Cindy Joyner, City Code Department Director, will be a guest speaker at the May meeting. If you have questions or concerns for properties within your neighborhood, bring them to the meeting.

GREAT AMERICAN CLEANUP - Mark May 17th on your calendar and plan to help clean up your neighborhood, your property, or some other property around the city. There are so many areas within the city where volunteers will be working to pick up debris, trimming bushes, racking leaves, and even pulling weeds. You can contact your neighborhood president to see what your neighborhood has scheduled. This is a great time to meet some of your neighbors and join together to beautify your neighborhood. If nothing else promotes your enthusiasm, just try walking your neighborhood with a bag in hand and picking up the trash you find. You will be surprised at how inconsiderate some people are about disposing of their trash. Don’t’ just think about doing this. DO IT!

SUMMER FUN - It is about time for the schools to close for the summer and with gas prices being so high, many vacations will be curtailed or eliminated. That can mean many hours for our young adults to fulfill. Neighborhood associations can help by organizing neighborhood projects for the teenagers to maintain and even improve public properties in your area. It need not be a fulltime job for them, but something to make them feel useful and good about their accomplishments. An evening party in a park or neighborhood center would provide an incentive for the participants and it would not cost your neighborhood that much. Think about some projects and plan with your neighborhood residents now.

NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH (Con’t) - I talked of the two major ingredients of a Neighborhood Watch in the last newsletter, member commitment and law enforcement inclusion. Some of the other important ingredients would be the setting of goals, assigning of tasks to the members, criteria for determining who should be members, communication between members and law enforcement, and the where and when of scheduled regular meetings. I will be discussing these ingredients in this newsletter and some in the near future.

Let me make one fast point, a Neighborhood Watch is much more than neighbors just watching each other’s houses. Members of a Neighborhood Watch should have a sincere caring for all neighbors by wanting to protect them from the criminal elements as they do to protect themselves. As you can see, this goes beyond "I’ll watch your house if you watch mine." If the neighbor is away for the day and a package in delivered to his porch, do you "watch" the package and his house until you go to bed at night? Or do you pick up his package and put it in your house until he returns? Leaving the package in visible view only displays that no one is home and is possible easy pickings for the criminal. The National Sheriff’s Association lists that a burglar only spends about 60 seconds to break into a house or garage. Are you "watching" during that minute or are you getting something out of the refrigerator? This crime may have happened anyway without the unattended package being left on the porch or your eyes not being able to watch the neighbor’s house 24 hours a day, but any crime prevention actions you do take is increasing the risk of being caught or seen and thus reducing the PERCEIVED opportunity to the criminal.

Didn’t talk much about the above ingredients but will in the next newsletter.