What's Up PINAC?

PINAC has its own blog now! Yea! You can follow the latest PINAC happenings and plans now without having to drown your inbox with the dreaded listserv...

What we're currently up to:

Fighting the Business Improvement District (BID) plan in Northampton. Although we squashed legislative efforts to criminalize panhandling, the BID still views panhandling as an inherent problem and Eric Suher claims that most of the businesses that signed the BID petition did so because the anti-panhandling ordinance was included at the time. In fact, we can see in the BID budget the real motives behind this BID plan. Looking at page 40, we see under the "Make a Change Program" $10000 for public safety, $75000 for marketing, and $85000 for advertising. We then turn to page 43 where it states that "Make a Change Program includes costs associated with the coordination of a program to reduce panhandling and homelessness." Yet as we saw earlier, only "public safety," marketing, and advertising are budgeted for. We can only assume then that, just like the anti-panhandling ordinance, the Make a Change Program does not seek to address the root causes of homelessness but intents to instead sweep away undesirable, unmarketable people from the BID through "public safety" initiatives. Indeed, all mentions of addressing homelessness fall under the public safety section of the BID plan.

Also, did anyone notice the mention of corporate sponsorship in the BID plan? What's to keep the BID from getting sponsored by Coca Cola and putting up a huge Coca Cola plackard downtown? Scary stuff...

Developing a Community Improvement District (CID) plan in Northampton. Although I don't really consider downtown Northampton dirty, I'm all for cleaner sidewalks, more trees, flowers, and lights where appropriate. But my issue with the BID is the fact that BID proponents hope to use forced labor to implement this beautification program. People ordered to do community service should do community service, not business service. If businesses want to beautify downtown in order to draw more customers in, okay, but you need to pay workers living wages for this labor. One of many issues I have with the BID... So we're developing a counter-proposal. Trees and flowers are nice, but wouldn't it be even more awesome to have some community gardens? And all this money laid out in the BID plan for marketing, it's kind of absurd to me. Here's what I think: the more inclusive and thriving a community Northampton is, the more it will market itself. So I'm more interested in taking that $75000 for marketing and $85000 for advertising and spending it on the construction of a community center in Noho. A place for art, music, and skill shares. And it could even be a free living space for the homeless, an empowering homeless co-op of sort where they make the rules and they maintain the space. The community center could be self-sustaining this way and a hub for diverse community activity.

http://nobid.tk