Read Drink & Be Merry

Recently I gave Wilder and the city an ugly grade of D+ for the reconstruction of Battery Park. I’m thinking I may have been wrong in giving out that grade. You see, giving a grade or an evaluation implies that the project is complete and can now be assessed. In reality the project is not complete, the park is not open, empty lots abound with no sign of progress or even real clues as to what to expect. The bi-weekly newsletter the city promised to send after the floods to keep us informed of the project and it’s progress? We received two hard copies a couple of years ago (the same exact information with only the dates changed) before it went online. I’m not sure what bi-weekly means to the city of Richmond but it looks like 4 issues in over two years. The last one released claims it’s now a monthly, published in June…

I should have given them an ‘I’, for incomplete.

Four years after the floods started and two years after the collapse of the storm drains and the destruction of the park and $47 million dollars later where should we be? Frankly, a lot further along than we are.

The drains are fixed. While we haven’t had a true hurricane deluge to test them the heavy rains we’ve had recently have produced nothing more than large puddles. Great! Couple of questions though…

When we flooded so did the park north of Brookland Parkway in Ginter Park. Do the new drains cover them or are they the next domino to fall in the whole north Richmond drainage system of Ginter Park-Battery Park-Shockoe Valley & Bottom?

The drain near my house on now depopulated Joshua Street looks to be working fine. Now I’m not a city engineer but shouldn’t drains be flush or below ground level? If the concrete lip of the drain is seven or eight inches above ground level…. Kinda defeats the whole drainage thing doesn’t it?

The sinkholes have been filled. Personally, I find sinkholes very scary. Has the city ever really fixed the one up in Church Hill from a couple of years ago? The mini-ones that opened up in the park and in the middle of tennis courts weren’t that big but have any studies been done to see if there are any more lingering just below the surface and how safe is the neighbourhood as a whole?

The park is not open. The only noticeable work that had been done for most of the spring and through the summer seems to have been reconstructing a brick buidling and installing a prefab (although very nice looking) playgound set. Work has picked up of late, however, with some attention paid to the resurfacing of the tennis courts. I would love to think it was due to my last post on the park but I suspect that our city leaders only read my blog if they are looking for ways to take potshots at each other… Being a bit more cynical I suspect it has much more to do with our upcoming election. I fully expect our council woman, Ellen Robertson, to be knocking on our door in the next few weeks (as she does each election cycle) to ask for our vote. Once she is done with that she can go back to ignoring phone calls and emails from her constiuents. At least with Sa’id Al’Amin we got noticed. Our current empty suit is a bit of a wall flower in city politics.

The park expansion seems to have been forgotten. When the city tore down the two apartment complexes and the dozen or so homes a couple of blocks from my house there was much talk of a community center, gardens, or any number of things. Can’t find anything resembling a plan out there (if someone knows pass it along!) and the area is turning into a poorly maintaned grassland. Couple that with the unknown future of Norrell School (at least they didn’t send the kids back to a school polluted with who knows what), the unused baseball fields (which they continued to water while we were under water restrictions…) and you start to wonder where all the promises (and the money) went.

Speaking of money…. I had a number of discussions with friends after the first post on all this. One thing that kept coming up was the money and the timeline. One almost has to wonder if Wilder, rather than repair and maintain the drains with city money when the problem started appearing, waited the two years until they completely collapsed so he could apply for Federal money to replace them…. Don’t know that’s what happened but just wondering and if so, were we an ‘earmark’?…

In sum…

We’re dry but will everone upstream stay that way?

The park is still closed but the election season has brought a few workers onto the scene and some incremental progress is being made (will it continue after Nov 4th?).

The park expansion forced dozens of people from their homes and now seems to have been forgotten.

Communication is either not the cities priority or not in their skill set.

Living in Battery Park the last few years has been a bit of a challenge.

While all the attention has been paid to The Bottom our storm drains crumbled and finally collapsed under the weight of Isabelle and Gaston.

As the mayor partied it up in Japan I was told by Richmond’s finest that if I didn’t leave my house (the water was within a block of my house but we sit up so high enough that we were never in danger) they would arrest me and turn Finn over to Family and Children Services.

As we debated whether we could drink the tap water and others were forced repeatedly from their homes after the lightest rains we saw a parade of politicians from Senators to the ever-elusive, and very absent, Rep. Bobby Scott make their obligatory stop for a photo op in our damp ‘hood. Ellen Robertson, our council person, hasn’t been very present either – except for her weekly spam phone messages. We soldiered on, dealing with detours for our new, above ground, drainage pipes and pumps the size of elephants that blocked our streets.

Rather than admit the boondoggle that is the city owned golf course changed the topography thus turning Battery Park and the surrounding environs into a lake, the city seized homes, rendered apartment renters homeless, and put the problem to the bulldozers. Oddly, some seized homes have been deemed ’safe’ and are currently being rehabbed and de-molded. It will be curious to see who gets to buy these homes and at what price….

Then, on what must have been a slow news day for out mayor, the Battery Park project was declared complete last December. Really? The pumps were still there. Sink holes in the tennis courts. Bulldozers and cranes were everywhere. Fences and no trespassing signs would lead one to believe the park not open. The floods, the clean-up crews in haz-mat suits… it all continued. Methink the mayor a bit hasty.

Spring arrived and the gashes in the ground were covered and they seemed to be moving on to cosmetics. The ground leveled, new playground equipment installed. Would we be able to use the park this summer? No. As far as I can tell we only get city work crews 2-4 days a month, and rarely two days in a row. At the rate they’re going I would expect the park to re-open about the time Finn finishes college.

So, that brings us to today. As Fay dumps much needed water onto our very brown lawns and for what may be the real first test of the city having spent millions to move water around the very critical 3-hole golf course. The shiny new grates near my house are working well and there is no standing water. Glad to know that bulldozing an apartment complex and displacing all those families had allowed the city to protect the sandtraps for the golf course. OK, I’ll admit, I don’t miss the apartments. They were a source of trouble but wouldn’t it have been easier to dig up a sand trap to rebuild the drains rather than raze a bunch of buildings with people living in them?

Moving over to the park proper, doesn’t look too bad. Six months ago the south side of the park would have been under anywhere from 6 to 30+ feet of water after more than 24 hours of rain. Today it looks a little soggy but not too bad. The brand new playground, however, looks like it is sitting in the middle of a lake. Hard to tell from a distance but at least 6 inches of standing water. The question is where did that water drain from? Is it just a puddle? Would you let your child play there? Will the men in the haz-mat suits return?

How did the city and our rock-star mayor do? I guess I would give them a ‘D+’.

Had they listened to the residents earlier about water back-ups they could have averted the whole problem by inspecting the storm drains around the park.

The houses were all built nearly 100 years ago and didn’t have problems until the city changed the topography of the area for the golf course. Yet, somehow, the city made it sound like we had all built in a flood zone and that we should feel grateful for the buy-outs.

Oddly, while Bush declined to name our area a federal disaster he named an area up in New York one. Same storm. Same number of people effected in roughly an area of equal size. Could it have happened to have been due to us having a Democrat as a Rep and them having a Republican in a tough re-election bid weeks before the 2006 election? Hmm….

Communication during the flooding basically sucked and the police were way too authoritative.

Months of detours really sucked and the city has yet to do anything about adding or upgrading access to the neighbourhood.

We got a really cool red back-pack from the Red Cross with emergency supplies if we are ever stranded in our home.

The plans for the park look to be very family friendly and are designed to reduce the drug activity.

The pace of the work make me fear it may not be done in my lifetime.

The new drainage looks to be working under it’s first heavy test.

The all-important golf course is open – without which the water would have just naturally drained into Shockoe Valley….

If I felt the need to deal drugs I would be very low-key about it. When engaging in activities that law enforcement agencies frown upon it is wise to keep a low profile. The neighbours in the unlicensed rooming house across the street seem to have missed this little nugget of advice. I doubt anyone on the block would care one way or another what they were up to if they kept it quiet. Instead we have heavy traffic stopping in front of their house, blasting horns at all hours, questionable individuals standing in their front yard yelling or throwing rocks at windows for attention (obviously none of these people have heard of doorbells or cell phones…).

The number of phones calls made by me and others to 911, the 4th precinct, and various other government agencies has reached the point to make the house a big red blob on any of the local crime maps. So it was no surprise that I was met with boredom or more correctly – ‘What have they done now?’ – when I called several numbers last night.

Sitting in my kitchen last night I watched as the same green Explorer kept driving down the block. Sometimes it would stop, sometimes it wouldn’t. Sometimes someone would yell something from the front porch, sometimes someone would run out to the car for a quick chat. Usually when someone runs out to a car you can see a quick pass of cash and small bags. Tonight it was only words that were being passed. Watching closer I noticed small bags and cases being brought out, regular tenants getting into their cars and driving off and many new people arriving. A lot of new people. People we had not seen before.

My calls to the police seemed to produce nothing except a couple of new numbers for me to call during business hours so I was a little surprised a half hour later when I noticed flashing lights in front of our house. Fire Trucks, EMS, police cars. Finn was very excited, I was curious. Something was going down. The evening progressed, we tried to watch Top Chef but kept getting pulled away as something new arrived or left outside (Thankfully we have a DVR and were recording the show). Then there was a knock at our back door…

M had been IM’ing our neighbour, S, and he had snuck around back to come over to our house with news and in hopes of a better view of the house across the street. Seems they had a body in the house. Seems the body had been there for a few days. Seems the police had been scammed….

The police had been told that no one had noticed the body (or the smell). Problem with that is the body was in a room belonging to someone else and he had been around all week. Personally, I would notice a dead body in the room with me, but I could be wrong. So the body was moved in the house or from somewhere else. Prior to the arrival of the police the house was ‘cleaned’, both literally and figuratively. What do you think was in all the bags and cases removed in the hours leading up to the ‘discovery’ of the body? The people the police questioned about the body were not residents (We’ve secretly replaced your paroled and wanted tenants with people having fewer legal issues…) but purported to be – all the real residents left earlier.

One can also not underestimate the stupidity of your average drug addict. You would think he would notice all the police cars parked on the street when he drove up, he didn’t. As he stopped and blasted his horn, waiting for someone to run out with his fix, I can only imagine the look on his face as the officers turned to look at him.

Slowly things began to quiet down. The police and EMS left. Scott’s Funeral Home’s hearse arrived. The body was manhandled down the stairs (rather roughly I might add) and whisked away. Don’t know the guys name. Probably never will. I find it a bit sad that the closest he may come to being remembered is right here on my blog. Hopefully he has some family or friends somewhere that will remember him better than this.

The new people at the house will hang out there for a couple of days. The regulars will trickle back and business will resume. And I will still hate my neighbours.