Residents Can Be Activists and Make a Difference in their City

Residents in the Woodlands may have noticed their curbs along Woodlands Blvd are now clean thanks to the City of Tamarac

By: Sharon Aron Baron

You don’t have to be an elected leader to make a difference.  Take it from me, anyone can make a difference in their community whether it’s volunteering, or being an active member on your homeowner’s association.

I take another route. I see things that need change, and not only do I write about them, I go further and address them at city commission meetings, where I ask them to consider my suggestions.

If I don’t attend city commission meetings, I’m watching them through live-streaming at home on my computer.

Oh yes, and let me add. I was instrumental in making that happen as well.

I was also tired of our streets and curbs looking dirty and black and I wanted to do something about this.  I drive a lot outside our city limits, and because I’m the editor of Coral Springs Talk, I attend a lot of Coral Springs city commission meetings as well, and so I know first-hand what’s important to the Mayor and commission there.  One of the Mayor’s goals was bringing up the city’s curb appeal to attract potential buyers in the area.

Mayor Vince Boccard said in 2012, “We’ve lost focus of what brings people here.  We’ve been so interested in the financial side of the city that we’ve lost sight of the beauty of the city.  The real estate market is going to change and when it does, we need to be ready by having the curb appeal.”

They spent money cleaning their city up: parks were revamped, the downtown was revitalized with landscaping and bus benches, and they invested in pressure cleaning all of their streets, sidewalks and medians.

Tamarac crews pressure cleaning on University Drive and Commercial Blvd

Once their streets were pressure cleaned, it was like night and day when driving between the two cities through Nob Hill, Pine Island, or University.

We needed consistency.  We needed to clean up our act.

I brought this to the attention of our city commission in 2013, and wrote about it several times on Tamarac Talk. Although I didn’t think they listened, they did. They put pressure cleaning in the budget this year.

This is why you have been seeing curbs and medians and city-owned sidewalks being cleaned up. According to Elise Boston, spokesperson with the city, crews have finished Nob Hill, Pine Island and University Boulevards. This week, they started on Woodlands Blvd at Bailey Road and are heading South.

Hopefully, code enforcement will be sending out notices to businesses with adjacent sidewalks to clean them as well.

If you see something that you feel needs to be changed in our city, speak up at a city commission meeting, where you are allowed to address the mayor for three minutes.  If it makes sense financially, and if it’s in the best interest for the greater good of the city, then it may be considered in the future.