RECENT COMMENTS
MPACT/CAPS meetings to resume in May
As you know, the Community Conversations scheduled for each individual precinct have been cancelled. The regularly scheduled MPACT/CAPS Meeting for Precinct 1 will resume on Wednesday, May 8th, 6PM at Main Street Station.
A reminder and an agenda will be forthcoming so you can better determine if you will be able to attend. We apologize for any inconvenience and we hope to see you next month. In the mean time, feel free to utilize my information and/or SeeClickFix.com to report any concerns within the MPACT umbrella. All CAPS concerns should be forwarded to Inspector Earl Weaver at 646-6869 or earl.weaver@richmondgov.com. Thank you for doing your part to help build a better Richmond.
There have been calls to return the meetings to the EDI Building on 25th Street, due to the decline in attendance, poor acoustics, and the intrusion of Main Street Station’s train passengers.
DPW’s Hope Cousins says that change may be coming:
Just yesterday, I asked the MPACT Manager about moving to a different location, for some of the reasons that have been shared and some that I have observed, as well.
MPACT Management is reluctant to return to EDI because they don’t have the necessary audio visual capability for speakers/presenters and we would have to be out of the larger conference room before 7PM because of another long time standing meeting.
After sharing your emails and making a few suggestions, they are now open to changing the meeting location, but it has to be a location that’s reasonable for residents both north and south of the river. The next meeting or two will be at Main Street Station, but if things go the way that I hope in the next few days, I will be able to share good news at the May or June meeting.
The MPACT/CAPS meetings are vital, especially for folks fighting the good fight to fight some of the neighborhood’s long-standing issues. The 1st Precinct CAPS meetings have been a great conduit for communication with a variety of city services. These meetings need to be regularly scheduled, and held somewhere easily accessible.
For some reason (and anyone’s guess is good) the city administration seems not to like the small, effective CAPS meetings where neighbors targeted problems specific to their neighborhoods. The original CAPS meetings were taken over by staffers who wanted to ‘preach’ about budgets, and river plans, and other things of interest but which had little or nothing to do with what CAPS did…that is give a voice to local people about local stuff. Originally the neighborhood served by ‘chpn’ had meetings at EDI on 25th Street…small venue for small groups. When the city administration decided to pre-empt these groups and give formal talks about non-local issues, the meetings began to be held at Main Street Station to accommodate groups that didn’t show and that have gotten progressively smaller. The cavernous acoustics at the train station make speaking and listening problematic, to say nothing about the constant and necessary interruptions of travelers and announcements via loudspeaker of arriving/departing trains. Go figure.