August 1st Regular meeting

So here I am typing up the minutes and watching shark week, please don't mind any typos or how slow this goes up - I am a true science geek!

OK first off I would like to say a big welcome and thanks to the new people who stopped in to join us for our meeting and they are Melissa, Ashley, Andy, Angie and Amy! Thanks for coming by and we hope to see you all again soon! We also want to say thank you to Eralene, Keith, Karena, Sgt. Dean and Officer Rogers for being there for us.

So we called the meeting to order just after 7pm and went around the room introducing ourselves. The financial report was that we had received the check from the City for the ice cream social, thank you Angie W and Bob.

Since we had new people the majority of the time last night was talking over the focus and reason of the Forum. Then we moved into our usual topics.

We discussed the National Night Out event we are hosting (see post below), discussed the problem of children in Southeast - mainly that there were few activities for them to take part in. TAP's Headstart program (held at the Belmont Christian Church) has been turning away kids due to lack of room in the program for them.

Then, we heard that in the time between now and the completed rebuild - the Boys and Girls Club is doing the same thing. Cutting it's enrollment in half while the work is done.

That's a whole load of kids, whose parents cannot totally afford childcare. A lot of kids.

We heard about some problem rental housing in the area - and efforts by police to curb the situation. Specifically the area around 7th and Tazwell, which then led into a long discussion on the Cemetery and the caverns below.

Yep - caverns.

Then we discussed organizing Neighborhood Watches - officially organizing them anyway - with police training and more. The more people we can get involved, the better Southeast will be, so if you have any interest in organizing a Neighborhood Watch - e-mail us and let us know.

In short, it was a good meeting - with nothing more pressing on the agenda than the Weenie Roast, thankfully.

Hope to see you all tomorrow!