Tacoma public utilities director William Gaines told the city council Tuesday that he wants to sell three small chunks of property the utility no longer needs.

The three are:

– one-third acre at North 18th and Orchard,
– 0.2 acres at S. 35th and S. J Street,
– 0.15 acres at S. 45th and S. Warner.

The first lot is about two building lots. The others are single building lots. They are among nine that the utility had wanted to sell but stopped to gauge whether there was interest in the community to use them for public purposes.

TPU chief Gaines told the council there was no community interest in these three parcels.

City Councilwoman Lauren Walker said she had heard concerns from the Warner Street neighbors about the lack of green space in the area due to apartment and townhouse construction. Perhaps, she wondered, it could be used for a small park.

Gaines said the utility was open to discussion.

Residents of the Far East Side are beautifying and stabilizing the area, and they're looking for new neighbors with the energy and vision to jump in on the fun.

They're urging prospective home buyers to come to the East Tacoma Home Buyer's Fair and Tour of Homes Saturday from 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.

It's a two-part event, with a resource fair at the Portland Avenue Center, 3513 Portland Ave., and a tour of move-in-ready homes nearby.

At the fair, reputable experts will be on hand to discuss zero-down financing, down payment assistance programs, FHA and rehab loans. They'll have information on credit repair, budgeting, and the difference between an appraisal and a home inspection. They'll showcase the homes that will be for sale in the next phase of construction at New Salishan.

They'll also introduce the community leaders who are revitalizing the neighborhood around what was once called T-Street Gulch. It's First Creek now, and it's a hotbed of activism and optimism.

On the tour, agents will show off homes in the $100,000 to $250,000 range. Some are bank-owned, some are new, and all are ready for buyers.

Organizers and supporters include the Women's Council of Realtors and Tacoma/Pierce County Association of Realtors, Tacoma Housing Authority, Washington State Department of Financial Institutions, Tacoma Public Utilities, United Way of Tacoma/Pierce County, Tacoma/Pierce County Asset Building Coalition, HomeSight, and the Federal Reserve Bank.

For information, call Edwina Magrum at (253) 474-7083, or e-mail her at emmag@harbornet.com.

The Puyallup Tribe is sponsoring the event organized by the City of Tacoma Safe and Clean Team, Improving Livability through Home Ownership.
support from an A-team of sponsors and participants.

Metro Parks Tacoma is inviting neighbors and fans of McKinley Park to a grand-reopening party this Sunday from 1 to 3 p.m.

The park has been a mainstay of the neighborhood for more than a century and recently got a shot in the arm with $1.7 million in bond improvement funds.

Projects included a sidewalk promenade, a new plaza and restrooms and skateboard features. The district had to remove some of the park's older trees, but planted nearly 100 new ones.

Here's more on the park features, from Anne Winters at the Park District:

Friends of McKinley Park, led by neighbors Patrick O'Neil and Darryl Scroggins, were a key group in that important early design work. During that process, residents identified safety improvements and preservation of the park's naturalized areas among their highest priorities.

To enhance safety by increasing visibility and accessibility of the park’s walkway, the community selected the design plan which included raising the sidewalk to create a street grade promenade. This work required significant regrading work and removal of some of the park's mature trees. Several of them had been previously identified by our urban forester on a watch list as needing replacement. Nearly 90 specimen trees were replanted as part of the of the improvement project, providing future generations with a rich biodiversity of healthy trees to enjoy. The vast naturalized area of the park remains forested and was untouched by the work done in the formal area of the park.

The promenade includes a small new plaza and restroom facilities located near the expanded playground, creating really nice gathering spaces for the community, overlooking the Tacoma Dome and downtown.

Sunday's event will include live music from the Joe Baque Trio, community booths and facepainting for the kids. The park is at 907 Upper Park St.

Safe Street's Darren Pen has sent out the alert on a tagging emergency.

Last week, he led a team of cops and residents to the retaining wall along the stretch of State Route 7 between Interstate 5 and McKinley Avenue.

They painted over the gang tagging that had accumulated over the last layer of community paint-over applied a month earlier. The gangs had gotten wise. Instead of using spray paint, they used rollers to super-size their vandalism.

They were back at it again this week. The whole shebang needs another coat of legal paint.

Darren invites anyone to grab a paint roller, take the SR 7 exit eastbound and catch the group at 7 p.m.
They

Here's a few more details about an event that I briefed in the paper version of The News Tribune earlier this week:

Organizers are hoping 1,500 volunteers young and old will show up to tidy up Tacoma’s Eastside this Saturday (May 2).

Already, 1,200 students, families and other community members have signed up to clean around schools and along safe walking routes to schools from 9 a.m. to noon in the 2009 Eastside Clean Sweep project, according to a Tacoma School District news release.

Four St. Vincent DePaul trucks will be stationed throughout the Eastside community to collect used furniture and other salvageable donations. After the clean-up, Clean Sweep participants can enjoy a free barbeque, family activities and entertainment at a community celebration and awards ceremony 12:30 to 2 p.m. at Stewart Middle School, 5010 Pacific Ave.

Schools participating in the clean-up include: Boze, Blix, Fawcett, Lister, Lyon, McKinley, Roosevelt and Sheridan elementary schools; Gault, McIlvaigh and Stewart middle schools and Lincoln High School.

A high school student from the Division 34 Kiwanis and Key Club has collected nearly 2,000 children books that will be distributed at the event.

The Clean Sweep planning committee includes the Tacoma Public Schools, First Creek Neighbors, Tacoma Police Department, Tacoma Housing Authority, City of Tacoma, Boys and Girls Club, Kids at Hope, Safe Streets and the Puyallup Tribe.

The clean-up is supported with a $5,000 grant from the Eastside Neighborhood Advisory Council (ENACT) and another $5,000 from the Puyallup Tribe. For more information or to volunteer, contact Kate Frazier at 253-571-1347.

Debby Abe, The News Tribune

Tonight's the big night for South End and East Side residents who've yearned for celebrity treatment from the City of Tacoma.

The city will roll out its Community Based Services program at 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 22,at Stewart Middle School, 5010 Pacific Ave. The new CBS area will stretch from Interstate 5 to 68th Street between Sheridan and McKinley avenues.

Tacoma Police community liaison officers Don Williams and Bert Hayes have been spreading the word (and the e-mails, and the flyers) that everyone is welcome to come and help set the program's priorities.

The CBS program aims to cut crime and blight and to encourage residents' involvement. To do that, it dedicates a community liaison officer, a code enforcement officer and a program development specialist to the neighborhood.

It promises residents "full support from the City of Tacoma as a whole."

City officials will be there this evening to listen to the problems that most concern residents. Street repairs? Gangs? Drug houses? Overgrown lots? Dangerous dogs? Speeders? Burglaries? Noise? Tagging?

The aim is to set preliminary priorities, and to give people the tools to join the partnership.

One more incentive: There will be snacks.

The Rev. David Alger, executive director of Associated Ministries, has won the 2009 Greater Tacoma Peace Prize.

He’s honored, he said, to be considered in the same group as past winners, including George F. Russell, Jr., the Rev. Ron Pierre Vignec, David Corner and the founders of the Conflict Resolution, Research and Resource Institute.

He and his wife, Sally, are looking forward to going to Oslo in December for the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. His trip is part of the prize awarded by sponsors Norden Lodge #2, Sons of Norway, and Embla Lodge #2, Daughters of Norway.

And he is trying to work out his schedule for May 30, the day he will accept the prize, and the day he will bid his official farewell to his job of nearly 30 years.

Alger came to Tacoma in 1980 with the expectation that he would act as a “metropolitan minister,” promote dialogue among churches, and facilitate their service programs.

It did not work out quite that way.

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The ivy trembled before them.

The ratty recliners bade goodbye to their alley homes.

The creatures living under scores of spare tires found themselves homeless.

If it was blight on First Creek or McKinley Hill, 100 volunteers put it in peril Saturday, thanks to two work parties, the Puyallup Tribe and the city of Tacoma.

Joyce Glass reported that the Dome Top Clean Up crew saturated the neighborhood around Gault Middle School and sent four truckloads of junk to the dump. Allyson Griffith of the Tacoma's Community Based Services program provided safety vests, gloves, garbage bags and the coveted dump passes.

DomeToppers distributed 240 door hangers inviting neighbors to join the group. The also made a list of neighbors who need help with maintenance, abatement or getting rid of gang tagging.

Space is cheap on the internet. Let's name the local heroes: Matthew Williams, Joyce Glass, Bill Mattox, Vern Freeman, John Culhane, Jonathan Zold, Mike, Michael and Jennie Agnew, Lynnette and Larry Scheidt, Marcus Mulligan, Chris Skelton, Kali Kucera, and Mary Young and her grandson.

Joyce sent special thanks to the crew from The Crossing Church, who arrived in their distinctive green bus and pitched in: Brenda Bacon, Dennis Stewart, Paul Bergin, Jim Oliver, Scott Murray, Ruth Beard, Ellen and Vincent Prather, Nikki Nicholson and John Sparks.

Down the hill, Dan Fear deployed two teams to attack trash and invasive plants in the First Creek Watershed. People,including kids fresh for the World Vision egg hunt, dropped in to help, so there were likes more than the 53 volunteers who signed in. I'll get that list from Dan, and add those folks to the blog.

One group started just above the Emerald Queen, hauling out junk that generations of the environmentally unaware have tossed over the creek banks. They specialized in rescuing trees engulfed by ivy. The trick is to cut the ivy vines as high as you can reach up the trunk, peel them down to the ground and then roll them away from the tree. All the ivy up the tree starves to death. The stuff on the ground lives, but doesn't produce seeds for a while.

The second team rescued the sidewalk over the creek's culvert on Fairbanks Street. It was twice as wide as anyone thought, and the overgrowth concealed an intriguing array of bottles.

Quote of the site: "There's nothing easy about ivy," David Whited.

Whited works for the Puyallup Tribe, volunteers with the neighbors and organized the celebratory lunch for DomeTopper and First Creek teams at the Portland Avenue Community Center.

Dish of the lunch: Too Busy to Cook's baked beans with hamburger, adapted from a railroad man's recipe. It's worth a few hours of pulling ivy and hauling sofas to get a big helping of it to enjoy with equally muddy friends.

We have steam to blow off, righteous anger.

But the whole mob with pitchforks image is getting trite.

Better to grab shovels, hammers and clippers and show up at one of two Saturday work parties that offer the chance to whack away at bad stuff.

The First Creek restoration team will kick off Earth Month with a chance to kill all the ivy you want. We are talking cutting, pulling, even rolling up the invasive vine that's attacking and smothering native trees in the watershed.

For the more automotive minded, there will be plenty of opportunities to amass a fine collection of used tires, and possibly shopping carts.

The big fun starts at 9 a.m. and lasts until noon. Muster at 1801 E. 34th St. There's parking in the church lot at East 34th and R streets. Bring sturdy gloves. Organizers will provide tools and directions.

The Puyallup Tribe will celebrate all the good work with a barbecue lunch for volunteers from noon to 1:30 p.m. at Portland Avenue Community Center.

To sign up, call Dan Fear at (425)260-4991, or e-mail firstcreekwatershed@gmail.com.

In South Tacoma, the Manitou Crew got MetroParks' permission to build a garden at the community center, and they've been operating on hyperdrive ever since. Frank Blair and Andy Mordhorst have been trolling for materials, from lumber to fencing.

They'll be meeting at 9 a.m. Saturday morning at the community center, 4802 S. 66th St., to haul sand, removed timbers and dig up old playground rubber. They'll also discuss the layout for the garden.

Interested? Bring shovels, gloves and the realization that living well is the best revenge.

Tacoma Rail may have clocked the fastest-ever remedy to a neighborhood's complaint.

The rotten economy has slowed the railroad business along with everything else. That means fewer cars are hauling freight, and more are sitting idle. Tacoma Rail makes most of its money by running cars, but its managers are using sidings to store cars. The demurrage fees paid by the car owners help support the city-owned railroad.

Two sets of those cars were working for and against a healthy city.

Since early February, several strings of black tanker cars had sat idle on sidings between 72nd and 60th streets west of McKinley Avenue.

They were making money for Tacoma Rail. But they were irking residents in the neighborhood. Who wants an empty asphalt tanker sitting indefinitely beside the back fence? Who wants the taggers who can't resist that big black space to spray paint gang signs?

Glenn Sukys asked if we could find out what was, or had been, in the cars. He guessed they were empty, guessed asphalt and was right on both counts.

He wanted to know how long they'd remain what he considered an attractive nuisance in a neighborhood that's had some crime and foreclosure problems. As of Thursday, the answer was: Until people are buying asphalt again.

Sukys' questions got managers at Tacoma Rail asking themselves the right questions about the effect on the neighborhood and alternative storage.

Over the weekend they had the cars moved to a siding elsewhere on the tracks.

In the future, they'll be more mindful of the people whose homes abut Tacoma Rail tracks.

How remarkable is this?

It's huge. A major public utility moves dozens of rail cars within a couple of days of hearing complaints about them.

Of course, now that the cars are moved, a good deal of the junk people have dumped along the tracks is more visible. The old sofas and mattresses present the perfect payback opportunity: Tacoma's rife with neighborhood clean-ups in the summer. When the dumpsters come to the 'hood, the folks who live along the tracks can thank the railroad, and help themselves, by hauling that junk out of the right of way and into the trash.

Writing about inter-agency cooperation is a great way to cure readers' insomnia.

But a story from the lower East Side demonstrates the real benefit to real people.

Tacoma Police officer Bert Hayes was out with a Department of Corrections officer, checking in on released felons. That, alone, is a healthy collaboration. We want folks who have returned from prison to the community to know that community corrections officers and the police know who and where they are.

Two men on the officers' list were renting a room at 1316 E. 30th St., just west of Portland Avenue at the foot of the McKinley Hill bluff. From the outside, the place is trashed. People have been dumping junk and construction debris in the overgrown yard. It's a blight on a b lock where other residents have cleaned up quite a bit.

Hayes recoiled when the elderly home-owner opened the door.

"I could smell electrical at the back of the house," he said of the wiring.

The only heat in the place is a wood stove with faulty ventilation. Soot from the stove coated the walls.

And then there was the mess: piles of belongings, and litter boxes for three cats. It was beyond anything the 84-year-old owner could sort through.
It was unfit housing, even for the pets.

"It was absolutely appalling," Hayes said. "It's the worst place I've ever seen."

That's saying a lot. Hayes has gone on mission trips. And he's worked rough neighborhoods.

He called in city building inspectors and Tacoma Power inspectors, who cut the electricity. Working with animal control officers, the growing team contacted the Humane Society for Tacoma and Pierce County. The kitties will stay there until the owner is safely settled in a new place.

Pierce County Human Service case manager Paul Calta worked with Associated Ministries to come up with the money to allowthe owner to stay a week at the HomeTel in Fife.

"It buys me time to work with the family, place the client in a safe environment, salvage the belongings and get him placed safely," Calta said. "I'm going to try to place those cats as well. I'm a little worried about the cats. Bert brought him over there, and we brought several bags of food from a food bank. He also brought some frozen dinners from home."

Meanwhile, social workers are trying to set him up with long term care. They also are working with him to retrieve any salvageable belongings from the blighted house.

DOC, meanwhile, is helping the two renters to find a place.

The property needs to be cleaned up, for the sake of the neighborhood. Count on Hayes to get it on the abatement list.

"Everybody worked together," Hayes said. "This is what we do."

Thanks to inter-agency cooperation, the homeowner will be sleeping safely from now on.

This is the kind of help that's available, now that agencies are working so well together. If you know of a senior or disabled person who needs this kind of assistance, call the Pierce County Aging and Disability Resource Center at (253)798-4600.

The kids took home presents, ate a spaghetti meal and had a chance to shop for mom and dad.

But the highlight of Christmas at the North Pole, an annual event at Tacoma Christian Center, was a unanimous choice for the three Gonzalez children.

“I liked taking a picture with Santa Claus,” said Andrew, 8.

“Yeah, I liked taking a picture with Santa Claus too,” said Israel, 6.

And even though 5-year-old Vanessa remained quiet and clung to her mother’s leg, she eventually agreed that she also enjoyed getting a snapshot with St. Nick.

“They had an absolutely great time,” said 26-year-old Julia Gonzalez of Tacoma, the kids’ mother. “This was such a nice thing the church put on.”

The Gonzalezes were among more than 2,000 people who participated in the event Saturday, a joint project of Tacoma Christian Center and World Vision. The activities included songs, games, videos, a meal, a gift for the kids (already wrapped), a spot for kids to get their picture on Santa’s lap, racks of donated clothes and a room where the kids could pick up gifts for their mother and father.

More than 100 volunteers helped route the kids through the various rooms of the large church on Tacoma’s East Side. It took about three weeks to set up the celebration, the church’s pastor, Terry Harris, said.

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