphs assur­ing him that his pro­pos­al did­n’t affect their deci­sion, but then said they did­n’t think it was good pub­lic pol­i­cy. A bit of dou­ble­speke.

Also, appar­ent­ly the devel­op­er offered to pay for an Eco­nom­ic Impact Study but it nev­er hap­pened which is why The Coun­cil­man felt it was a nec­es­sary evil to pop up with this sud­den leg­is­la­tion to pro­tect local busi­ness. He also men­tioned the mag­ic num­ber of 1800 jobs, which made me won­der if he has seen Bill Calla­han’s most recent post.

That is real­ly all I caught about the Steel­yard Com­mons. I’m not too good at the on-the-spot jour­nal­ism stuff. Or any­thing even approach­ing any type of jour­nal­ism.

Tremont spe­cif­ic stuff:

• The Jef­fer­son Branch of the library is going to be open on Sat­ur­days, if it has­n’t start­ed already. This is because we use it so often.
• Gospel Press is going to be doing some ren­o­va­tion of their build­ing and the vacant lot across from the Fly­ing Mon­key is going to be turned into a park­ing lot, at least tem­porar­i­ly, which will relieve the stress from oth­er neigh­bor­ing streets. In the future, some apart­ments might be stilt­ed above it.
• A gen­tle­man that lives across the street from me was found by his upstairs neigh­bor, dead of appar­ent OD on alco­hol and pills.
• Hot Spot report forms for drug deal­ers can be found at Luck­y’s Café and can be faxed to TWDC.
• Val­ley View is sched­uled for demo­li­tion in late spring or ear­ly sum­mer. Once con­struc­tion [which should take 3 years or so] is com­plet­ed around 200 dif­fer­ent types of home, run­ning the gamut from low-income to full mar­ket home own­er­ship, should be avail­able for peo­ple to move in.
• If that hap­pens we will like­ly be able to keep Tremont school around, pro­vid­ing that it sur­vives the next round of clos­ings.

Some things I heard about that might be use­ful to remem­ber:

Cuya­hoga Met­ro­pol­i­tan Hous­ing Author­i­ty
Tremont Social Ser­vices
Ohio Cit­i­zen Action [who will be at the next block club meet­ing to talk about air qual­i­ty]

I did­n’t get to bring up my idea for street clean­ing or the Tremont blog because the meet­ing ran on so long and peo­ple were anx­ious to leave. I’ll just keep work­ing on it and bring it up at the next meet­ing on April 12th, at 7:00pm, at Luck­y’s.

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