County Board
Mary Hynes: Jan. 1, 2010 remarks
Good Morning.
Welcome to 2010 – a year that I am sure will be filled with challenges and opportunities. I strongly
support Mr. Fisette’s focus on fiscal and environmental sustainability – in these challenging times, working to lessen our community footprint on the earth while also expanding our efforts to build a “green” future makes a tremendous amount of sense. Once again we are poised to demonstrate how our community can adapt and innovate in tough times, even as we face unprecedented economic challenges.
I’ve lived here for 30 years. For most of those years, Arlington has been in the fortunate position of being able to respond to wide ranging citizen needs with creative government initiatives recognized as national models. In the current environment, however, we must make choices among very worthy activities - choices of size, or scope and even whether some should be continued. In this context, I want to reinforce Mr. Fisette’s call for aggressively looking for efficiencies and process re-engineering while also call challenging us to tap - in new ways - the “people resources” of our County.
We’ve always known that Arlington’s greatest strength is its people. We are a community of giving, helping, smart, hardworking folks who care about our community, our neighborhoods, and each other. We are fortunate that we can call on each other at a time when our financial resources won’t allow us to do everything we think might be helpful to the community and its residents.
Over the coming year, I’ll be putting my efforts, whenever I can, into seeking solutions that involve a broader range of Arlington’s “people resources”. For instance, traffic on some neighborhood streets continues to exceed safe speeds. I’ve invited the School Board, the Civic Federation, the Neighborhood Traffic Calming Committee, the Transportation Commission, the Partnership for Children, Youth, and Families and other interested community groups and citizens to form an Ad Hoc Working Group to identify new, low-cost strategies to slow traffic on neighborhood streets in the absence of resources to construct speed bumps, traffic circles, or other physical changes.
I’ll continue collaborations on issues of particular importance to Arlington’s young people. For example, the Out-of-School-Time Task Force, launched with the Partnership for Children, Youth, and Families and the School Board last fall, will, by the end of this calendar year, be bringing us cost-effective program proposals that help our young people better use their non-school time. In addition, I’ll work with the Partnership for a Healthy Arlington and the Arlington Public Schools to address a significant community problem – teen drinking – by harnessing a new understanding of the gaps in our systems that allow this dangerous behavior to persist among our teens.
I’m also planning to use this period of less intense development activity to work with the Arlington Civic Federation to identify conditions that promote small scale-redevelopment in appropriate places. This has to be done in a way that respects our long held commitment to vibrant transit-oriented commercial development and compliments and is compatible with our single- and multi-family neighborhoods.
We’ll be putting a Capital Improvement Plan together in the spring of 2010. Importantly over the last two years, this Board has initiated a broad initiative to assess the condition of the County’s facilities and properties. I’ll be reaching out to Commissions and community leaders to help make sure our plans meet the infrastructure needs of the community in efficient and creative ways.
As part of my annual New Years Day remarks, I always ask to hear from my fellow Arlingtonians. If you have an idea for how we can improve on what we do, I want to hear from you. If you want join with others in seeking creative ways to address the challenges we face, I want to hear from you. Or, if there is a way the County can be more helpful to you in these difficult times, I want to hear from you.
Making Arlington and Arlingtonians thrive is a challenge we meet best when we meet it together. I look forward to working with all Arlingtonians and, of course, my fellow County Board Members as we begin what I believe will be a great new year.
