The Arlington Heights fall meeting is coming up next Tuesday, October 17, 7:30pm, at Patrick Henry Elementary School.
We will have Arlington County Fair representatives at the meeting to discuss the possibility of opening the midway part of the fair a day earlier next year (i.e., the Wednesday of fair week, instead of Thursday). This would involve the outdoor area, including the rides, but not affect the usual Thursday opening of the indoor part of the fair. The proposal would open the fair from 5-9pm that night and shuttles would not be running. Denise Marshall Roller, Event Manager for Arlington Cultural Affairs and Arlington County Fair, members of the fair board, and a representative from the police department will be at our meeting to discuss the proposal and hear our concerns. This proposal was brought forward for the 2006 fair but not implemented, largely because fair representatives did not have time to address neighborhood concerns. They are therefore coming to talk about the proposal for the 2007 fair to allow adequate time for discussion and implementation. This issue previously generated a lot of debate over our email list when it came up this year. If you have opinions or concerns about this proposal, this meeting will be your opportunity to express them and have them addressed before this proposal is implemented.
Our next big agenda item will be a presentation from our Neighborhood Conservation Advisory Committee (NCAC) representative, Juliet Hiznay. For those of you not familiar with the NCAC program, it is a county wide program which allows neighborhoods to propose and receive funding for beautification, parks, and infrastructure projects. For many years nearly all of the sidewalks and streetlight additions in our neighborhood have come from this program. The upcoming bond proposal (to be voted on in November) includes very little funding for the NCAC program over the next two years. This has led to an environment of rapid change for the program. The presentation will be on what these changes are and how they could affect current and future projects for our neighborhood.
We should all thank the members of the Arlington Heights Neighborhood Conservation Committee for their tireless efforts during this period. Despite the work required just to stay on top of the potential program changes, they've also been working on updating our neighborhood plan. This plan is required by the program and is meant to guide what projects are most important and appropriate for the neighborhood. Juliet Hiznay, Tony Halloin, Lynn Michaels, Sean McNamara, Ken Poole, and Richard Bullington-McGuire have all been working hard to make sure that Arlington Heights gets the most it can from NCAC.
In other neighborhood news, we just had another great joint yard sale with the Penrose neighborhood. Thanks to Amy Vennett for helping to organize this.
We also heard back from the county parks department that they have completed the installation of soil stabilizer on the blue stone field at TJ. Hopefully, this should ensure that the neighborhood will not have any more problems from dust blowing on dry days. If anyone continues to notice problems please let me know.
Also, thanks to the efforts of Cathy Camp, Dave Reidy, and county parks staff members, we recently had a very successful plant save day on the properties at TJ~Rs southeast corner. These properties were bought by the county a number of years ago to be converted to park space. The existing buildings were being used for a temporary school program, but will soon be deconstructed to fulfill this goal. The homes will not be demolished, but carefully taken apart to recycle and reuse the building materials. Most of the existing trees will remain, but it is likely that many of the small plants would have been damaged by the deconstruction. The plant save was organized so that these plants could be protected through transfer into private gardens by neighbors.
I hope to see you at our coming meeting.
Adam Croswell
President