Meeting Notice 

The Bartlett Park Neighborhood Association invites you to a program on

How to get affordable home repairs and  improvements 

Wednesday Feb 26th, 6pm at NHS 1600 MLK Street South.

Special Guest George Smith of the city.

City Council member Gina Driscoll

NHS President Deborah Scanlon

Other neighborhood news

Please report ALL suspicious activity to St. Pete Police at 727.893.7780
 "Eagle Eye"  You can share your surveillance video with police if a crime occurs near you, call SPPD for details.

The Community Garden is open on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings.

Your Community Resource Center is next door to NHS and open Monday -Friday from 10 AM till 2 PM. Stop in and have a cup of coffee with neighbors or call 727-826-9774.

Please give us your name, address, phone and email for future notices and membership information.

Coming up -

Neighborhood Yard Sale
Youth Day
4H Club for kids
NHS classes to help tenants become homeowners, family budgeting and improve credit
Affordable Home Landscape Workshop
New Child Care Center opening
Cookout in the garden
And More...

Are you tired of some of the things that are going on in your community? Rethinking Justice Workshop this Saturday

Are you tired of some of the things that are going on in your community?

Are you sick of ignoring God’s call to do justice?

Well, here’s your chance to put your faith into action. Join other congregations and learn about the biblical requirement to do justice. Learn about how and why it’s important for us to stand up for our communities and to bring them closer to what God designed them to be.

Faith and Action for Strength Together
Rethinking Justice Workshop
Saturday, September 8, 2007
From 8:30 A.M.-12:00 P.M.
Macedonia Free Will Baptist Church
900 16th Avenue South
St. Petersburg, FL 33705

For more details, please contact your Pastor, or call Tequena Hatch at (727) 823-9197. Learn more about F.A.S.T. at their web site.

Faith and Action for Strength Together: Mission

The mission of F.A.S.T. is to bring together diverse congregations in order to address the root causes of poverty and injustice in Pinellas County, FL. F.A.S.T. was founded in 2004 when 700 people came together at a covenant assembly. Currently F.A.S.T. has 30 member congregations, representing 50,000 people, that are located throughout Pinellas County and are diverse in their socio-economic, racial, denominational and geographic backgrounds. Congregations in F.A.S.T. work together to build relationships, listen to common concerns, research community problems, and then to take action to see that systems in the community are held accountable to principles of justice and fairness.

Goals: To serve as agents of change, calling for a renewed community by holding public systems accountable to improve the quality of life for all in Pinellas County. To foster and promote community wide interest and concern for the problems of individuals and families, particularly low- to moderate-income, so that such issues as poverty, crime, sickness, housing, education, and environmental degradation may be lessened, and education and economic opportunities may be expanded.

Update 10/20/07:

Hope to see you at the F.A.S.T. Assembly

Monday October 22, 7:00 P.M. at Holy Cross Church.

7851 54TH Avenue North

This is the first of the three big public actions for year four of F.A.S.T. All participating covenanted members will vote on the priority issue for the coming year. At the caucus meeting on October 6^th Drugs and Crime surfaced as the most dominant category. Some congregations will be newly covenanted on this night also.

Slumlord surprise: A bill for repairs

"Slumlords who leave tenants in squalor, with no heat or hot water, or sometimes with no electricity, may soon find the needed repairs have been made - at their expense. The city says it's fed up with intransigent landlords and is planning a crackdown that will give building inspectors authority to order repairs, without the building owner's consent or cooperation."
Sally Goldenberg, Staten Island Advance

New York City is way ahead of St. Pete. About half of our neighborhood is owned by absentee landlords, many of them slumlords. Code enforcement needs to have more teeth. Nusiance Abatement also needs to be more effective. We can learn from New York. More from the Advance:

The City Council now says it will crack down on these negligent landlords by empowering city housing inspectors to get more involved in making repairs at the landlord's expense.
With a day of pomp and circumstance surrounding the initiative in City Hall yesterday, the Council introduced the "Safe Housing Act," which requires the city to identify 200 buildings each year with the worst housing code violations, intensify inspections and demand that the landlords pay to fix the problems.