The City Wants to Pay You Up to $10,000 to Improve Your Neighborhood

By Robert Wilonsky Mon., May 11 2009 at 8:34 AM

Categories: News

City of Dallas Code Compliance

The Dallas City Council gets back to business today with three committee confabs, chief among them the Quality of Life hoedown where they're poring over the Code Compliance Accountability Report Card -- so "modeled after a 3rd grade report card" and lettered A through F to provide "the reader a grading scale of which they are familiar," hunh. According to the sneak peek provided in the briefing docs, the Citywide Service Request Volume Improvement Rating for April '09 is an overall B-, at least, when you take the average grades of the seven community code districts. Still, five out of the seven districts collect grades in the Cs; two, in the Bs. And Harvey's Racquet Club Apartments on Hudnall Street has its own grading system.

The committee's also set to take discuss something brand-new called a Loving My Community Neighborhood Improvement Grant, which is ...?

A new initiative that offers a financial incentive to neighborhoods to work together to develop and implement a self-help project or program for their community. The program vision is that residents will come together and tap into assets in their neighborhood such as the knowledge, skills, contacts and creativity of their neighbors.

By helping themselves and helping each other, neighborhoods would potentially increase the number of residents that care about the condition of the area they live in, which would result in more revitalized communities and a better city.

There are grants, of as much as $10,000, available for neighborhood and homeowner associations, crime-watch and community garden groups, PTAs, scout troops and so forth who come up with an idea the city can fund without having to maintain. No word on where the money's coming from, as details are being hashed out in advance of the May 27 council meeting at which this'll be hashed out. But among the caveats: The city doesn't want to have to mess with the project after it's done.

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