by Sylvia Berman, Mitman Neighborhood Association president
Hi Neighbors!
During one of the storms that knocked out the power recently, there was a massive pile up in front of Sewell School … right where the horrific accident took place earlier this year. Several of us went over to see if we could help. A couple of cars hit each other, some cars were stalled due to the flooding and a fire truck stopped to try to check the situation. (The usual!)
Everyone was ok … but I asked these people if they live in the neighborhood. As I suspected, none of them did. They just use our street to pass thru. Later, I got calls from neighbors who couldn’t get to their own homes because they couldn’t get thru the mess.
I spoke with Councilman Kozachik about it and he reiterated that the Road Diet, ie., converting the street from 4 lanes to 3 lanes, really is starting in the fall. We are hoping it will lower the amount of traffic.
It has been easy to drive 60 miles an hour from Craycroft to Wilmot … but not anymore! That hawk light is being replaced with a traffic light. I am not sure how that affects Chantilly.
Steve K. also said the TEP is currently working on the power sources in midtown to try to avoid more outages. It seemed to me that TEP did a great job during the power failure. They worked continuously thru the night. People were relieved to see their trucks out so quickly after the storms. They fixed our pole at 3am.
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The property that used to be the old Riteway bldg., was taken to court by the City of Tucson … thanx to the efforts of board member Jennifer Beard. That’s how we were able to put a stop to the homeless camps in the parking lot. Currently they are owned by Aguirre Property Management in Nogales. They are back in court on September 6 over a variety of additional issues. We have reported the weeds along the 1st Street side of the property and the metal structure being built, as far as we can tell, without a permit.
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Did anyone hear shots fired on Speedway on Friday, August 5th? I received several calls from residents and the police recorded 4 reports including a crime scene team. This was in the 5800 block. The same block as Love Cabaret and Club XS. Of course, it could be unrelated to both. But for our safety, we would like to know if it has any relevance to our neighborhood.
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Once again, Mitman Neighborhood Association is appealing to the community for help with our website. It needs to be updated and made useful. Does anyone have experience with WordPress? Just a few hours would be very helpful. Harold Hallikainen has done a wonderful job of resurrecting it after if fell into neglect because our former President, Lou Bright developed dementia. But it needs the old materials archived and new links inserted. We would like to know what you think of the website … how can it be useful to you?
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Last but not least is Councilman Kozachik’s weekly newsletter (the link doesn’t always work, may need to paste into browser or ctrl + click)