Burns points out that I’ve neglected to mention that there will be a Gang Prevention Summit held at the Boys & Girls club on January 17th.  The Agenda (so far) is here.  This issue, and others like it, will take some time to solve so this won’t be a one and done kinda deal and this seems like a good place to start.  There has been some consternation out there (justified in my view) that this has turned into some sort of love-in.  I hope that the updated agenda has allieviated some of these concerns. 

A final and more detailed agenda will be released tomorrow.  I’ll post it then.

Here’s the latest agenda:

6:00 p.m.          Welcome, introductions (Mr. Lawrence D. Hughes, City Manager)

6:05 p.m.          Agenda overview and goal/purpose of summit (Chief Doug Keen)

6:20-6:30           Northern Va. Gang Task Force history and summary (Director Ray Colgan)

6:30- 7:00          NVGTF Operations overview, including recognition/response (Lt. Dan Hess)

7:00- 7:20          NVGTF GRIT (prevention) overview (Mr. Rick Buchholz)

7:30-8:00-          Limited Q and A session

Thanks for the reminder DB.

So, we had our meeting on regulating SOB’s the other night and the folks from Public Works showed up with a walk-on item about the overpass on Rt. 28. 

Several months ago the folks from VDOT came and briefed the Council on the progress of the project.  It was an interesting presentation and this is meeting where that map that I posted awhile back came from.  The representatives at that point indicated that Rt. 28 would be 4 lanes throughout the project. 

Well, 3 months later and the VDOT folks indicate that we’re down to 2 lanes for the better part of 2 months.  I’m listening to this guy talk and I thought my head was gonna pop off.  I kinda lost my cool and let ’em know what I thought.  It’s going to be a mess.  We now have about 3 weeks to figure out how to route around the congestion and also to plan for emergency services.  Since we’re now in with the County for dispatch there are more resources but planning is somewhat more complicated. 

I’m really mad about this but there doesn’t seem to be much we can do about it.  I do know that the people of at public works are going over the plan with VDOT to see what can be done.  As for the traffic, both now and in the future, there isn’t much the City can do about it: the vast majority of traffic on that part of 28 is into or out of the County….