The Buena Vista Neighborhood Association isnâ€™t wasting any time to work on their improvements to St. Pete's Bartlett Park neighborhood and for city recognition. Resident Scott Swift forwarded me information on the new associationâ€™s latest clean-up and petition drive this last weekend:

We picked 10 full bags of garbage on 13th Avenue and went door to door with our petition to have our new association recognized by the City. I am thrilled to report that everyone we met with supported the formation of a new neighborhood association and NO ONE declined to sign! Some people weren't home, but we collected 19 signatures (excluding several people already in our group who will sign later) just on 13th Avenue alone!

Going door to door allowed us to get feedback from 13th Avenue residents regarding their concerns. The key things we heard were disillusionment with the status quo & concerns about drugs and speeding. Other broader concerns were drop out rates of school children and lack of parental responsibility.

I have attached pictures from the cleanup. Since some of you receive e-mail at work, I have excluded shots of the more "interesting" litter we found (at least 3 used bullets and several drug baggies and one pink thong!!). Not surprisingly, all the ammo and drug paraphernalia was located in front of the 2-3 properties that residents have constant concerns about regarding drug dealing.

So far we've had a positive meeting the Deputy Mayor David Metz and Susie Ajoc, have covered about 15-20% of the area we need to cover with the petition, distributed our 1st newsletter, cleaned up 10 bags of litter on 13th, met lots of interested residents, and finalized our mission statement. All in just our first 2 weeks!

The new association split from the established and recognized Bartlett Park Neighborhood Association. Read what caused the split here. And don't forget to read the reactions to the new organization on my first blog post about it here.

This article appears in Jan 2-8, 2008.