I’ve had such a great week working with my new personal assistant Lance Marshall, just back from NYC! He did some great work off Broadway but couldn’t wait to get back to Houston. Many of you know him because of his work with me on charitable events and producing Gracious! Magazine before he left 2 years ago. He’s back to stay and very excited about working with me on a political campaign. He has great ideas about reaching out to all our friends and has been a family friend of mine for years. His creative energy is always refreshing. I’ve been very blessed through out my real estate career to have worked and surrounded myself with great creative minds who don’t shy away from hard work. It’s a recipe for certain success.
Get your thinking caps on (wow, that phrase is a blast from the past. I wonder if teachers still say that to kids.) According to the Houston Chronicle the City of Houston has approximately 5.6 Million Cubic Yards of Tree Waste. The City Of Houston has announced that they would like to “Recycle Ike.” What a fantastic idea! The top three ideas for what to do with the Tree and Leaf Debris will win cash prizes.
The awards will be:
Email RecycleIke@CityofHouston.net or visit their website www.recycleike.com for more information. This is the kind of thing I love. I cannot wait to see what solutions creative people come up with. The deadline to sign up to participate is October 31. The the site then gives you all the rules for submitting your plan after you’ve registered to participate. Should be intriguing.
I thought it would be fun to get out with a crowd and watch the debate last evening. I ran by two locations I had been invited to attend. First was the Harris County Democrats office at 201 Broadway in the East End. Obama supporters were pumped and were starting the evening early with live music! I had come to see “La Princesita De Tejas” who is a beautiful child star but had to leave before she took over the stage from “Gino and the 5 Smooth Stones.” They were fantastic and did everything from Chicago to country. Next we scooted back to the Heights to Star Pizza where Kevin Hoffman did a great job hosting a debate watching party for Heights neighbors. There were lots of hoops, hollers and boos from the crowd and it was definitely more exciting than watching at home, even though it was hard to hear at times. And the food and service were much better;-) I ducked out early to finish watching at home and hear the commentary afterwards, at least for as long I could tolerate the bickering between the commentators.
I’m just back from a week and a half in Italy to celebrate my husband Bob’s 60th birthday with our friends Ashton Martini and Javier Gautier. We had a wonderful time and I enjoyed the trip knowing it may be my last long trip away for quite a awhile. It was a whirlwind trip visiting Rome, Naples, Florence and Venice in what really amounted to eight days. As on so many of my vacations, I was very interested to see what works in other cities. In Naples the traffic was unbelievable. It was the craziest thing you’ve ever seen. Thank goodness poor Javier was driving. In Venice of course, I thoroughly enjoyed a city with no cars at all. How refreshing! I think we’re all interested in a more pedestrian friendly environment these days. It’s interesting to me how pedestrian shopping areas can be so appealing. I was also pleased to see gas had dropped below $3 per gallon while I was away.
After almost three years of hard work and the involvement of several people before me, we have enough support in the center part of the Houston Heights from I10 to 20th and Yale to Studewood, to start our constable program. We will start with only 1 constable patrolling eight hours per evening, five days a week but it is a start. I’m hoping as many others are, that this will only be the beginning and that if it is a successful program, more supporters (subscribers) will come forward. At only $255 per year per household or business, we’ve had only a few residents openly against the program yet due to having no comprehensive vehicle for organizing the sign up, it’s been tougher than anyone anticipated. The Houston Heights Association only reaches HHA members and it is not a mandatory association. The participation that we have had has been largely due to neighbor to neighbor word of mouth. Please note, our patrols will be constables, not sheriff’s deputies. Commissioners court recently suspended new contracts for deputy patrols until they look further into complaints that affluent neighborhoods in the county (not in the city) were getting better law enforcement than less wealthy neighborhoods. The constable program is totally different in that constables really don’t patrol our neighborhood at all unless contracted to do so. It makes it a little easier for citizens to keep up with I think. Constables carry out the work of the county courts (although I did get a traffic ticket from one once.) Councilman Garcia voiced concern in a meeting earlier this year at a Heights Association meeting, that the downside to a constable program is that data may be lost that would be useful to HPD if good reporting practices are not employed. I, and many others, think it is worth our effort to make sure this obstacle is overcome and that neighborhood data on crimes and suspects is transmitted systematically to HPD so it can be of use to them in their continuing efforts to fight crime in our neighborhoods and across Houston. I understand from neighborhood meetings that HPD has made many recent improvements in compiling data and getting it out to HPD patrols in a format that can help them detect trends and patterns in criminal activity much more efficiently than in the past. I plan to make every effort to assure there is no break down in this transfer of information because of the new constable program. I am told could the program could begin in the Houston Heights as early as January 1, 2009. Good job everyone but we still have work to do.
