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Op-ed: Clean up the city (by Peter Children)

Pat Otto the neighborhood coordinator has only two guys on her staff, this means a lot falls through the cracks because there aren’t enough people to cover the city and consequently we all suffer.

I was talking to Tom Jolas our former mayor about this earlier today and he reminded me of an operation he implemented when he was the mayor. He worked with the police force to first identify all the abandoned cars sitting in driveways and in yards around town. Once he had that information he struck a deal with a local scrape dealer with a car crusher and the railroad.

He found  many of those with these cars were happy to have the automobiles hauled away, “Many cars sat there because they didn’t have the funds to move them,” Jolas said. Why couldn’t this be repeated today? We certainly have an abundance of inventory available, there are cadaver cars all over the place, the scrape dealers are here and so is the railroad….all that is missing is the initiative by our current administration.

Why should the neighborhood commission go wanting for funds to hire more personal? Why can’t we increase their budget to clean up the place we live? Now don’t get bent out of shape when I say this; we give the museum $265,000.00 a year and they are sitting on close to a million in their account. True some of that money came from bequeaths but that does not take away from the fact that it exists.

Clean up this town, get your priorities in order…this is were we live, am  the only one who sees this filth. Draft a law with teeth in it, one that will cause you to keep your property clean, and if it is not followed and the city comes in and does it, then apply the cost to the property as a lien, and if the lien isn’t paid in a specified amount of time, foreclose.  I would inspect the interior every home that requires a citation for outside clean up if there are young children living in that home.  That could be done by the health department along with building inspectors.

If this “new” council wants a place to start making a difference, what better place to begin than our own back yard.

Peter Children

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