President Pete Specos remains sidelined but the meeting rolled on anyway with about 15 attending on June 2nd at St. Marks.
Pastor Larry discussed the possibility of “Operation Clean Sweep” to be implemented as a demonstration of support to residents on those blocks most heavily infested with crime and drugs. It would be a clean up and informational event. It will be discussed at the next Frankford Forward meeting on June 13th.
Residents on the 4700 block of Griscom discussed tenants dumping trash in the alley that runs in the back of the block. Reports to 311 may be the only option however it usually falls to other residents to clean up after them.
Construction is going on at 4101-07 Paul Street without permits at a location that was formerly a cabaret until it was closed following a shooting. The Civic will investigate and report it to 311 if the allegation is true.
On the crime front, the trend over the last 5 years has been downward. There were no homicides in May for the second month in a row.
The Civic is no longer the designated RCO (Registered Community Organization) for zoning in Frankford since that function was assigned by the ZBA to the Frankford NAC. The same situation had prevailed with the Northwood Civic until a recent case of an application to convert a duplex to a triplex at Castor Ave. and Dyre Street. That application has been assigned to the Northwood Civic and will be discussed at their June meeting.
Most RCOs believe that these cases should be handled by the RCO closest to the address of the case. It would make more sense to divide Frankford into 3 geographic zones to cover our large area. Formerly an applicant would often have to make a presentation to 2 or even 3 RCOs which is an unreasonable burden.
A suggestion was made to rotate the location of the Civic meeting to give more residents the opportunity to attend. The Civic meeting had to move out of Aria Hospital due to a scheduling conflict in the use of the meeting room and has been meeting at St. Mark’s since the beginning of the year. That issue will be discussed at a future meeting in discussions about increasing community engagement.
A resident of Margaret Street raised the problem of L&I issues and difficulty to getting simple things done with them. One result of the last PSA meeting where the L&I Commissioner attended, is that we now have a direct line of communication to that office in order to work more effectively with them. When specific problems are reported, we can find out what happens and hopefully take corrective action.
The next meeting of the Frankford Civic Association will be held on Thursday, July 7th at 7 PM at St. Mark’s Church at 4442 Frankford Avenue.
