Side Streets   Neighborhoods, people and issues

Are you afraid in your neighborhood?

Scared to walk at night?

What about the daytime?

A new survey reports that fewer than 50 percent of folks in the Pikes Peak Region feel “very safe” walking their neighborhoods at night!

The 2011 survey of the Quality of Life Indicators in the Pikes Peak Region released Friday reports the number of people who feel “very safe” walking in their neighborhoods at night has dropped below 50 percent.

According to the report, 82 percent of people surveyed feel “very safe” or “somewhat safe” strolling their neighborhoods in the day.

But when night falls, the number drops to just 71 percent. And fewer than half feel “very safe.”

I was shocked.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no macho man. Over the years, I’ve been scared, day and night, visiting certain neighborhoods . . . the housing projects in Chicago, the Tenderloin in San Francisco, or any neighborhood in Oakland, East St. Louis and Kansas City, Kan.

But never have I felt fear in Colorado Springs.

I know there are neighborhoods here where you can get robbed or shot . . . Briargate, Peregrine, Flying Horse, Broadmoor.

Let’s face it, any neighborhoods where there are nice cars, fancy homes and money are targets of crime.

The only fear I’ve felt walking at night in the Springs is from the rare mountain lion or frequent black bear who roam our region. I’ve seen mother bears get pretty aggressive around humans at dusk. I even faced one in my own garage.

But the survey is talking about fear from humans and that is much different. And it doesn’t seem to matter that the crime rate in the region is 10 points below the national average.

Colorado Springs neighborhood activist Dave Munger and Mayor Steve Bach spoke at a news conference in September 2011.

So I asked neighborhood guru Dave Munger, president of the Council of Neighbors and Organizations, about the findings.

“I’m a little concerned,” Munger said, noting that some of the fear may be related to another finding of the survey that showed the city’s police are solving fewer crimes than ever.

The so-called “crime clearance rate” dropped to 22 percent in 2010 in Colorado Springs and it was 27 percent in El Paso County. In Fountain, the rate was just 23 percent.

“Unfortunately, I don’t have a great solution for this,” Munger said. “The question is: How do we make sure we are providing a safe environment for all our citizens and good a quality of life for all citizens regardless of their ability to pay for it?”

On the positive side, he said, the survey showed a growth in the number of neighborhood organizations. There are about 200.

“That’s a terrific thing,” he said. “Neighborhood and community organizations are where we learn to work together and understand what it means to live and work together. They are basic units of democracy.

“When a neighborhood is organized and makes decisions to improve the quality of life, it will impact the people in the immediate vicinity in a positive manner.”

Wonder if those neighborhood groups are good at solving crimes?

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To date, the answer is no. No neighborhood organizer/activist has ever been elected mayor of Colorado Springs.

The mayor typically is a product of the establishment . . . a banker, attorney, businessman, a leader of a non-profit or some other executive.

Even as neighborhoods have grown in sophistication, political savvy and influence at City Hall, they have not produced mayoral timber. 

Sallie Clark

The most successful product of a grassroots neighborhood movement, Sallie Clark, tried twice to win the mayor’s seat and lost. 

In 1999, she finished third to incumbent Mary Lou Makepeace and car dealer Will Perkins. 

Then in 2003 she again finished a close third behind winner Lionel Rivera and Ted Eastburn.

Another neighborhood leader who joined her on the council was Margaret Radford.  They were followed by Tom Gallagher.

In 2004 Clark deepened her political resume when she was elected to the El Paso County Commission.

Margaret Radford, former neighborhood activist and two-term member of the Colorado Springs City Council

She’s watching with interest the upcoming race for mayor. That’s because the race includes two men whose roots are in neighborhood organizing like hers: Gallagher and Dave Munger, president of the Council of Neighbors and Organizations, or CONO, the umbrella organization for the city’s neighborhood associations.

Clark is wondering, like I am, if their backgrounds in neighborhood leadership, will translate into votes for mayor.

Radford surprised me with her analysis. Having come from a neighborhood organizer/activist background, I expected her to echo the need for our next mayor to have strong neighborhood sensibilities and perhaps roots similar to hers.

However, Radford said neighborhoods don’t have the corner on leadership training. She urged voters to elect the candidate with the best character, leadlership skills and vision. Interesting.

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Folks in Rockrimmon are not convinced the Pure Medical storefront that opened in December is anything more than a drug dealer in the neighborhood.

Pure Medical dispenses medical marijuana and has two stores in Colorado Springs — it’s store in the shopping center at Rockrimmon Boulevard and Delmonico Drive and another downton on Tejon Street.

Here’s a look at the area from FlashEarth:

 Even though access to the windowless store is restricted to people with official medical marijuana cards, folks in Rockrimmon are upset about its existence in the same shopping center where neighborhood kids get candy and soda at the convenience store, or doughnuts, deli and sub sandwiches and pizzas.

Some residents have reached out to their homeowners associations.

The Comstock Village Homeowners Association sent out a survey to its 540 homeowners to get a sense of the feeling toward Pure Medical. Their survey was a response to a group of homeowners who spoke at a recent board meeting.

The Council of Neighbors and Organizations, or CONO, which represents the HOAs in the city, also is concerned.

It’s unclear what, if anything, anyone can do about the dispensaries until the Colorado General Assembly acts on proposals to regulate the budding industry.

The problem has been 10 years in the making. In 2000, voters decided to amend the Colorado Constitution in 2000 to legalize medical marijuana for “persons suffering from debilitating medical conditions.”

The issue erupted in 2009 after the U.S. Justice Department announced it would not actively prosecute medical marijuana businesses. Didn’t matter that marijuana remains an illegal drug under federal law. Dispensaries blossomed.

Check out these two Web sites catering to folks seeking dispensaries. One is the WeedMaps.com and the other is DispensaryDigest.com :

In fact, Sheriff Terry Maketa recently said there are about 38 medical-marijuana dispensaries in El Paso County but only about three in unincorporated areas.

Colorado Springs has a task force studying what to do with the dispensaries.

And the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, which maintains a medical marijuana registery, is lobbying state lawmakers for laws to allow better regulation.

For example, it doesn’t want doctors to be able to profit from recommending people to the medical marijuana registry. And it wants tools to ensure doctors have not had their registrations revoked or suspended by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Besides being a political issue, it’s a legal question being played out in state courts. Marijuana dispensary owners are suing for the right to sell pot, arguing communities can’t ban the dispensaries.

Some cities, including the Denver suburb of Centennial, counter that cities can prohibit businesses that violate federal law.

Fourteen states permit medical marijuana, but pot remains illegal under U.S. law.

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The Council of Neighbors and Organizations, or CONO, is trying to alert residents of Colorado Springs and El Paso County about the budget crises facing the local governments.

So CONO – a volunteer umbrella group for the city’s neighborhoods - is sponsoring a series of free community forums where folks can come and listen to non-partisan experts discuss the economy and how it is crippling local governments.

Dave Munger, president of CONO, said the group wants to dispel a lot of the misinformation floating around about the city using “scare tactics” to justify a property tax increase and allegations of “socialist conspiracies” and the like.

The first forum was in August. The second was 6:30-8:30 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 17, at the Fire Department Complex, 375 Printers Parkway, east of downtown. 

The final forum will be held 6:30-8:30 p.m., on Tuesday, Oct. 13, at the West Intergenerational Center, in the old Buena Vista Elementary School at 1628 W. Bijou Street. It will feature a lengthy community discussion of the implications of the previous two forums. 

 Initial comments will be made by by:

Dave Csintyan, CEO of the Greater Pikes Peak Area Chamber of Commerce;

Jan Doran, past president of CONO

 Steve Pope, publisher of the Gazette.  Ample free parking is available on site.

  The Pikes Peak Library District is showing the sessions online and on Comcast Cable Channel 17. Below is a screen capture of Dave Munger at the first CONO forum.

CONO’s first economic forum featured Colorado Springs City Manager Penny Culbreth-Graft and El Paso County Administrator Jeff Greene. That session can be viewed on cable on this schedule:

• September 21, Monday 7:30 p.m.
• October 11, Sunday, 6 p.m.
• October 15, Thursday, 9 p.m. 

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We’ve all see yard signs promoting political candidates. Or signs urging drivers to Slow Down, Drive 25 and Keep Kids Alive. Or advertising the landscaper/roofer/concrete company doing work at someone’s home.

But recently I noticed a new kind of yard sign in the Discovery neighborhood in Rockrimmon  that could start popping up all across the Colorado Springs region.

Here it is below:

That’s it, you are asking?!? What’s so special about that sign?

It represents an end to phone calls from people wondering if their neighbor has approval for whatever is going on in the yard behind the sign.

That’s huge if you are one of the hundreds of volunteers who sit on a Homeowners Association, or HOA, board or an “architectural control committee” that governs improvements made in covenant-controlled communities.

That simple blue and white sign with seven words will stop the phone calls.

It immediately tells people that the paint color being put on the trim is approved, or the roof meets ACC guidelines or the garish curbside driveway pedestals are OK, no matter how ugly and ostentatious you think they are.

The signs have another, perhaps more important, value.

If folks get used to seeing signs in front of houses where projects are underway, they will immediately notice when work is going on and the signs are absent.

In other words, it will be harder for people to get away with doing work without HOA approval.

The signs are going to be featured at an upcoming monthly meeting of the Council of Neighbors and Organizations, the umbrella group for the city’s HOAs.

I suspect we’ll start seeing similar signs in neighborhoods across the region.

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