A standing room crowd showed up for a full agenda at tonight’s Frankford Civic meeting.  DA Seth Williams stopped by to discuss his office’s new iniative of assigning his assistant district attorneys to geographic areas.  He feels that this will allow them to better understand and relate to the needs of the community.  Sounds kinda like the police departments PSAs.  Here’s video of Seth talking about Frankford’s issues.

Also at the meeting, Jason Dawkins from counsel-woman Sanchez’s office spoke:

• of her reservations about the obesity tax pending in counsel stating that coming from retail and small business, she was concerned about increased taxes hurt small business.
• He also talked about Smedley school at Bridge and Charles Streets becoming a Renaissance school.  The plan proposes to turn around about 30 schools over the next three years by bringing in new leadership from education management organizations (EMOs), charter schools, or teams of District educators.
• Spoke again of the city’s “Spring Into Your Park” cleanup scheduled for April 10th.  He has to possible projects and are looking for input
• He’s got recycle bins, get into contact with him if you need one
• tomorrow at Sankofa Freedom Academy at 1 pm, they have their rescheduled Black History Month presentation
• THEY ARE PLANNING FOLLOWUP STAKEHOLDERS AND TOWN HALL MEETINGS ABOUT THE HALFWAY/DRUG HOUSE TASK FORCE! Remember the last one?  It was a year ago and apparently there’s been some steady progress.  No firm date has been set.

Carla Sastio came in to talk more about Philadelphia’s Recycling Rewards.

The business owner of 4102 Paul Street, sitting at the corner of Torresdale and Paul St, came in because he’s seeking a zoning for retail sales of aftermarket wheels and tires.  The place is currently zoned commercial but because he wants to be able to take the tires off of cars, it has to be zoned as auto repair.  There were concerns over where he would be storing all the tires after another tire joint burned down two of it’s neighboring houses.  His zoning hearing is March 9th at 2:30 pm.

The owner of 1715 Harrison Street came in looking to get zoning to convert it from a 2 family home to a 3 family home.  He stated he lives in New York and that he’s owned up to 100 properties in Philadelphia at one time.  He admitted to having one outstanding L&I violation for having key locks on every room which usually means its a being used as a boarding house.  He said 5 people were living there now.  The owner left after his presentation.  Later on Pete Specos spoke of taking 3 weeks and 4 letters to get into contact with the owner, and that there were 3 or 4 violations on the property.  He also said all three floors of the house were occupied and that when he went to the location, it was a “pig pen”.

This was in response to my post two weeks ago.  Councilwoman Maria Quinones Sanchez offered this in response.  It is not her full comment.  You can find that under the original post.

For the record,

I committed and helped to bring a new charter school to Frankford, Sankofa. Hundreds of kids are now provided with a quality education, a vacant church school is now fully utilized and jobs have been created.

I committed and have revitalized or am in the process of repairing ALL the recreational facilities, including the million dollar plus, Gambrell center, complete with spray park, the completion of Deni Playground and now our work at Overington Park and the work at the smaller passive parks.

I committed and have been working with the Philadelphia Housing Authority and the Office of Housing and community development to create a “real” housing strategy that provides for affordable homeownership and reuses for the large housing people in Frankford have left and have been converted to multi family rental and boarding homes.

I committed and am working to bringing resources directly to Frankford businesses for improvements and expansions on the corridor.

I can go on for pages and pages. But I will not. I have confidence that the majority of the folks in Frankford, who live the petty infighting everyday, know that I am working hard for them, despite the pettiness of a few.

As for the Halfway houses I inherited from the previous Councilpersons, I have led the first major city effort to address the zoning issues, bringing interdepartmental cooperation unseen in Frankford, EVER. Are we were we need to be, NO. We can do better, YES and I will continue to do so.

There has been an economic downturn and resources are limited. But my record will show that I have made tremendous investments and have leveraged resources unseen in Frankford.  I understand frustration. But unless it is converted to positive work, its negative and unproductive. And more importantly, it doesn’t move Frankford forward.

I can’t say I disagree with any of the above.  I think we would all like to hear more.

Last Wednesday was the first anniversary of  the town hall meeting called by councilperson Maria Quinones-Sanchez.  It was held at St. Joachims on February 3, of 2009 and caused quite a stir at the time.  You may remember that the subject was the recovery house problem in Frankford.  The problem being that there is an overabundance of recovery houses in our neighborhood.   We have been told that this is a difficult problem to solve.  It may be but how do we know.  We haven’t had any official communication from the Councilperson.  We haven’t had any news.

This is not to say that nothing has happened down at City Hall.   What we were promised, is a return to our community of the people involved in that meeting to report on what was going to be done.  We need to know what has been done and what will be done in the future to address this problem. A year is long enough.

Jason Dawkins, of Ms. Sanchez staff, spoke this month at the Frankford Civic about organizing community groups to adopt a pocket park.  John Loftus, in this weeks Northeast Times, gives the issue the full treatment.  Have a look here.  There is a meeting at the second Baptist this Monday to talk about it.