Anyone missing a few beer cans...

David Lapier and I spent New Year's day spiffing up the neighborhood a little bit. Next time you walk down the Deborah Bice-Broussard sidewalk along Kinney Ave hill you will notice that the abundance of beer cans, paper, food wrappers, discarded COA parking signs and such have been removed from between the sidewalk and the condos. Maybe Flipnotics will take a moment or two to clean up the trash above their establishment.

I hope that this is just the first in a series of projects we take on over the year to help make this neighborhood a more pleasant place to live. If you would like to volunteer to help on a future project, please contact me using the email at the bottom of the page. If you have an idea for a project, contact us too. BTW, it took less than an hour for David and I to accomplish this cleanup.

Oak Wilt . . . Murdered Pecan trees . . . What to do . . .

There is a little movie making the rounds that covers the recent loss of the pecan trees on Barton Springs Road. While it is entertaining, it goes a bit overboard personalizing the trees and accusing the developers of murder. The real thing that we should be rallying around is not this movie but the slow death by disease that is starting to affect the oaks in Zilker.

The Zilker Yahoo! Group has been abuzz with emails about oak wilt that seems to be creeping from the Barton Hills neighborhood into the Zilker neighborhood. Hopefully those in the affected area (shown above - Rabb, Wilke, Fortune, Arthur, Airole, Westridge area) are doing something about it, but I do believe that all of us need to be made aware of the issue and take appropriate action to keep this from spreading too much.

Chris Dolan of the city's Oak Wilt Program can be contacted at 974-1881. There are also preventative measures you can take. You can inject the trees with fungicide BEFORE they get infected, but Mr. Dolan is the person to contact. These oak trees are much more important to the neighborhood. Thanks to Suvi Aika for providing the image above to the Zilker list.

This City Really Knows How to Beautify

We have all been grousing about the roads being torn up for the current wastewater improvements, and we are all anxious for the project to be over. Many people have had to live with the project being in their front yards while some of us just have to suffer the torn up and sometime closed streets. I wonder why they do not have to clean up after themselves. A friend of mine recently pointed out that the sign and associated debris has been laying on the ground at the corner of Kinney and Barton Springs for nearly 6 months. I know the sign just says "improving" and not "beautifying", but this is really ridiculous. In addition, you can find broken signs and sandbags left all over the neighborhood. I saw the sign company pick up the sign(s) from a corner by my house, and they just walked right past the sandbag. Zilker and the entire city do not deserve this litter - especially when it is being left by contractors the city hires!

PS - here is that number to call if you have any questions of ACWP

Our Lovely Sidewalks . . . What SideWalks?

On an overcast Sunday in early March David Lapier and I decided that it was about time to reclaim a portion of the sidewalk on the south side of Barton Springs Road. While the city occasionally sends out a contractor to weed eat the hell out of the median on Barton Spring Road, nothing much gets done along the right-of-way on the south side of the street. How many city employees drive by this area on any given day? Well, the two of us spent a little over a half an hour down there picking up trash and cutting back the brush which had almost overtaken the entire walk.

How many of you saw the fire plug in the first photo? The next time you are walking down the section of sidewalk between Barton Blvd. and Kinney Ave. enjoy the fact that you do not have to step out into the road anymore. The drainage system that was so carefully crafted has been unblocked too. That road sign and orange sand bag are not a from the current road project(s) - they were left from a previous project!