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Subscribe to City LineAugust 7, 2009
From the office of Mayor George Schloegel
Along with City Council members Ricky Dombrowski and Libby Milner-Roland, I would like to invite you to a community meeting Monday night at Herbert Wilson Community Center.
We will use this town hall meeting to update residents on progress at the Veterans Affairs property, along with a proposal for the Clower-Thornton Nature Trail that will be done with help from the Seabees.
Parts of this plan include as many as 10 athletic fields on the north portion of the property. Another facet of the proposal could include a Botanical Garden.
We will have maps and sketches of the plans at the meeting and your input is very important. The meeting particulars can be found farther down in this email.
I also want to use this edition of City Line to further explain our intent behind the clean-up letters that were recently sent to property owners asking them to deliver an action plan to us by the end of the month.
Many properties have already been cleaned, and while many have been left vacant, they are no longer threats to public safety.
But simply because a property might no longer pose a threat to the public doesn’t mean the City of Gulfport no longer wants to hear from the property owner.
Yes, there are several options available to the city that allow us to take action on property owners who refuse to respond.
However, I want our citizens to understand that those options should be reserved for extreme cases. Instead, our intent is to help property owners find practical solutions.
The city wants to help find suitable tenants or buyers for these empty downtown properties, and to do that, we need to work with all our property owners. We need to know more about what each owner hopes to do with his or her property before we can help.
On another note, there is reason to celebrate this week in Gulfport. Four of the city’s five water systems managed by SouthWest Water Company recently received perfect scores by the state Department of Health.
After a detailed inspection and evaluation of five systems, four earned a perfect score of 5.0 and one earned the second-highest rating of 4.7. More on the perfect scores can be found toward the end of this email.
I want to congratulate our Department of Public Works and SouthWest Water Company on this great achievement.
We already live in a good city, and with your help, all of us working together, we will make it great. Have a safe and fun weekend.
Sincerely,
George Schloegel
Mayor
Gulfport’s water gets high marks
Four of the city’s water systems managed by SouthWest Water Company are perfect, according to the state Department of Health.
Each water system in Mississippi is subject to an annual evaluation by the state department of health. After a rigorous inspection and evaluation of five systems, four earned a perfect score of 5.0 and one earned the second-highest rating of 4.7.
“There is a lot that goes into making our water not only safe to drink, but making it the best quality water possible,” said Mayor George Schoegel. “We could not be more pleased with these results.”
The City of Gulfport began a public-private partnership with SouthWest Water in 1999 to operate and maintain the City’s Public Works Department, which includes the City’s five water systems.
“Gulfport is the second largest city in Mississippi and getting a perfect score on multiple drinking water systems that serve this many residents is a rare and major accomplishment,” said Jeff Blackwell, SouthWest Water’s Project Manager in Gulfport.
Office of Public Information - rlafontaine@gulfport-ms.gov - Phone: 228-868-5782
P.O. Box 1780 Gulfport, MS 39502-1780 - FAX: 868-5800
