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I hope you all had a great holiday! For me, my favorite gift was seeing one of City Council's most development-skeptical members enjoying what looked like a beautiful Christmas Eve dinner with their family in The James's brand new "Napoli Kirkwood" as my family did the same at the table next door. There are no atheists in foxholes and there are no NIMBYs when you're hunting down a reservation for ten on Christmas Eve!
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- At last week's meeting, City Council was supposed to vote on their idea to remove the sidewalk infill requirement for very large additions, but after hearing from a couple of citizens who disapproved of the plan speak, CM McLean requested that the council "continue" the item to their next meeting on January 9th. CM Luetzow seems to be against the amendment and if we can get McLean and, say, CM Zimmer to join her, we can stop this shortsighted change. Email you council members, hearing from the public clearly makes a difference!
- Last week's Webster-Kirkwood Times:
- Page 10 had a fun story on artist and Kirkwood native (I had no idea!) "Fnnch," famous across the world for his honey bear series
- Page 11 had a nice update (including pictures!) on the Community Center upgrades
- The St. Louis Business Journal published what is perhaps the best (non-Gadfly) article on attitudes towards development amongst citizens and the elected officials since I've been doing this, focusing especially on the failed Jefferson RFP process which I've written on extensively. I'm going to try to have a pdf version available for those who can't get past the paywall next week, but until then, I will say this line made me nervous: "Gibbons said she is working on some type of legislation to protect the character of Kirkwood's historic district, but it's too early to know what form that might take." We should protect historic buildings but there's no such thing as a historic parking lot. Handcuffing Kirkwood's economic growth by blocking development in the most economically prosperous part of the community will leave Kirkwood's residents poorer, more tax burdened, and with fewer amenities. Thats a choice we can make to protect parking lots, it's just not the choice I think we should make.
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That's it for today (for the year?!) Thanks to everyone who made it to last Friday's Housing Holiday Happy Hour; I had a blast! I'm in town until tomorrow evening and then back to NYC so let me know if there's anything I should check out in person in the interim! I'll talk to you all here soon!
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