NEARTOWN ASSOCIATION (NTA) MEETING Cherryhurst Community Center, Tuesday April 22, 2003 Minutes

NTA President Raju Adwaney called the meeting to order at 7:05 p.m. Robert Graham moved to approve the March minutes and Ed Gonzales seconded.

Announcements: Donna Roth announced that a landscape project for the 1100 block of Lovett was getting started and solicited donations. A neighborhood florist has volunteered to do the design which will include native plants and mature trees. The project will need approval from the COH Parks dept. Mandell Place has agreed to donate one tree (15-30 gal. ~ $50) and Spencer Co. will plant trees at cost. The East Montrose Home Tour is scheduled for May 18^th from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The cost is $10 per person (cash only) and proceeds benefit the East Montrose Civic Association. Ed Gonzales had received automatic notices from TABC that Ruthie's Ice House at 1829 Richmond is applying for a beer/wine license. A business at 1402 Westheimer, at Republic Square, is also applying for a license.

Spur 527 Project Mike Mark presented an update on the ongoing Spur 527 issue. He stated that beginning last Aug. the Neartown Spur task-force has pursued two goals - traffic mitigation and Spur redesign (constructing a portion of the Spur below grade). The original TXDoT schedule for the Spur had construction beginning in Feb. 2004 (would be closed for ~33 months) and TXDoT wanted to accelerate this to Feb. 2003. The Spur task-force approached TXDoT about rescheduling, and TXDot reached an agreement with the COH to delay the start date to Feb. 2004. There have been a number of meetings on the possibility of de-coupling the Spur project from the US59 construction currently under way. One suggestion has been to postpone the project until 2006. Mike stated that the next step for the task-force was to engage an engineering firm to determine whether the two projects can be structurally de-coupled in a way that will allow the Spur to be connected later. If this is possible, then the task-force would also like to commission a redesign of the Spur that could be presented to TXDoT. The total cost of this engineering work may be ~$70,000 (the initial phase to determine feasibility would be less than this). There are other allies in this project including Midtown, TIRZ, etc., and Neartown's share of the cost would be ~$15,000 to be raised from multiple sources. Mike estimated that it would take ~ 30 days to raise the money. Ed Gonzales announced that a separate bank account had been set up for the project.

The meeting was adjourned. NTA Secretary, Dana Padgett