NAC 6 Minutes 12/6/04

PRESENT: Katherine Jones, Trish Cunningham, Paul Dienes, Sara McGill, Dan Beins, Lisa and Randy Grove

We will try to get all of the minutes missing from the last year done in time for review at the next meeting. Paul will let Katherine know which minutes he will prepare. We will collectively write a report about the meeting with Colonel Ball on 10/18/04. Sara will help with minutes from the meeting 11/1/04, that none of us attended. There were about 4-5 neighbors, and the Head of Security. They discussed several options: students are parking on the streets because the staff are still parked in the on campus parking. Might consider pushing classes back a half-hour or an hour, so staff leaves before the students arrive. Issuing free parking passes to students already, so that is not working. We might ask them to enforce on campus parking, not merely encourage it. Parking by residential permit was also suggested. We may bring Hood back in January to discuss making the class schedule change, to make sure that happens for the next scheduled round of classes.

We will also send an apology letter for not being at the meeting. Katherine will prepare the letter for discussion.

We discussed formalizing our structure. Paul and Trish volunteered, without objection, to be co-chairs for the next several meetings, at least until they decide they cannot do that any longer. Katherine will take and prepare minutes of the meetings.

Discussion of Wilson Place Traffic Calming: We received a letter 11/4/04 from Engineering about the issue. We will post the letter on the website for neighbors to see. Various members reported incidents relating to the traffic problem. One witnessed a school bus driver with kids on the bus talking on a cell phone while driving down Wilson. She takes the bus number down and reports to the school board. We discussed reducing the speed limit to 15 mph. Trish asked about getting the police to adopt a zero tolerance policy for speeding, but we do have a problem getting enough officers assigned to the area to enforce the speed limits, given the other more pressing duties they have, especially during the peak hours for speeding in the neighborhood. We discussed getting the neighbors to pool money to pay for speed bumps. They are testing speed bumps on 12^th and 14^th streets in Frederick.

Traffic calming is clearly becoming a citywide problem of concern to residents. We discussed suggesting to the city to let us test our stop sign idea the way that the 12^th and 14^th streets are testing speed bumps. Also to test a speed enforcement period and see what the differences would be before and after the stop sign installment might be.

We also discussed writing a letter from our NAC to the Mayor and Board of Aldermen about the traffic calming issue.

The Land Management Ordinance will be discussed at a meeting 12/15/04 at 7:00 p.m. Trish will attend this meeting and report back.

Discussed sending a mailing about the Emergency Preparedness survey we got from the city in order to help get our NAC fully reported an organized for emergencies. Or we might walk the survey to neighbors we know may need to be surveyed.

One member reported about a fight that occurred in front of their house. 2 cars of teens were fighting, took police 15 - 20 minutes to arrive to deal with the fight.