Recently Don Balsamo, Karen McGraw and myself met with William Rhodes, Director of the Solid Waste Services Department, to discuss what could be done to encourage property owners to take an active role in keeping vegetation cut back where their properties adjoin the alleys used by garbage trucks. Mr. Rhodes indicated state law allows his department to cut and clean up overgrown and neglected lots for health and safety reasons, and place a lien on the title of the property to recover the cost. However, the City ordinances requiring property owners to keep their portion of the alleys clear only provide for recovering the City's money for City crews doing the work in their place by filing an action in Municipal Court. The problem there is that the cost of bringing a delinquent property owner into court exceeds what can be recovered from such an action. So the City's position is that it cannot afford to "force" people to discharge their responsibilities to keep their portion of the alleys clear. Instead there was an agreement to develop some educational matter to attempt to persuade property owners to proactively trim vegetation and refrain from using the alleys as a dumping area for unwanted items. Pretty surely, additional Alley Cats sweeps of the alleys with HPNA volunteers and workers hired at HPNA expense will be necessary in the future. Probably the next one will be in the spring.
Finally, I and the indefatigable Karen McGraw attended the November 14th Board of Adjustment meeting to address a potentially worrisome proposal to split a nine thousand square foot lot on Avenue A with 75 feet of frontage into two 4500 square foot lots with 37.5 feet frontage. The property owner wants to do this to enable him to sell the two houses on the single lot independently to separate owner occupants. While everyone is in favor of more owner occupancy, the problem with this is that the resulting lots are smaller than currently allowed under the City's Land Development Code and smaller than the prevailing 50 foot wide Hyde Park standard. The owner's agent thinks she has discovered authorization in state law to subdivide a parcel that is composed of two or more original lots regardless of what current City ordinances say about minimum lot size. The reason this is worrisome is that every house in Hyde Park, with one exception that we know of, sits on two or more of the original 25 foot wide lots that Monroe Shipe began selling before the turn of the century before last. Our concern
groups.yahoo.com/ group/ HPNA_Gen_Members. Set your browser pointer over
that link, left mouse click, and click the "Join this group" button in the
upper right hand corner when the page opens. You will have to pick a Yahoo
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| -- | Gary Penn HPNA Co-President (512) 452-3103 garypenn@swbell.net |
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PLANNING - The Hyde Park Planning Team
has been meeting to complete the re-zoning (Neighborhood Conservation
combining District) for the Hyde Park area north of 45 St. The City
will be helping us.
We hope to have this adopted within a year. We will begin a field survey early in 2003. There are 75 blocks to survey so we will need your help. We estimate 1-2 hours per block. This is a great way to get to know your block better and to understand some of the issues we will be addressing with re-zoning - like land use, building height, setbacks, garage and parking location and driveway width. Neighbors have already volunteered to coordinate five areas. If you can help in January & February please email the person coordinating your area. Neighbors from south of 45 St. can also volunteer. In 1990, there were a number of volunteers from north fo 45th even though we only surveyed south of 45th. Here are the contacts:
If you would like to work on a digital photo project for this area let me know.
SIDEWALKS - The city will be adding new sidewalk
on W. 40th from Avenue B to Guadalupe and on the north side of E. 45th
west of Duval. Liz Cameron, Sam Waring and I walked the route with
City representatives on November 12. They will have engineering
drawings for us to look at in the near future. Actual construction
will not be complete for around six months.
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