The post office meeting, part 2

At the post office meeting yesterday, the subject of graffiti kept coming up by Miami's postmaster Jesus Galvez. He was fixated on graffiti, which is a problem businesses have to face. This didn't address the issue of the bombed out look of the parking lot and the filthy mess inside the facility and the massacred trees. I didn't care for this whitewashing of the real issues.

I actually spoke up at the meeting and said that maybe the graffiti artists who usually come out at night, see the closed facility, see the bombed out lot attached and assume it's an abandoned factory or something, so they spray away and tag the stuff with their graffiti. That got a laugh by the crowd.

As for trees being replaced. Martin Petrey, the post office manger of design and construction for the area, was concerned about finding specific trees that residents feel are native to the area. Comm. Marc Sarnoff said he would find them without a problem, so they should strike that concern off their list.

Another thing is the way the trees would be replaced or mitigated. The plan now is to place half of the money for trees in a trust fund for the post office here and put the other half in a trust fund for the post office facility on US 1 and Bird Avenue, you know, that ugly structure across from the car wash. Comm. Sarnoff would like to possibly see trees or foliage block the ugly structure. That is after all an entrance to the Grove and currently it isn't very pleasing to the eye.

Others felt that the post office should stay out of the tree planning and planting, that they should just just fix the parking lot and allow locals to handle the placement of trees.

Keep in mind that there will be no multi-level parking structure put on the location, that never was the plan. It will be a surface lot as it has always been.

Hopefully they will make it nice, with pavers or bricks or something pretty and also some people brought up the building itself, hoping that it can be painted to maybe fit into the area. I don't know if that means certain colors or what. But anything is an improvement.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the federal government is under no obligation to do any of this. They are doing it because of the complaints and maybe shame. But again, they can easily ignore us, turn their backs and go the other way, so I do give them lots of credit for getting involved.

The meeting yesterday went very well. I was pleased to see so many people turn out.

Photo by Harry Emilio Gottlieb