April Message

Our top priority of the year is public safety, not surprisingly. The City Council voted 8-0 to perform the first outside management review in 18 years of the police department. Our hope is that we can learn from an outside perspective some lessons that the best departments are using to drive crime rates down. This is not a criticism of our police department, but learning from others is always a good practice. Good neighborhoods start with public safety. Then, we get to move on to “quality of life” issues.

Thank you for Council members Rick Kriseman, Jamie Bennett and Jeff Danner for being strong advocates of this outside review. Thank you to all City Council members for voting for the review. The areas to be looked are being discussed by the City Council members at this time. We will get an update at the CONA meeting as the scope and time table. We hope this will come directly from a council member.

The City voted last summer to seek to become a “green city”. This is a comprehensive series of changes in city policies that reduce air and water pollution and use energy of all kinds more efficiently. The City has completed a benchmark survey of 118 current policies. Soon, the Mayor and the City Council will begin changing policies to move us towards a Green City. We will get an update at the April meeting.

Two weeks ago, I visited the Florida House in Sarasota with two members of City Council, Jeff Danner and Jamie Bennett, and Mike Connors, who is the lead staff person appointed by the Mayor to implement the Green Cities program. The Florida House is a demonstration house showing energy efficiently, hurricane protection, water conversation indoors and outdoors, locally produced building products, healthier home materials and new building materials. There were dozens of examples of things that could benefit the City and its citizens if they were widely adapted. If you get a chance to visit, you will come away with many ideas for your life. We will have many of these items at the Pinellas Living Green Expo in June at the Coliseum.

Finally, everyone is welcome to attend the CONA meetings. You do not have to be your neighborhood’s representative.

Karl Nurse
President
Council of Neighborhood Associations