CL staff writer Alex Pickett writes for our issue next week about a split in the Bartlett Park civic group. Here's a preview:

On a bright Saturday morning, eight residents of St. Petersburg’s Bartlett Park neighborhood gather in the renovated home of Julie Richey and Stewart Nicol. The former vice president of the neighborhood association, Scott Swift, is here. So are Lindsay Myers, editor of the Bartlett Park Newsletter, and John and Rosemary Kitchen, both elected officers in the association. The Kitchens are black, and longtime residents; the others are white, and moved to Bartlett Park in the last three years.

Over crumbly coffeecake, the group shares the successes, failures and frustrations of local activism. But then they get down to business: They are meeting today to plot a defection.

For the last year, these residents have labored to improve Bartlett Park. They helped to form a Crime Watch group, started a newsletter, sponsored litter clean-ups and enforced codes regulations in this oft-forgotten part of St. Pete just south of downtown.

But trying to improve the neighborhood, as Brian Wyllie puts it, is “like pushing a lead ball.”

Wyllie and the others say the more they work toward making Bartlett Park a safer, cleaner, more hospitable place to live, the harder some in the association push back.

“To those of us that are new, [revitalizing the neighborhood] is still a very slow process,” Swift says. “We do a project every three to four months. Everyone else in the city does one every two weeks.”

So this group of eight — and two other relatively new residents who couldn’t make the meeting — have formed their own organization: the Buena Vista Neighborhood Association, which will focus on the area between Fourth and Martin Luther King streets and 13th and 18th avenues, approximately half of Bartlett Park.

“We’re going to continue to do positive things for the neighborhood,” Swift says. “But the association has served as an obstacle."

This article appears in Dec 26, 2007 – Jan 1, 2008.