CNA 02.09.09 General Meeting Minutes

This meeting was called to gather ideas from the general assembly on how the neighborhood association can best serve their needs and on how to encourage participation in areas of interest to the general membership. There are 2000 households in Crestview. 21 people were in attendance, 2 of which left after the announcements, and 8 of the remaining are already serving on CNA committees.

Announcements:

Traffic Calming
Steve Dobie, Chairman of the Traffic Calming Committee, gave an update on the status of the traffic calming effort in Crestview. The committee’s plan was submitted to the City in July. They will be meeting with the City in the next few weeks to go over the City’s response to their plan and hear the City’s recommendations. The final plan will be mailed along with a ballot and an invitation to an open house to Crestview residents. 60% of the returned ballots are required to be in favor of the plan in order for it to be implemented. This will likely be our only shot at calming traffic for the next 10-15 years. The committee’s attempted to focus on existing problems in the neighborhood, as those are expected to get worse when the new developments (Crestview Station, Wal-Mart, etc.) are completed.

Bylaws
The proposed bylaws for the CNA will be frozen at midnight on February 9th. The next general meeting there will be a vote on whether or not to implement the new bylaws over the old bylaws. There was some discussion to refresh people’s memories on what the main differences between the two were. It was suggested that the copy of the proposed bylaws on the neighborhood web site be marked up to help people see what the differences are.

Next General Meeting - Texas Gas will be speaking on gas safety.

Candidate Forum
There will be a candidate’s forum for the mayoral and city council candidates hosted by Crestview in April. It will be arranged by a combined North Austin neighborhood coalition.

Open Forum on how to improve the neighborhood association and participation:

Gardening – there is a gardening listserv in Crestview and a seed swap this weekend
Land Use Committee – status: not very active as Heidi’s main concern is with monitoring variance requests and they aren’t very common in Crestview. Looking for representation in the City.

Q: Way to enforce neighborhood compatibility?
A: No.

Issue – Neighborhoods have no power to influence the kinds of developments that are going on.

Crime – Neighborhood Watch?
- Crime Statistics for Crestview?
- Info sharing?
Steve Dobie volunteered to find out how to get the information compiled by the APD (i.e. crime stats) and make it available to the neighborhood.

What is our vision for our neighborhood in the future? Can we target specific areas and projects (e.g. a pedestrian walkway to Crestview Station) and delegate to people interested in spearheading these efforts?

Crestview Station/Cap Metro/pedestrian trail/rails with trails – Water run off and water retention designs are at maximum. When Cap Metro decides to add another line to the rail, they will need to spend lots of tax payer money to force water underground because Trammel Crow has not allocated enough green space along the rail to provide adequate water retention (or a hike and bike trail) for a new line.

Austin Energy - Substation will have 15ft-high fences. The neighborhood may need to take action to save a large burr oak along St. Johns if raising the existing power line will threaten it.

Bulk trash pickup and tree trimmings are poorly timed. Perhaps the CNA could contract with someone to bring in a large dumpster where people could drop off their brush or bulk for a small fee, or we could arrange for stuff to be taken to the dump.

Perhaps we should do more to promote the National Night out, annually in October. Perhaps someone would be willing to advertise and coordinate this.

Social Activities – more ice cream socials or Saturday meetings?

Recommendation to seek suggestions for increasing participation on-line, since many seem unable to attend the monthly general meeting.

One suggestion was made that higher attendance to the general meetings might result if meetings were held less often, say every other month or quarterly.

Participation seems dependent upon the topics of the meeting. Perhaps we should attempt to have guest speakers at every meeting.

Someone suggested speaking to the churches in the neighborhood on providing refreshments to the general meetings as a way to reach out to the neighborhood and perhaps encourage attendance at the general meetings from the church congregations.

A recommendation was made to deliver the newsletters 7-10 days before the general meetings so that people have adequate notice. Many do not receive the newsletters until after the meetings or have forgotten and already made other plans. In order to facilitate this, perhaps the date of the ex comm. meetings could change so that there is time for information from that meeting to make it into the newsletter. Another suggestion was made for current newsletter distributors, or block captains, to gather e-mails from their region to be able to e-mail out electronic copies of the newsletters as a backup.