Minutes of the Center Neighborhood Semi-Annual General Meeting
May 15, 2006 7pm
Shogren House
Board Members Present: Theresa Benton, Barry Bradie, Cameron Clemens, Robert Jordan, Judy Kennedy, Don McElmurry, Shirley Nacoste, Nana Nash, John Rusoff
Other Attendees: approx 25 other neighbors, Lee Perlman (press)
Welcome and Introductions 7:05pm
Position/Committee Intros
Board members serving in positions and committee chair leads describe their work. Included are treasurer, secretary, land use, Providence Good Neighbor Agreement committee, Providence Transportation committee, SEUL board rep.
SEUL board update
Shirley describes SEUL, its function, and gives her report. Fundraising is ongoing; there was a presentation on the Metro 2040 plan; the next Neighborhood Agendas campaign is being planned. There’s a Diversity and Representation Committee, on which Shirley sits, whose goal is to make NAs friendly and inclusive.
Officer Brendan McGuire, Neighborhood Response Team
Officer McGuire introduces himself and takes questions, no news to report
Tim Nacoste, Donald Long Juvenile Detention Center
The Center is one of 4 designated model sites in the country. They’re opening their policies and procedures to a team to perform an assessment. They’d like someone from CAN to participate. The first meeting is this Friday, May 18th 8am-5pm.
Neighborhood Cleanup
John – The cleanup is this Saturday May 20th. Volunteers are needed at the event.
Community Visioning Project
Molly Rogers [co-?]wrote the grant application for the project. Part of the project is to host an event to foster better relations within Center Commons. This event will take place June 17th. Another facet of the project is a neighborhood-wide event at Shogren House on National Night Out, August 1. Per the grant requirements, visioning questionnaires will be sent to residents and PSU students will be collecting data at the events.
Help is needed to organize the 8/1 event; the Shogren House is reserved but almost all other organizing and preparing still needs to be done.
Footnote: On June 10th the Shogren House is hosting an ice cream social to help celebrate its 100 year anniversary.
Changing the name of our neighborhood (association)
This was proposed and intentionally tabled at last Fall’s general meeting so that there’d be time to make people aware of the issue and solicit possible new names. Such a motion requires a 2/3 vote of the general membership to pass.
A motion was brought to the floor to change the name of the neighborhood. Since this issue wasn’t new to most people (it was discussed in the two previous newsletters) discussion was limited. There were 35 eligible voters present, thus requiring 24 affirmative votes. There were 12 votes against changing the name, so the motion failed.
Board Elections
Martha Westgate and Jon Laufenberg, whose terms expired, did not stand for re-election to the board. We welcomed new board members DyLynn Robertson and Marsha Hahn.
Meeting Adjourned 8pm
Next meeting 6/20/2006
Live Entertainment by Melao and food from El Rincón Latino organized by Nana Nash