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HWNA NEWS
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November 2001
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Slate of Candidates
Do you have neighborhood news to contribute? Contact editor, Shelley Labrado by phone: 913 342-4071 or email: letsdanceamerica@yahoo.com
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Annual ElectionsTuesday, November 6,
2001
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Slate of Officers Almost Complete for 2002We will elect a new Board of Directors at our November meeting, and several people have offered their services to the organization. The slate is as follows:
Past President - Wayne Walden** Members-at-Large Gayle Copeland **As noted in our last newsletter, the process for elections will be a little bit different this year. Circumstances have prevented our last two president-elects from serving out their terms. Therefore, this year we will elect a past-president to serve a one-year term and a president to serve a two-year term, one year as president and one year as past-president. You may also note that there is a blank spot in the slot for president-elect. This position is a three-year commitment and is essential to the long-term stability of the association. The purpose of having the president-elect serve a three-year term is to allow the person to become familiar with the workings of the neighborhood association before becoming president. The president remains on the board after his or her year at the helm to help the new officers learn the ropes. The process has worked well for us, but we need someone to run for president-elect this year. We are fortunate to have many, many talented people living in our neighborhood; we need one of you to volunteer for this position and to keep our association strong. Your neighborhood association is as strong as you make it, and choosing our new officers is an important part of the process. Make sure to attend the November meeting to elect our new officers. By the way, nominations for all positions will be accepted from the floor. It’s not too late for you to file as a candidate! And if this year isn’t possible for you, we will be looking for board members next year and the year after that and the year after that. Please consider serving as one of these officers either now or sometime in the future. | |
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New Membersby Donald Caswell The September meeting, at which we were able to discuss the traffic-calming devices with UG representatives, attracted many area residents who had never attended a Westheight Neighborhood Association meeting before. They came to discuss the traffic-calming devices because those devices directly affect their daily lives. Although these people live on the periphery of the Westheight neighborhood, they had not been included in our publicity for earlier meetings on traffic. Their presence at our meeting created a situation I don’t remember seeing before: disagreement. These people disagreed both with the placement of the traffic-calming devices and with the process that put them in place. HWNA is a rare association, one in which there is rarely any disagreement. Except for our candidate forums, our meetings have no conflict. Issues are rarely debated for more than a few minutes, and nearly every motion passes unanimously. Disagreements are so rare at our meetings that many of us felt something was wrong. We had forgotten that the main reason people meet is to iron out their differences. * The appearance of these people with their different view of our traffic-calming efforts was not a threat to our association or our efforts. It was simply another step in the process of solving the traffic problems in our neighborhood. Nine of the new people who came to the Sept. meeting have now joined HWNA, and we look forward to working with them on traffic-calming and our many other projects. I hope they - and all Westheight residents - will continue to take part in making this neighborhood an even better place to live. But keep in mind that you don’t have to wait until you disagree with us on something before you get involved. | |
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CommentaryBy Elizabeth Cooper The residents of the 1400 block of North 24th Street and the north side of Everett between 22nd and 25th would like to thank Rick Yarnell for inviting us to the September HWNA meeting. Rick also deserves a thank you for delivering a copy of your newsletter to us. We greatly appreciate the fact that you acknowledged the fact that we had not been notified of the traffic-calming devices. For those of you who think we only got interested as an afterthought, we would like to say that we would gladly have attended your meetings, planning sessions, and workshops if we had known about them. Kensington group knew nothing about what was going on. Even if they did, they have not been having regular meetings, nor do they publish a newsletter. So how do you think we would find out? I would also like you to note that there were three residents from the north side of Everett present at the September meeting. Perhaps the residents of Washington Blvd. would feel differently about the diagonal on 24th and Everett if they were forced to use the steep hills on Oakland and 24th Street. I guarantee that we put up with as much noise, speeders, and trash as any resident on the Boulevard. How many of you have had to replace mirrors, windows, or in some cases even your car because of pranksters smashing these things as they drive down the street? We have. We are all in this together (I hope) so please, let’s put aside our hostile feelings and see if we can come to mutual understanding and get this problem solved before the first snow.
Locke’s Custom Cakes & Cookies
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