Getting involved with local government

I find it amazing that "town meetings" are not more well attended. It's a rare opportunity for an average person to voice specific concerns and possible remedies in some detail to people who might be able to do something. Since I strongly believe in participatory local government, I made a special effort to attend even if I didn't have a specific agenda.

Before the meeting, I chatted with Mayor Quill. He was aware of at least some Hydrofracking issues. I did inform him that even using pure water to hydrofrack had problems since it would force god-knows what to different parts of the ground elsewhere. Due to that reason, hydrofracking of any sort should be approached with a great deal of caution. For now was not in favor of it. However, he was in favor of developing conventional gas wells around the area. During the meeting, I also learned that the landfill bio-gas experiment had disappointing results. So the city wants to fuel it's power plant with new conventional gas wells. The city was also trying to develop hydro resources but it is slow going due to technical and possibly other reasons that were not explained in detail. The city does use some self-generated electricity for it's own use. The excess capacity is currently sold to our local electric company NYSEG. The former mayor was also at the meeting. He suggested that this inexpensive source of electricity should be used for stimulating specific businesses instead of keeping overall city government costs down.

When it came time to publicly voice specific concerns, I stated that we should make an effort to keep the city walker and biker friendly. We don't want to "fail" at it. Specifically, give some thought to bicycles when planning street repairs. I also put in a plug for keeping sidewalks in repair for electric wheelchair people who I see making their way along some rather busy streets! I was pleased to hear that the city planners are aware of those issues and they will continue to try to keep the streets wide where possible. Although homeowners pay for sidewalk repairs themselves, the city maintains wheel-chair accessible sidewalk corner slabs on each intersection at no cost. Plus they are building additional walkways along the river. One question I had was if some of the parking garage space could be assigned to bicyclists. They currently can only park outside of the parking garage and some people do ride in the rain. I also asked one of the planners if a new bike path to WalMart might be possible. Promoting Walmart isn't the goal. It's to get people on bicycles. My hope is that they might do so if they can easily reach popular destinations such as the bus hub and shopping centers.

Intentional Communities

The Westcott community center in Syracuse was an active place this Saturday. This weekend, the "The Alchemical Nursery" was giving out free bags of bulbs to people who live in the community. As a result, each spring, flowers bloom in front of homes and apartments of those who participate! The center also was distributing recycle bins provided by the county and of course there were organic vegetables for purchase.

Although this was all good, I came to Syracuse for a different reason. The Alchemical Nursery people were also showing a film and hosted a Q&A panel about "intentional communities". These come in more forms and are much more numerous than I was initially aware of. Some intentional communities seem nothing more than weak homeowner associations while others manage member activities to an almost cultish level. Communities tend to change over time and members themselves tend to change too. Some communities deal with aging members simply by limiting membership to younger members while others have gone as far as setting up assisted living arrangements. One thing in common with the successful communities is that there is usually some common theme that binds the members together which is above a purely economic benefit.

The topic is much more complicated than this blog posting can cover. The main message I got from the movie and Q&A panel was that successful intentional communities do exist and no two are the same. The lifestyle can be quite rewarding but a planned community requires a lot of work to maintain. If you want to check out what types of intentional communities are out there, check out http://www.ic.org/