City makes changes to avoid Halloween mischief

Last Halloween, the Athens Police Department reported 75 arrests and was tasked with maintaining crowd control without riot gear when a fight involving 11 people broke out in a rowdy crowd on Court Street.

In addition to regularly implemented policies in preparation for the Halloween block party, the Athens Police Department and Athens Service Safety Director have both devised new ways to ensure that safety and order can be maintained in the midst of large crowds.

“Last year we didn’t have any place to store our riot gear that was convenient to Court Street," APD Lt. Ralph Harvey said. “Being stored at the station is not ideal in the event of an outbreak of crowd violence.”

This year, the riot gear will be stored in a mobile van that will travel up and down court street to one of four designated “rally points” in case of an emergency so that officers can quickly have access to riot gear.

There are 40 bags filled with riot gear that include chest and leg padding, a baton, shield mask, gas mask, and tear gas. These are available for the 27 APD officers on foot and 4 mounted on horses, with overflow for some of the officers coming in from other towns.

30 footed and 30 mounted officers are paid $150 to help aid the APD and Ohio University police throughout the night, but they do not necessarily have riot gear.

“We are able to handle riot situations through our own training, so it’s not necessary for outside city officers to be equipped with riot gear and trained in riot behavior,” Harvey said. “In the event of a riot, we will put our own officers in the riot lane and have out of town officers follow up behind to make arrests.”

The city has also decided to make changes to their regular street pattern this Halloween, making Mill Street one-way eastbound towards Elliot Street starting Friday at 3 p.m. and ending Sunday morning.

“Mill is becoming more of a party area each Halloween, creating a lot of pedestrian traffic,” Assistant Service Safety Director Rob Lucas said. “Making the road one-way in the direction away from Court Street will lower the amount of people in the area as well as lowering the chance of people getting hit by car traffic."

This setup will also allow for the flow of traffic to be away from Court Street, which the city hopes will aid in crowd dispersion.

“We’ve set up bandstands at the North and South ends of Court Street the past few years and placed dumpsters and portable toilets intermittently, all in mind of crowd compaction,” Lucas said. “When crowds stop moving, that’s when trouble arises.”

Despite mass preparation for a worst-case scenario crowd uprising, the most common charges on Halloween according to APD are for public urination or carrying an open container.

“The most important thing to us is that safety and the law are maintained,” Harvey said.

Alongside help from outside officers and OUPD, OU will also help the APD maintain order with their standard 100 “Green Jacket Volunteers” strolling campus property with walkie-talkies to police from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m.

“The student fests the past two years especially demonstrate the potential for disaster when crowds congregate, and any time you take a community this size and have a huge influx of people flock to it, you must plan,” Associate Director for Residential Education Judy Piercy said. “Halloween in Athens is a huge event, and it’s just about negating the risks of crowd behavior.”

Slideshows in media outlets

In the "ONLINE ONLY" section of The New Yorker magazine today, I saw this slideshow that made me think of my looming slideshow project due for this class. Granted, this slideshow is a review of an art exhibit of the Guggenheim and not photographs, but the concept of using a slideshow with featured paintings in the exhibit then an experienced curator making his own commentary is an interesting one. Slideshows with pictures never used to be common in magazine media, and The New Yorker goes one step further by making the piece a feature on a concentrated topic of art. I definitely feel as if I am seeing more slideshows across the board from news/magazine sources online.

Click the link for the slideshow below:

AUDIO SLIDE SHOW

Monsters and Shy Beauties

OCTOBER 25, 2010

This week in the magazine, Peter Schjeldahl reviews “Chaos and Classicism,” at the Guggenheim. Schjeldahl takes a close look at reactions to war and dictatorships in European art from 1918 to 1936, including Otto Dix’s gruesome sketches, Pablo Picasso’s neoclassical detour from surrealism, and Mario Sironi’s use of classical statuary.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/multimedia/2010/10/25/101025_audioslideshow_classicism#ixzz12pluOv4n

Proposed ordinance could save Athens $400,000

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An ordinance introduced at last night’s City Council meeting could save the city an estimated $400,000 over 15 years in energy costs if passed on Nov. 1.

Environmental Chairman Elahu Gosney proposed the plan to enter a contract with Perfection Group, Inc., a business based in Cincinatti, Ohio that helps cities, counties and corporations find financially feasible options for reducing energy costs.

Perfection Group, Inc.’s plan would cost the city $417,000 to outfit four city buildings with more energy efficient heating/cooling systems or new windows and light fixtures.

“We’ll be borrowing about $300,000 from a local bank in terms of a short term loan,” Gosney said. “The remaining $117,000 will come from city funds designated for this type of infrastructure.”

The Athens Community Center located on East State Street, the City Code building located on Curran Drive and the City Hall building and public parking garage on Washington Street are the four buildings designated for updating.

The Athens Community Center will have new heating/cooling system controls installed, as well as improved water pumps, high-efficiency double pane windows and upgraded exterior lighting, costing $358, 780 of the allocated cost of the energy saving project in the ordinance.

“The recreation center will have the most work done because it costs the city the most money and is very large,” Council member Jim Sands said. “With just changing lighting in and outside of the community center, the electric bill for the building will go from about $100,000 a year to about $60,000.”

It will take an estimated eight years to see the savings equal the project’s $417,000 bill.

“It will take time, but it isn’t bad when you consider we will be seeing changes in bills for all four buildings as soon as everything is installed,” Gosney said. “These are only small projects on the scale of what our city could be doing to save energy costs.”

The project included in the ordinance is only one of many presented to the city in Perfection Group, Inc.’s evaluation package.

“The Fire Department’s station and Athens Police Department building were also presented to have energy savings possible,” Athens Mayor Paul Wiehle said. “We just need to handle one ordinance and project at a time for now, budget-wise.”

The ordinance will be read again twice at City Council and then voted on Nov. 1, but there is little doubt that it won’t be passed.

“I have no concerns it won’t pass,” Wiehle said. “ It’s impossible for the city to not save money here, which is extremely important considering our need to cut the budget.”

This is my cat, Eliot.

Meow.

Noise ordinance can't dull Court Street's roar

The stricter enforcement policy of the noise ordinance has silenced the west side of town, but it hasn’t crashed Court Street’s party.

Captain of the Athens City Police Department Tom Pyle decided to be more proactive in enforcing the current noise ordinance after a controversial amendment to the law with stricter penalties was tabled last spring.

With the proactive approach, officers can warn or cite noisy households or businesses on an on-view basis, instead of waiting for a complaint to be called in. After 10 p.m. weekdays and midnight on weekends, if an officer judges that noise from a household or business can be heard 50 feet away or past the property line, they can take action in form of a warning or citation.

Capt. Pyle hopes the changes in enforcement will lower noise levels so that no stricter ordinance would be necessary, but residents and businesses on Court Street haven’t been affected or seen change.

“It’s impossible to get work done in my apartment during the weekends because I can hear people walking home at all hours during the night after the bars close,” Ohio University senior and Court Street resident Bart Rennels said. “The noise from that is a nuisance but it can’t compare to the noise I hear living above a bar.”

Conversely, Mill Street Resident and OU junior William Bracken has been asked five times the past school year to turn off music at his house and send people home for being too loud.

“It’s inevitable that this town is going to be loud on the weekends, and it doesn’t seem fair that I can get a warning so quickly but someone in an apartment on Court doesn’t have to worry about being too noisy,” Bracken said. “They can’t control the noise uptown, so why are they focusing so much on trying to crash our parties on streets like Mill that can hear all the bar crowds anyway?”

When it comes to bar noise, Capt. Pyle maintains that the only way a bar may get a citation for noise is if tenants living above called it in. However, since the department’s focus right now is maintaining silence in possibly residential areas, bar noise isn’t a top priority.

Manager of Broney’s Alumni Bar Kyle Paradise wasn’t even aware that Court Street and bars fell under the noise ordinance’s jurisdiction.

“We’ve never had issue with the police, or people complaining about noise coming from us,” Paradise said. “I think it would be near impossible for police to ever be able to control the volume of Court when the bars close at 2 a.m., there are just way too many people.”

Chairman of Athens Safety Committee Sherry Coon said that there may be another committee formed regarding noise within the uptown area in the future.

“I view Court Street as a different problem, since we receive complaints about noise from residents living in streets a fair distance from the bar area,” Coon said. “Because of the geography of Athens, the noise reverberates off the mountains and lands somewhere else. We didn’t even discuss uptown when we considered the new ordinance, because it’s seems like a problem above us. ”

For students living on Court Street trying to get work accomplished during the weekend, Athens Mayor Paul Wiehl didn’t offer much sympathy when asked what could be done for uptown residents upset by noise.

“Court Street is the heart of this town on the weekends, and any student that’s been here for a week knows that,” Wiehl said. “It’s a give and take situation if you’re going to live there and that is why the police are taking the action in more residential areas, in hopes of regulating areas where it is actually possible to regulate.”

Even with blaring music, sirens, traffic and drunk banter at all hours in the morning, some students love living on Court Street and are not disheartened by the lack of enforcement of the noise ordinance.

“I can go on my fire escape and people-watch Court Street while looking at the mountains simultaneously,” junior Katelyn Sierzputowski said. “This is the only opportunity I’ll have to be a resident in a city area where the residents are preponderantly my age. Yes it’s obnoxiously loud, but it’s an experience, and I’d prefer it stay the way it is than be quiet.”

Students flock to Court Street when the weekend rolls around or big news hits.