1. City Council approved the Five Points traffic plan at Tuesday's meeting with 5-1 vote. This is not a surprise. The only opposition it faced on council was Mike Schweder, who ended up voting for it, Jean Belinski, who voted against it, and Jay Leeson, who was absent from the meeting.
You can read about it here.
My take: Something needed to be done about the traffic in that area. This plan of one-way roads seems to be the best plan suggested. I am not sure why it will take from April 2009 through December 2009 to turn some roads from two-way to one-way, but that is the timetable.
2. The City Council Recreation Committee, which consists of council members Belinski, Schweder and William Reynolds, had meeting this week. They are changing the use permits for the city's little league teams to use the city's fields. The permits were all terminated in December, so the city could make changes. As you may recall, Lehigh Little League and the Bethlehem Blue Mountain League team were involved in a few tussles regarding the use of a field at the City's Monocacy fields. One of the proposed changes include the city collecting fees from teams to use fields, instead of the local little league. A little league will have use of the field for $1 per year. A team wanting to use the field would pay the City $150.00, who would give that money to the Little League to pay for maintenance and lights.
Another change, proposed by Reynolds, would be to have the organizations submit their financial statements to the city earlier. Currently little league and other organizations submit their financial statements by March 31st, the change would move that to the middle of February. The change would allow more time for the city to make sure the fees, collected by the City and given to the little leagues, are being properly spent once they get to the little league.
You can read more about it here.
My take: It is about time that City Council steps in a regulates these little leagues and the control they have over the public fields. These leagues were profiting from charging other teams huge fees to use the fields, and the little leagues get to use the fields for nothing. I will admit that the little leagues do maintenance and pay for the electricity for the fields, but the profits they were making were ridiculous.
3. Council Meetings will now begin at 7:00 pm, instead of 7:30 pm.
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I ran across this post today. Despite the fact that weeks have passed since you wrote it, I am compelled to respond. I was the Treasurer of one of the Bethlehem little leagues for several years, until about 3 years ago when my kids stopped playing. I can't speak of the situation at any other league, or even of the current situation in my old league, but I can say that our league certainly didn't make any ridiculous profits - in fact, we really made no profits. If all went well, we carried over enough money from one year to cover the start-up costs the next year, and maybe put some aside in a fund to buy a new lawn tractor after a couple of years of saving. I don't remember that we renting out the use of our fields. We let an adult softball league use our fields once, but the beer drinking and people sitting on our brand new dugout roof caused us to stop that after one game. People often assumed that we made all kinds of money from snack bar revenue - but we essentially paid retail prices for the snack bar stock, and the electric bills from running freezers and refrigerators 24 hours a day in a small, sun-baked building were substantial. By the time we paid the league's fees to Little League Baseball Inc., paid the substantial amounts for property and liability insurance, replaced worn out and lost uniforms and gear, maintenance equipment and snack bar equipment, paid utilities, bought infield dirt and paid the freight charge to bring it in, etc., there just wasn't much left.
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