Here's the minutes from our meeting on March 3rd;
We started off by going over the minutes from the previous meeting, and then on to committee updates.
Mike Broder is going to be heading up the committee on the public garden. They met on February 12th with the Green Guerillas, and there was a good turnout. Eleven members were there! They put a new chain & lock on the gate to the garden. There will be a meeting at June's House, 196 Madison Street on March 16th, 6:30pm. Mike has spoken with Green Thumb about getting the developer who is currently encroaching on the garden to get off the garden and fix the fence. My law, the garden will have to be open at least ten hours a week to the public. A grant for the garden was declined for now, but we've already applied for a second grant.
The public safety committee attended the 79th precinct meeting. Police Commissioner Kelly was in attendance. Some things that were talked about were the gun buy-back program. Also there's been some problem with the stop&frisk policy of the city. The police are supposed to tell people who are stopped that they have the right to make a complaint, but they haven't been doing that enough. We could use some more people to attend the precinct meeting, they meetings happen the fourth Wednesday of every month.
I don't have notes on the block part committee, so I'm guessing their presentation didn't have any new information.
The block association has won a grant for $600 from "Citizens for NYC" We'll be using the grant for permits, welcome kits, and that sort of thing. The grant comes with a series of benchmarks we hope to meet, including outreach, community beautification, and informational workshops. We will be able to apply for a second grant in the fall.
There was also talk about competing in the "Greenest Block in Brooklyn" competition. Andrew talked about the flower-boxes he had made for his house.
The By-Laws for our Block Association were presented and then approved by unanimous vote. Now that the bylaws are approved, we will be collecting dues at the rate of five dollars per household per month.
We're looking into meetings with various city agencies, but these meeting probably will be happening on weekday nights rather than at our monthly Saturday meeting. The 79th Precinct will be meeting with out block association and Madison Block #2. We couldn't schedule a meeting with Sanitation but we did receive a lot of information on recycling, pick-up times and that sort of thing. We'd like to have a meeting with the Brooklyn Botanical Garden sometime in May. We'll try to have these meetings in the community room of the YMCA at 7pm on weekdays.
There was some talk about legal driveways. Apparently there's only four or five legal driveways on the whole block. We talked about a collective agreement between neighbors concerning etiquette on parking in non-legal spots.
There was discussion on the problems with kids playing football in the street and there were a few different ideas on how to deal with it. Some people thought we should call 311 about the problem, but others thought we should deal with the problem as a block. Perhaps we could aapproach parents as a block. Dennis suggested a meeting with the kids of the block. Biz, Dennis, Tamilla and Daryl showed special interest in dealing with the kids. They'd like to convince the church to let us use their parking lot as a basketball court so that the kids would have a better place to play.
We will now start notifying people about the meetings via email and phone, rather than just phone. There was some confusion about the meeting time, as some people still thought it was a 7pm meeting. The meetings are 6:30pm now, as we have so much to discuss!
