Reports -
Monthly GHNA Board Meeting Minutes
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President’s Report Roger Cook
Q3 2009: We held our annual meeting and picnic in August and elected board members. Welcome to Bert Guerro as a new member of the Board. We were pleased that Councilor Trudy Jones could attend the meeting and she gave us a short update on city activities and answered questions from the audience. I had a goal when I became president of achieving over 200 neighbors on our email list and we are now over 250. This allows us to quickly get information out to residents of Glenwood Hills. We got the city to put chains across the dirt road just north of Smith's next to Tramway as people driving 4-wheel drive vehicles on this utility access road were becoming a nuisance. We continue to focus on crime in our neighborhood and are trying to recruit more people to become block captains. We continue to slowly add a few business' who want to advertise on our website.
Oct. 2009
Our annual report to the City of Albuquerque was submitted and accepted. The annual neigborhood garage sale seemed to have been well utilzed by the residents so we will plan to do that again next yesr.
Feb. 2009: I was able to get 250 of the city calendars. These are being handed out to the block captains to hand out to folks in their blocks. This is a good way to reconnect with everyone and also to encourage everyone in the neighborhood to join our GHNA email distribution. I had good luck getting people to sign up with a personal request to my immediate neighbors. It's good to see we are making some progress on getting more sign-ups.
Jan. 2009: I met with Dave Bentley and Roger Abbott and came up with a budget for 2009. We have included in the estimate the additional cost of dues (now $50) and the extra cost of patrols due to the city raising their prices. All of the extra dues will go into patrols. The other parts of our budget will remain flat.
Oct 2008: Our anual report to the City of Albuquerque was submitted. We also submitted our by-laws changes from the annual meeting.
Goals for my presidency: I have two areas I would like to see some real progress on:
1. Now that we have a working website, I would like to see a high % of the GHNA members sign up for email communication so this can be our primary communication method. It is quick, easy and cheap relative to any other method. My goal for this year is to get to at least 50% of members signed up. Longer term I would hope this could get to 75% or higher. We appear to be at around 20% currently. I would also like to continue improving the usefulness of the website to the residents and am open to inputs on what would make the website more useful.
2. Neighborhood security is my second area of focus. Our's is one of the safest neighborhoods in Albuquerque and I would like to keep it that way. One thing we can do to improve is to expand our block captain program by getting more of our neighborhood covered by block captains. Secondly, I would like to see the block captains get their areas to participate in the official Neighborhood Watch training by APD. This would allow us to have Neighborhood Watch signs put up in those areas that have been trained - a good deterrant to criminals.
Block Captain
July 2009: We now have 8 block captains covering over 150 houses in the Glenwood Hills Neighborhood Association. We have added a more accurate map of all properties covered by our homeowner's association.
District 8 Coalition of Neighborhoods Roger Cook
Year-to-date 2008: One topic of major interest to GHNA is the ongoing work to develop a D8 DOZ (Design Overlay Zone) document. The GWNA had a committee that read through the proposed document and made inputs (approved by the board) to the committee. Since a new counselor was elected to our district, Trudy Jones, she has changed to process to include more commercial property owners since the DOZ is primarily document defining regulations for commercial properties. This project is still in progress. State Representative Jimmy Hall was able to allocate money to repave the Tramway biking and hiking trail.
August 2009
There was a D8 Coalition of Neighborhoods meeting on July 24. Counselor Jones could not attend the meeting so Elizabeth Shields gave an update for her. She said the counselor's office would like inputs an citizens in D8 concerning their support or lock of support on the following 3 topics that the counsel is currently considering: Form Based Code; a downtown Event Center; Trolley car along Central from Nob Hill to downtown. The D8 DOZ rework is still in process - it may be completed by Sept. Greg Payne, City Transportation Director, gave a presentation on the Albuquerque public bus system. They are seeing a large uptick in ridership lately due to high gas prices but there has actually been a pretty steady growth since 2005 (up 53% since 2005). The city has been upgrading it's fleet and now runs entirely on alternative energy sources. The bus service is heavily subsidized. The D8 Coalition member to the 21st Century TF (i.e. Trolley) gave a very negative report on the TF. In his mind, the data that was presented did not support a trolley on Central. He was not at all convinced this was a proper use of tax payer money yet the city appears to want to push ahead with this. The Coalition voted to side with him and will take an official stand against the trolley.
Garden Club
There will be six meetings in 2009.
Landscaping Committee
June 2009: This is the busy time of the year. Many areas are being sprayed to try and keep weeds from growing up in the medians. Nick checked with the city, they are on a tight budget and say the chances of getting some landscaping coming into the neighborhood on Manitoba is close to zero. the city took out the dead yucca in the median on Montgomery but did not replace it. Overgrowth along Montgomery needs to be delt with - Carol is organixing.
Year-to-date 2008:
landscaping activities don't really get started good until spring arrives. This year there has been a lot of focus to clean up the overgrowth along Montgomery Street. There is ongoing activity to keep the landscaped public median areas looking good. They have also been trying to find a way to improve the landscaping at the Manitoba entrance to our neighborhood. Volunteers are needed to help keep the weeds down.
Neighborhood Patrol/Security/Crime Marc LaChey
Year-to-date 2008: The neighborhood patrol keeps a very busy schedule and this year is no exception. Marc usually has enough volunteers to patrol on weekend evenings but he is always in need of more help. Two new radios were purchased for the patrol. There have been at least four burglaries in the neighborhood this year – all in the daytime. We need everyone in the neighborhood watching out for unusual people or activity and to notify the police when they see something suspicious.
Web Site Roger Abbott
August 2008: July was a milestone month for the Web Committee. We negotiated an agreement with Greg Lobberegt, a broker for Keller Williams Reality, to sponsor the Reality News page. We went public with a mailing to all GHNA property owners on July 19, 2008 explaining the GHNA Web site, including our “glenwoodhills group” email system. We completed the web development agreement with Annemarie and Mark. The final cost for the web site development was $889.73. For comparison, a job like this with any other web desiger would have totaled anywhere from $2480 to $3100. Thanks goes to Steve Ciepiela for negotiating this agreement. We have now taken control of the web account and management of the web site. We also developed a “Web Site Operating Procedures".
July 2008: Roger reported that the new GHNA website went "live" on July 1, 2008.
Welcome Committee
June 2009: 8 hospitality packets were handed out this past month – all to families living at The Lofts. Carole tried to reach other families there but has gotten not response.
Year-to-date 2008: Carole has had a few vacancies but currently has eight volunteers who each are responsible for certain parts of the neighborhood. They have solicited ‘freebies’ from many local stores for the welcome gift basket and have many new items for this year. Usually around 10 gift baskets are given out each month. Anyone who is aware of new people moving into the neighborhood should contact Carole to let her know.
