The Mayor and City Manager recently toured Newtowne Drive to highlight maintenance items that the City could fix to improve the lives of residents.
At a talk in the City on October 10, author Charles Marohn of “Strong Towns” talked about the need to make small changes to improve the lives of residents where possible. Even before his talk, the City began to look at ways to clean up some of our most vulnerable neighborhoods. For example, in September, members of the Mayor’s staff participated in Neat Streets in Eastport. At another cleanup, volunteers and city staff worked to clean up Clay Street.
More recently, a crew including Mayor Gavin Buckley, City Manager Teresa Sutherland, Alderwomen Rhonda Pindell Charles and Sheila Finlayson worked on a cleanup project along Newtowne Drive.
At that event, the City created a punch list of repairs that the City could tackle. In all, there were 26 items on the list. They included things like re-striping the crosswalk, removing metal and wooden sign posts that no longer had signs, removing trash in the street and along the sidewalks, repairing a section of sidewalk that was a tripping hazard, painting the curbs and addressing maintenance issues at the bus stand.
Of the 26 items on the list, 16 were able to be addressed almost immediately by our City of Annapolis Department of Public Works. Other items on the punch list require a partnership with other vendors, like BGE, to repair broken lights and lampposts.
The City will continue working for everyone on these quality-of-life issues. They encourage volunteers from the community to come out and help. As discovered with the Neat Streets project, it can sometimes take as little as one hour with 20 or 30 people to make a tremendous difference in a city block.
