Kent Community Liaison On-Line...

The Kent State University Graduate Assistant, Neal Stefanko, who was hired to serve as the Kent community’s first neighborhood liaison has been a busy guy.  This Fall Neal walked his beat — those neighborhoods that are predominantly student rentals — to introduce himself, to listen and to get a lay of the land. 

Bridging the town gown gap is not an easy task, but by all accounts Neal has navigated these waters very well.  And although we were realistic in our expectations for what he could accomplish in his first 6 months, I still think he’s done a great job at communicating with the neighbors and I think it’s working. 

With a couple of long warm stretches late into Fall there were plenty of late night outdoor festivities in the neighborhoods that could have turned ugly but at the end of the night the revelers went home on their own usually without a police escort — which is always a good thing for everyone involved. 

I can’t say that Neal is the reason we had a safe and civil Fall but I think it’s fair to say that his personal touch has helped take some of the edge off of the town gown relations. 

Neal let me know that he’s uploaded information for folks to access and download that he thinks offer the kind of sound advice that students and permanent residents need to know.  Here’s the welcome message that Neal posted on his site as part of his first neighborhood newsletter called the Kent Communicator:

Welcome to “The Kent Communicator!”

My name is Neal Stefanko and I am the University-Community Liaison and I would like to welcome you to the new “The Kent Communicator.” First, let me explain my position. I am a vital communication tool that will be used between Kent State University and The City of Kent Community. One way I am working to obtaining communication has been to walk through the community going door to door talking to residents and students. Throughout this process I am pleased to say I am enjoying meeting everyone and look forward to meeting those residents and students that I have not yet met. The feedback I am receiving will help in my position continue to make informed communications and educate where needed to obtain a well balanced approach to the University and Community residing in harmony.

Second, I want to welcome everyone to “The Kent Communicator”. This newsletter will be of great value to students and residents alike. Every article will be vital information for students and residents with emphasis on important issues that are needed to help educate and inform students and residents alike. There will be a blend of information streaming from University and Community sources. As this newsletter continues to grow I would encourage anyone and everyone to submit ideas or articles to my email. This may include pictures and graphs or any other information that would be considered vital for everyone from students to community to read about.

In closing, I welcome your feedback at anytime. Feel free to contact me at UniversityCommunityLiaison@kent.edu or 330-672-2480. I cannot wait to hear many more good stories about our amazing student body as well as the opportunity to answer your questions.

Sincerely

Neal A. Stefanko
University-Community Liaison

You can read the entire newsletter by clicking here.  (I particularly like his column on How to Get Caught By the Police — good message delivered with a sense of humor.)

2009 Community Development Block Grant Report...

• City identified 9 properties for demolition.
• 6 of the 9 properties have been cleared by the courts for demolition and 5 of them are expected to be demolished by December.  Remaining 3 properties still awaiting court action.
• City entered into contract with developer for the construction of 3 new residential structures.  Construction expected to begin in early spring 2011. 

Here’s the CAPER Executive Summary:

2009 Code Compliance Report...

One of Kent’s top strategic priorities is sustaining great neighborhoods in our community.  A lot of our focus over the last couple of years has been jobs, jobs, jobs — which makes sense in this tough economy — but at the end of the day we still subscribe to the idea that we work to live, not live to work, so having a great place to live is vital to our quality of life and the City has to a role to play in that.

Actually we play a lot of different roles in protecting, preserving and creating great neighborhoods but one of the most direct is our City Code Enforcement Program.  Just like the laws that govern behavior, Code Enforcement is that social contract that we agree to when we choose to live in our community.  We, as dutiful citizens, have voted in regulations that reflect our values and expectations for how we want life to be in our neighborhoods, e.g., trash in containers, yards mowed, respectful noise levels, safe houses, etc.  And the City’s Code Enforcement Officer is responsible for holding us all accountable to our own community standards.  

Here’s a snapshot for how we did in 2009:

Concrete Season...

If you drive anywhere around Kent these days you know that summer is the high water mark for construction activity.  Pile drivers, jack hammers, mixers, excavators and backhoes are in their glory right now.  If you could get close enough you’d see that they are sporting couplers made by Kent’s very own ACS Industries on Mogadore Road, the coupler industry leader (my shameless plug for a Kent based business). 

There’s definitely a heightened sense of urgency for construction after the passing of the summer solstice in these northern latitudes as the window of the season is narrowing with each passing day.  With that in mind, the City is busy with its annual concrete repair and replacement program.  The concrete work is an example of routine maintenance that like clockwork is performed year-in and year-out.  It’s like the painting of an aircraft carrier; by the time you finish one coat, it’s time to turn around and start all over again — the same holds true for city sidewalks. 

In order to keep up with the damage that mother nature, errant vehicles, and everything else inflicts upon our favorite slabs of concrete, the City sets aside $100,000 or so a year and hires a contractor to work on those areas that are experiencing the worst spalling, chipping, cracking and differential settlement. 

Besides keeping the city looking good and making it easy for moms and dads to roll their strollers around their neighborhoods, it’s also about keeping the public safe from what we refer to as slips, trips and falls that result from bad sidewalks.  It turns out that our favorite majestic trees are public enemy number for our favorite sidewalks; the tree roots lift, push, crack and bully sidewalks all over town.  Since we love them both, we have to continually work on repairing the root damage which is probably close to 80% of the concrete work that we perform each year. 

Street Name                         Location
Cuyahoga Street -  Between Major’s Lane and N. Mantua Street
Gale Drive – Cul-de-Sac to North end of Bridge on Sunrise Blvd.
Garth Drive – Silver Meadows Blvd. to East end of street.
Kevin Drive
Longmere Drive – Middlebury Rd to Haymaker Parkway.
Oak Street, West – Franklin Ave. to S. Water Street
Pleasant Avenue – N. Mantua Street to East end of street
-Individual Locations (Wilson, Crain, Doramor, River) 

In addition, if funding is available we hope to add the following to this year’s program:
-Additional sidewalk work on Sunrise Boulevard
-Additional sidewalk work on Crain Avenue

There may be minor traffic delays on certain streets during the repair work but those delays should be less than 5 or 10 minutes. The pavement replacement on Kevin Drive will reduce the two lane road down to one lane for a period of two to three weeks.  The contractor has been asked to maintain two way traffic on Kevin Drive through the use of appropriate signs but if necessary, Kevin Drive may need to be shut down at some point. If this occurs, the residents will be notified in advance of the closing and emergency vehicles will always have priority access through any work zone even if the road has been temporarily shut down.   

Construction Traffic Challenges...

Receiving Federal Stimulus dollars to fix local problems is great — except if you happen to live around the construction site during construction – which is what the residents on Carthage Street have been dealing with for a couple of months now and they’re understandably frustrated with the disruption to their neighborhood.  Last night (Monday, August 2) a couple of City Council members, along with City staff and I met with a room full of Carthage Street residents to get a first hand account of what the construction traffic was doing to life on their street and we discussed a range of ideas to help mitigate the most troubling safety issues.  

When you’re dealing with a project as big as the Crain Avenue/Fairchild Avenue Bridge replacement that has so much traffic trying to squeeze it’s way north, south and east and west — traffic troubles are going to rear their ugly head.  Most of us can avoid the area and we do our best to accept the extra 5 to 10 minute traffic delay that occurs as we plow our way through the construction but imagine if you lived in the midst of all this construction activity and didn’t really have a choice but to cope with the impacts 24-7.  That’s the reality of residents on Carthage.

I think everyone in the meeting understood that in the long run the new bridge and realigned roads will have a positive impact on their neighborhood but right now that’s not helping much.  The trouble is there’s just not many ways to get from SR 43 to Fairchild Avenue and points west, and commuters being an industrious bunch are always looking for the shortest distance between two points which is how some of them have found themselves on Carthage Street. 

Carthage is not the detour route but impatient drivers in search of a shortcut have tried to make it a detour route.  Carthage was purposely not selected as a detour route because as a small residential street it’s not set up to handle large traffic volumes so the irony is that those folks that think they’ve found a shortcut quickly discover that it’s not that short nor does it cut time off their commute.  All it does is back up cars on an otherwise nice and quiet residential street and generally make life miserable for the families that live on Carthage. 

The goal of the meeting was to better understand the dynamics of what was happening on Carthage.  We had police representatives there, engineering staff there, and public service staff in attendance to listen and explain what might or might not work.  The staff walked away with a to do list that is hopefully going to yield some relief for the residents’ stress and in turn I think the residents better understand how much longer they will likely have to endure the traffic congestion. 

If there’s any good news its that the engineers anticipate the current road closures to be lifted by November which should restore some more normal traffic patterns.  In the meantime the staff will be looking at measures that discourage cut-thru traffic on Carthage. 

On behalf of all the residents that call Carthage Street home, be a good neighbor, and keep their street safe by sticking to the detour route. 

City of Kent CDBG 5 Year Plan...

Some of my best friends in city government have been planners, but despite that, I’ve always felt that as a group city planners were a hazard to themselves.  Not because they’re bad people but because they’ve built a world of acronyms that only they can understand so the average Joe and Jane can’t relate — and more importantly appreciate — all the good things that the planners do.  Try sitting through most planning meetings and tell me I’m wrong.  Not likely. 

Which is too bad because city planners do a lot of great work that is very meaningful in our community but they’re cursed with aconymitus.  The truth is it’s not really their fault — they’re just using the language of the state and federal agencies that send money their way.  Who’s going to argue with the hand that feeds you so the fed-speak gets passed from generation to generation until only those inside can understand it.  For most of us it’s like Latin, we can see the relevance but we can’t speak it. 

The good news is that the City has a great translator in Bridget Susel.  She can drop acronym-bombs with the best of them but she is also well versed in language of non-planners and she is one of the best planners that I’ve had a chance to work with when it comes to interpreting fed-speak into what we speak.  She’s just completed the 5 Year Plan update for the City’s CDBG programs (that’s Community Development Block Grant for you and me) and she and I thought we’d share a few pieces of it for those that have wondered what all that CDBG stuff was about. 

The City of Kent doesn’t actually get a lot of Federal CDBG funds — around $325,000 a year — so it doesn’t go that far, but Bridget works hard to make sure whatever we get has a real impact in the areas of low income housing assistance which is the heart and soul of CDBG. 

For the true adventurer’s you can download the full document here:  2010-2014 CDBG Strategic Plan

But for novice, I’d recommend a quick read of the executive summary (below):

City Council Approves Neighborhood Liaison Experim...

In Council’s Committee session last week they voted to approve an experiment with a new Neighborhood Liaison position that will be jointly funded as a City-University neighborhood partnership.  This item will now go for a final vote in the Regular Council meeting next week (Jan 20th).  If you’d like to see the details of the job description, position expectations, salary, etc., click here.

The idea of Neighborhood Liaison was a part of a series of initiatives that the City staff researched and reported back to City Council on that were intended to make sure Kent’s neighborhoods remained strong as they are considered an extremely important part of the community.  We titled these efforts the Neighborhood Enrichment Program and you can read more about the program components in an earlier blog post (dated March 2, 2007) or check out the staff proposal on Neighborhood Enrichment.  

Here’s also a short list of other blog posts that provided updates on the various elements of the Neighborhood Enrichment program:

April 9, 2009
April 8, 2009
July 24, 2007
June 12, 2007
June 2, 2007

Protecting and restoring the quality of life in Kent neighborhoods is a theme that has emerged year after year on citizen surveys and on the list of City Council’s strategic goals.   Generally speaking here’s what the goals of strong neighborhoods aims to achieve:

Objectives: 

·   Strengthen and build effective partnerships with the City’s diverse community; celebrate and capitalize on Kent’s diversity.

·   Provide services and programs for a multi-cultural audience.

·   Increase awareness, participation and compliance with neighborhood code issues.

·   Promote rehabilitation and sustainable infill development.

·   Develop programs that encourage neighborhood based initiatives and planning. 

·   Partner with Kent State University to revitalize campus border neighborhoods.

·   Seek programs that instill a sense of neighborhood pride and enhance neighborhood identity.

·   Strive to improve the rate of home ownership in Kent.

____________________________________________________________________________________________
 

And here’s how these objectives translated into real program efforts in the last two years:

• Upgraded Code Officer to full time position
• New Exterior Maintenance Code
• New City Tool Loan Program
• Code Compliance Annual Report
• New Citywide Trash Management Service
• New Civil Citation System for Code Violations
• 9 Public Meetings to Update the Zoning Code
• New Neighborhood Liason Position
• New Community Policing Initiative and Grant

_____________________________________________________________________________

Neighborhoods are more than wooden buildings lined up in row along the public right of way; they are that unique public space that is created from the mix of people that call a neighborhood home.  Great neighborhoods are what make life in a small town university City such an attractive place for people of all ages and interests; they really are one of our best assets.   The challenge is to make sure we look after our neighborhoods and give them the TLC that is required to keep them meaningful and relevant for each generation that chooses to call Kent home.   That, in a nutshell, is what the Neighborhood Liaison position is all about.

Neighborhoods Matter and Code Enforcement Counts...

Harkening back to my days as a student in political philosophy I was relieved that guys like Locke and Rousseau offered a reasonable alternative to Hobbes’ view of the world that he presented in his classic work Leviathan.  Hobbes’ argued that the natural state of humanity is a war of one against everyone, and thus our life is solitary, poor, brutish and short.  Taking that perspective to it’s conclusion meant that only an absolute despot could control the mutually destructive urges of mankind.

There’s no question that we all have some self destructive tendencies but call me an optimist — I think Hobbes was more drama king than philosopher king on this one.   That is one dark and depressing lens to view the world through.  Even if he turns out to be right I always felt like asking then what’s the point then? 

I’m still a John Locke, Thomas Paine Rights of Man sort of guy at heart and I took solace from Rousseu’s view that maybe we are a brutish lot but we brutes can still agree to set aside certain of our brutish tendencies for the sake of community.  Signing up for a clan or tribe meant being willing to sacrifice some of our more inappropriate behaviors in the name of public good — that’s the social contract that comes with belonging to something bigger than just ourselves. 

Locke was banking on human reason and tolerance to rule the day and thanks to Thomas Jefferson and our fearless Founding Fathers we’ve been cashing checks at that bank ever since under the banner of democracy.  It ain’t always perfect but it’s far better than the alternatives. 

The point of this stroll down my academic memory lane was merely to say that while Code Enforcement isn’t always the most popular of City activities it is deeply rooted in the concept of what it means to live in a City — we’re willing to concede certain rights, i.e., to leave trash wherever we want and to make as much noise as our inner child wants, for the sake of a public good. 

The late Councilman Bill Schultz had a knack for artfully reminding folks that we the people knew what we were getting into when we signed up to be a resident of a City — we accepted the boundaries that we asked our government to uphold on our behalf in the name of the community we call Kent.  He acknowledged that Kent was founded on higher expectations for civility and he would offer his sage advice in a friendly and sincere way, saying that if you don’t like boundaries you should live in the county or a township not in the City. 

That legacy carries on today in the form of Kent’s public safety and code enforcement functions.  They aren’t always the most popular things we do but they are among the most important.  With that in mind we just completed our annual review of code enforcement activities for last year.  We look at where we have had our most common violations and what patterns have emerged so that we can continually adjust to dynamic community needs. 

Here’s the latest summary of Kent’s Code Enforcement Activities:  (download a copy)

West River Neighborhood Success Story...

The West River Neighborhood Revitalization project is closing out its 18^th year.  With almost 2 decades of pushing and pulling the neighborhood forward there’s a lot to be proud of – new jobs, significant private investment, great new businesses and a traffic corridor that is increasingly pleasant to drive through.  There’s still work to be done, and the Fairchild Avenue bridge has a big part to play in that, but it seemed that the West River neighborhood had a story that needed to be told so that the lessons learned could be shared as the City wrestles with economic development challenges in other parts of the Kent community.

Here’s the staff report — (click here to download a pdf version)

City / R&R Trash Bags on Sale at Giant Eagle...