The neighborhood meeting was a waste of time

Glenn Terry wrote up an excellent report on what went on at the North Grove meeting the other night, which neighbor Marika de Nie Puyana set up at her house. About 36 people showed up to voice their concerns, including Commissioner Sarnoff and Ron Nelson, his chief of staff. The meeting was mostly about the Grove's parks and the neighbors questions and concerns. 

The Glass House, the mangroves, Kennedy Park, Peacock Park, Scotty's, etc. It was all brought up at the meeting. You can read what Glenn had to say here.

Plans are in the works for Scotty's and that area, I believe that today there are presentations taking place downtown, so I don't believe anything the neighbors might come up with are going to change that and the same for the Expo Center, which is going to be knocked down after Burn Notice vacates in October or November, and a Community Center is not going to ever be put in that location, even though that is a clever concept that should be looked into.

I found the fact that astroturf is being added west of the Glass House interesting, rather nauseating, actually. I mean we are in Florida, everything grows without effort, why put fake grass in like they did in the Blanche dog park?

The mangroves were to have windows cut in years ago, and yet nothing has been done. Commissioner Sarnoff said at the meeting, "I know we need the views [of the bay]. I spent four years and $100,000 trying to make this happen in Peacock Park. We finally got permission to cut 'windows' in the park's wall of mangroves and we began trimming them back. When the state officials said, 'Stop,' we still could not see the bay. It was all for naught. It was very frustrating." 

I can 't help but think that if Sarnoff's house was facing these mangroves, he would have found a way to open up the windows. But DERM, the Department of Environment and Resource Management is tough to deal with, so maybe not.

I think the simple solution would have been to just open the freaking windows and then use the $100,000 as the state fine for doing so. You know, just do it and then apologize later. It would have been done and the $100,000 would have been spent anyway, but we would have had a bay view. And that $100,000 might just have been the cost of mitigation, you know, replacing the harmed mangroves with other plantings elsewhere in the area.

I have a feeling that when a restaurant is finally ready to move into the Glass House, a bay view will be important to that enterprise and something will happen to open it up then.

The thing that really riles me up is that fact that neighbors who are taxpayers, have no say in what goes on in our own neighborhoods. And we never have. Elected officials forget who hired them.