July 2009 Archives

The city council wants Takoma Park to be on the sharpest, pointiest angle of the environmental cutting edge, again. That's where the city fancies it was a couple of decades ago when it introduced curbside recycling.

However, they are leery of regaining the edge by turning Puritan. The Puritan way is to ban things, especially sinfully convenient things, things people will experience soul-cleansing hardship to lose. Things like gas-powered leaf-blowers!

A group of local Puritans, er, environmentalists, are pushing the council to do just that. Some of them, swaddled in their green hand-woven natural-fiber robes, watched disapprovingly from beneath their cowls as the council tossed the ban proposal back and forth like an overheated planet at the July 20 city council meeting.

1), Despite the fact that some seats on the city's Committee on the Environment have gone unfilled, the committee has presented a lot of good ideas to the city council.

2). The city council has failed to implement many of the committee's good ideas.

3). Therefore the Committee on the Environment should be suspended.

Nothing puts a crooked little smile on Your Gilbert's face like a yummy bite of irony flavored with unintended consequences. We got a good taste of it from the city council June 22nd when it continued discussing the Langley Park/Takoma Sector Plan. That would be the Prince George's County sector plan, not the Montgomery County sector plan which will be dealt with on a later date.

The irony is that the coming changes to the Langely Park area, particularly the route of the Purple Line light rail train, were supposed to benefit the large, low-income, mostly-Hispanic "workforce" community living in Langely Park. But, as the city staff reported to the councilmembers, the coming of the Purple Line and the streetscape improvements are inspiring the owners of the low-rise apartment buildings that characterize the area to think about raising the rents or even tearing down the old apartments and building newer, more expensive, high-density ones.