What’s the next step for city streets?

Streets have been a problem for Clarendon for decades; and although the Board of Aldermen has tried to tackle the issue many times, it continues to plague the city. We have a great community, but many of our streets are frankly an embarrassment and a disgrace.

A typical example of this is the streets around the baseball fields. We have better ball park facilities than most towns our size, but you can’t drive past them without risking the well being of your car or causing brain damage to your passengers. Drive too fast down Sixth Street with your infant, and the little tyke could well end up with shaken baby syndrome.

Currently a city crew is trying its darnedest to patch our thousands of potholes. They have made some progress, but it’s a massive undertaking to say the least, and it’s seems clear that they don’t have all the resources they need for the chore.

City Hall also had planned to seal coat about ten blocks this year, but estimates came in higher than expected (big surprise), and they only had enough money to do nine blocks. Some city leaders wanted to seal coat as many of the new streets as possible and take care of what’s still paying for, and others wanted to seal coat or work on older streets. The results last week: No action.

The streets that were paved in 2005 do need to be seal coated on a regular basis to preserve them, but the larger problem is the older streets. Spending $20,000 to seal coat streets such as Fourth from Koogle to Jefferson would be a waste of time and money because frankly there isn’t much left to seal.

The city has two years left on its payments for the new streets. The original plan five years ago was to pay for those streets and then do another big paving project. That’s still a good idea, but what do we do in the meantime to keep people from losing their front end on the way to the post office? Two years is a long time, and the city can’t afford to wait until 2012 to think about a solution.

City Hall should develop an aggressive plan to tackle this issue – smoothing out the rough places while protecting the investment that has been made in the new streets. Figuring out how to do that with the limited resources available to the city will be a challenge, but a solution needs to be found because this has gone on long enough.

A recent poll on ClarendonLive.com found that 65 percent of those responding wanted the streets to be the city’s top priority. It is time for city leaders to deliver on this issue. If it means other priorities have to take a backseat, that’s fine. We can delay adding new office space in City Hall or codifying ordinances (for the second time) if it means seeing real results on the roads.

As city leaders look for a new administrator, knowledge of street and infrastructure improvements needs to be at the top of their “wish list” as much as knowledge of municipal finances and grant writing, and other qualifications. We don’t need our top man (or woman) putting dirt in potholes, but we do need someone who knows how it should be done and knows how to allocate the resources to see that business is taken care of.

Mosque not the main issue at Ground Zero

Conservatives across the nation are all abuzz about a planned mosque near Ground Zero – the former site of the World Trade Centers in New York.

A planning board in that city gave the project a green light, but opponents say the planned 13-story Islamic center would be an insult to the people who lost their lives on September 11, 2001, and a sort of victory for the terrorists.

I disagree. The insult isn’t so much the planned mosque as it is the vacant spots where the Twin Towers once stood.

Generally speaking, a mosque or a synagogue or a church is a celebration of our religious freedom in this nation. As New York Mayor Bloomberg correctly pointed out, the firemen rushing into save people that fateful day didn’t stop to ask what God the person believed in.

It’s been nearly nine years since the towers fell. Long before now, they should have been re-constructed exactly as they were, or new, more magnificent towers should have been erected in their place.

The fact that we’re left with two holes in the ground is a sad commentary on the state of our nation. We’ve gone from a country that did great things and built buildings that soared to great heights to a country that wrings its hands in fear of offending someone.

Instead of second-guessing “Freedom Tower” designs and protesting the construction of a house of worship, America should just move forward and come back stronger than ever before.

Let them build the mosque but rebuild the Twin Towers, too. Now that would be a testament to the greatness of America.