Bridge
matters
Just
when it seems Rochester has tapped
out its energy for creative planning for the season — what with Ren Square workshops,
the Urban Land Institute recommendations, the Design Matters conference and all
— along comes word of a charrette to end all charrettes.
The
target this time is the short strip of East Main Street that crosses
the bridge over a major CSX rail corridor and intersects with Circle, Railroad,
and North Goodman Streets in the space of a few hundred yards.
It’s
about as convoluted an intersection as you can imagine — a mini Can of Worms built out of
city streets instead of highways. A word like “daunting” hardly seems adequate.
“Lost cause” sounds more like it.
Yet
that hasn’t stopped the folks at the RochesterRegionalCommunityDesignCenter from
organizing with neighborhood groups to tackle the area with the latest of their
informal brainstorming sessions. Improving access
to the Public Market from Railroad
Street is one motivation behind the event. Getting
onto Railroad Street in a car can
be dicey, and the prospect of doing it on foot, at least from points south,
seems downright terrifying. Changing that will be on the minds of the
charrette’s organizers when they convene the event this weekend.
Things
get started Friday, November 11, at 5 p.m. with an open
house and walking tour of the area. The charrette itself — cleverly titled
“Bridging Neighborhoods” — begins at 8:30 a.m. Saturday at
the Laborers Hall, at Fourth and Railroad Streets. More information is at
http://www.bridgingneighborhoods.com.
SEIU GETS ITS CONTRACT
Last month, SEIU 1199 members were picketing in front of the
University of Rochester Medical Center and other UR buildings. But last
week, the union and the university reached a contract agreement, which will
give patient-care technicians, secretaries, food servers, and janitors a 6
percent raise over the next nine months and will continue health benefits, a
major issue for this group of low-paid workers.
One of the workers on the picket line was patient-care tech
Devery Reid-Holmes, profiled in City’s October
26 issue. “We were out there that whole weekend,” Reid-Holmes said last week,
“and it was a lot of work talking to people, passing out flyers, and working
together as a group. I was just so glad that our health benefits were not
touched. I mean, that was the main thing for me and my daughter. I feel really
good about it, and I’m really glad I have this job.”
School
chemistry
In
the 1980s, when a local environmental group first started poking into what
chemicals schools use to keep pests in check, every single school district used
some form of pesticide. Five years ago, that hadn’t changed much, says the
group Rochesterians Against the Misuse
of Pesticides:
“In
2000 it was only one district that reported no use,” said RAMPer Audrey Newcomb
at last week’s press conference announcing the latest findings. Today, just
five years later, that number’s grown to four school districts plus three
individual schools out of 27 surveyed: The districts are Brighton, East
Rochester, Penfield, and West Irondequoit; the schools
are Allendale Columbia, BOCES 1, and Harley. (The Rochester school
district uses Round-Up on the grounds outside of its schools.)
Despite
the increase in pesticide-free schools, RAMP members say they’re disappointed
more isn’t being done. “It’s very slow,” RAMP member Judy Braiman said. RAMPers
applaud districts like Brighton, which they
say was one of the first to can chemicals in favor of alternative treatments
like diatomaceous earth, weeding by hand, and in some cases a little common
sense and ingenuity. As an example, Braiman mentioned the district removing a
bee’s nest with nothing more than a vacuum cleaner.
Other
districts ought to be following suit, the group said.
“It’s
not rocket science,” said Braiman.
In
addition, there’ve been advances in creating environmentally friendly products.
That’s reflected in a law that will require schools to use green cleaning
products by the start of the next academic year. Some schools are already
complying, but RAMP wants more to do it.
Along
with a chart showing which schools use which chemicals, the group released a
second, more ominous chart detailing the health effects associated with each
chemical they found. Those include cancer, birth defects, and environmental
degradation.
See the chart here.
This article appears in Nov 9-15, 2005.
