We had our chance to take over

So I stopped by the Multnomah Neighborhood Association meeting on Tuesday night. Small turnout - in fact I suppose I was the only "member of the public" there. We had two members of the press, and the other three folks were the officers. I've "outed" myself to Zach, the outgoing chairman (term limits, who knew?), but to everyone else I was just some guy who needed to get out of the house.

Topics covered included a tree-preservation plan draft that we're not allowed to Cite or Distribute, the usual land use issues, including discussion of a new stoplight at 30th and Barbur which might not make much sense now, but will be useful when the large housing project at Headwaters is complete. However - a stoplight at that location is going to make getting into and out of that Chevron station a major pain in the backside. A crosswalk will be very helpful for people trying to get to the burned out "lingerie modeling" place on the south side of Barbur. Maybe with a traffic signal we can attract a real business onto that corner.

The remainder of the meeting was devoted to discussing the last agenda item, which was to be nomination and election of officers. After some bemused objections by Don (editor of the Post), we put up a motion to delay the nominations and elections until there were more people at the meeting than would be filling the actual offices. And that's only 'cause I didn't bite on the open Secretary position. As I said in the subject line - we missed our chance to take over.

However - there was a fortunate bit of synchronicity by way of one of the papers - I can't remember if it was the SWNI paper or The Connection - turns out a member of another nieghborhood association had battled low turnout by sending postcards with info about the next meeting - had a 10% response rate! We discussed doing the same, since SWNI pays for the printing. We then put forth a motion (well, I did actually - my fist motion!) to spend a few bucks to insert 1000 of these into next month's issue of the Post.

The plan is that we then will have enough people to have a nomination and election that will not invite scrutiny by the UN monitors, etc. Plus we'll have Sam Adams. No, unfortunately not the Boston Lager, but instead the high-profile City Commissioner.

All-in-all it's good be be getting involved in the neighborhood. I must admit I'm tempted to "run" for office, but I think I'm not ready for that kind of committment. See you next month! Second tuesday at 7PM.