February 2009 Archives

You like those speed bumps on your street, don't you? And if you don't have one, you are itching to get one, aren't you? All those other neighborhoods have them, why doesn't yours rate? You are fed up with those reckless drivers zooming past, yakking on their cellphones, not watching out for your kids or pets, and one of these days some speedy dufus is going to miss the curve and wind up in your nasturtiums!

We hate to break this to you, Dear Readers, but the city council does not share your love of speed bumps. Speed bumps are so 80s! They are not environmentally correct (cars slowing down and then speeding up put more fumes into the air), they are hard on suspensions, noisy, are not kind to bicyclists, and generate complaints to the city when people knock their transmissions on them.

The highlight of Monday's meeting was a councilmember falling out of his chair. It happened with a "Thump!" only a few minutes into the discussion of the Strategic Plan and Council Priorities. This is the document the council has been writing for the last several months, a process the mayor likened to the "making of vegetarian sausage."

That's what they will be calling Takoma Park when the city gets an urgent, primary, and preventative health care facility. The Health Services Impact Committee wrote out this prescription in their preliminary report to the city council Feb. 2.

Starting off easy, the committee says, the city must first convince the state legislature to change the law so that alternative health practitioners have the same primary physician status as conventional doctors.