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How to Apply for Street Trees & Sidewalks

How to Apply for Street Trees & Sidewalks

Of all the questions posed to the Emerson-Garfield Neighborhood Council, some of the most common ones concern street trees and sidewalks. How do you get them if your house doesn’t already have them? How do you go about dealing with old/diseased/overgrown trees or repairing cracked/uneven sidewalks?

Both are projects that must be dealt with on the city level. The EGNC (like all neighborhood councils across Spokane) acts as an intermediary in many of these cases by helping you formulate your request in the right way and bringing your project to city’s attention.

For street trees, you can download this work order form (Word .doc), fill out the required fields, and submit it to the address provided. Our neighborhood council allocates a certain amount of funding for street trees every year, so if they are made aware of your request, they can try to ensure that there are sufficient funds.

If sidewalks are your concern, your best bet is to come to the next neighborhood council meeting (typically the second Wednesday of each month; see the calendar) and speak directly with the people who handle sidewalk installation and repair requests for the neighborhood.

Every spring, missing or defective sidewalks are documented by our neighborhood on a map provided by the city’s Engineering Department. Areas in need of new or repaired sidewalks are highlighted with marker pens on the map.

In recent years a small group has also walked the neighborhood and identified addresses that are in need of new or repaired sidewalks. These addresses are added to the map as well, and the whole thing is submitted back to the Engineering Department in late spring.

The city’s combined neighborhood sidewalk contract (in the $500,000 ballpark) goes out for bid and is awarded in early summer. If desired, the chosen contractor then walks the areas indicated on the map with the neighborhood rep to talk about the work to be done. Construction occurs in the late summer and early autumn. (And, yes, it does happen.)

If you have any other questions about sidewalks, streets trees, or neighborhood-related issues in general, please don’t hesitate to get in touch using our contact page.

Neighborhood Council Meeting Recap

Neighborhood Council Meeting Recap

Last night’s Emerson-Garfield Neighborhood Council meeting was one of the more satisfying ones. That’s because it was the one where we decide how to allot the Community Development funds (since that’s a term that keeps cropping up, we’ll soon have an explanatory post on what CD funding is and why it’s so important).

A small volunteer group of council members met prior to the neighborhood council meeting to review funding applicants. From a list of 28 organizations with 39 separate requests for service funding, the actual recommendations were narrowed down to six. Those were decided on some basic criteria:

  • Did Emerson-Garfield fund the organization last year?
  • What is the organization’s stated reason for applying for funding?
  • Does the organization have a physical location in our neighborhood? Or is it at least active there in some form?
  • Has a representative of the organization ever attended an EGNC meeting to personally “pitch” the funding request and field questions from the public?
  • Does the organization have access to additional funding sources beyond E-G’s Community Development funds?
  • Will the organization’s services directly benefit residents of our neighborhood?

On the basis of those criteria, the following six organizations were put forward and later approved by all voting members of the EGNC:

These organizations will receive letters of recommendation on behalf of the Emerson-Garfield Neighborhood Council to be granted all or part of their funding request. (In previous years, the neighborhood council used to exercise almost complete control over funding recipients, but that process has changed this year to save administrative costs.)

From a separate pot of capital funding, the EGNC allotted the following amounts for the following purposes:

  • $2,600 to Corbin Senior Center for repairing a parking lot entrance and miscellaneous improvements like heat tape
  • $20,000 for sidewalks — which receives 1:1 matching funds from the city, therefore a total of $40,000 will be available for sidewalk installation and repair throughout E-G in 2013
  • $34,650 for home rehabilitation — which receives 3:1 matching funds from the city, therefore $103,950 will be available for initiatives like SNAP and Lead Safe Spokane throughout E-G in 2013

A representative of the City of Spokane’s Community, Housing and Human Services Department was on hand to answer our questions about funding procedures and possibilities. During the discussion about apportioning of funds, he informed us that we still have $17,000 remaining in unallocated funds for street tree removal and replanting.

New this year in the CD funding process is an additional $100,000 general pot. All neighborhoods are allowed to submit project applications for part or all of this money. After some discussion on whether or not the looming deadline (December 6) was feasible, the EGNC decided to put forward its own application for a covered bus shelter on the southbound corner of Monroe and Montgomery.

Other project ideas included a dog park, a pedestrian crossing at Grace and Monroe, and a picnic pavilion in Corbin Park. All of these were seriously considered, but voting members decided unanimously to concentrate on a single project so that it stood a better chance of being approved. It’s likely that all these ideas will be revisited in the future.

Also discussed at the meeting: recent crime hotspots, park improvements, a forthcoming mailer, and this year’s snow plow protocol. These will all be covered in a second post tomorrow (because this one’s getting awfully long).

If you are a resident of Emerson-Garfield and would like to apply for street tree planting/removal or sidewalk installation/repair, we will soon have posts that describe how to do that and that will provide the relevant forms. Please stay tuned.

Leaf Pickup on Nov. 11, 12, 18-20

Leaf Pickup on Nov. 11, 12, 18-20

City crews will be conducting leaf pickup on the west side of Emerson-Garfield (i.e., west of N. Monroe) on Sunday, November 11 and Monday, November 12, and on the east side of Emerson-Garfield (i.e., east of N. Monroe) from Sunday, November 18 through Tuesday, November 20. Pickup will take place on all those days between 6am and 10pm.

Leaf pickup means that the crews will be coming around with giant vacuum-type contraptions that suck up all the mucky leaves that have collected at the curb in front of your house. This makes winter snow removal easier and allows all the autumn rain and melted snow to drain more easily. It’s a good thing.

Two things to keep in mind:

  • Don’t rake leaves from your yard into the street! It’s tempting, we know, but excess leaves will overburden the crews and their machines. Use your green bin instead (collection for that continues until Nov. 30) or start a compost bin in your yard.
  • Don’t park on the street on leaf pickup days. Crews can’t vacuum leaves out from under vehicles. The inconvenience of parking in the alley or your garage for a few days will, we hope, be outweighed by the improvements to snow removal and storm drainage.

The full citywide leaf pickup schedule is available here (PDF link). More info on leaf pickup can be found here.

Community Development Block Grant Info

Community Development Block Grant Info

Last night we tried something new and live-tweeted the public hearing on Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funding for 2013. The hearing was arranged by the newly amalgamated Community, Housing and Human Services megadepartment in the city bureaucracy, and its aim was to address changes to both the amount of available funds and the application process.

This was our first live-tweet attempt, so we overlooked some of the etiquette (a #CDBG2013 hashtag, for instance), but we hope we nevertheless managed to convey some of the more interesting facts and figures as they came to light.

We realize that public hearings aren’t as exciting as, say, an Apple product launch, but we thought live-tweeting would be a good way for everyone to take part and stay informed. It’s easy to lose steam about neighborhood events when it seems like all anyone does is attend meetings.

Some of the more relevant highlights:

  • Total tentative CDBG funding for 2013 is $2,844,749. Of that, the total allocation for neighborhoods is $652,800.
  • The top recipient of that neighborhood allocation is Hillyard with $113,139 (not East Central, as we tweeted last night; the slide had no order to it). Emerson-Garfield is fourth on the list with $57,250.
  • Public service activities get a pot of $426,712. Community centers have to share $250,000 for operations. Nonprofits have a pot of $176,712 for operations. For the first time, neighborhoods also have access to a supplemental grant pool of $100,000.
  • There have been 42 applications received so far for public services money. These applicants include organizations like the Corbin Senior Center, Second Harvest, COPS. A total of $773,027 has been requested.
  • Many Spokane neighborhoods have used community development funds — or a combination of CD funds and others — for projects that improved their neighborhoods’ safety and beauty (some examples are shown above). Except for some street tree replanting, Emerson-Garfield was all but absent from that list.

The PowerPoint presentation with all these figures and more is available for download here.

If you represent an organization that is based or operates in Emerson-Garfield and have questions about the application process, please get in touch with us using our contact form.

To contact a city representative, please address your queries to the following people. They can all be reached on (509) 625-6325:

Materials for Tonight’s Meetings

Materials for Tonight’s Meetings

The agendas for tonight’s Emerson-Garfield Neighborhood Council and planning stakeholder meetings are available for download. Save paper and grab your copy here:

Remember: the meetings start at 6pm (planning) and 7pm (neighborhood council) at the Corbin Senior Center.

As much as we wish everything was always sunshine and rainbows in the world of Spokane neighborhoods, there are some pressing issues to consider on both of these agendas. Many of those issues stem from decisions made by various departments within the city bureaucracy.