Middletown Helps Residents With Code Enforcement

"We will work with residents over the summer and fall and restart the program next spring to continue work on making our City attractive..."

" We will work with residents over the summer and fall and restart the program next spring to continue work on making our city attractive" ..... while we do our best to attract the most Section 8/ welfare candidates with the theme of welfare saturation, continue to maintain our desolate, vacant, brown field industrial sites, continue to lose business, employment, jobs, population, continue to plow money into a downtown area with no direction or developmental plans and continue to ignore the most basic amenities with our streets and infrastructure to the point where the streets will end up gravel and the sewers and bridges will collapse at any given moment. Atta girl, Gilleland! Way to stay focused on the important things this town needs.

This "Clean Up Middletown" idea is a complete crock of city officials on crack.

I swear,they're like nats that just won't stay away.Our city is in poor shape because our taxes are being used to pay these morons to go around and harass people about cracks in the porches,small spots in the over hang over the porch that need painted,garage doors being torn down and new ones put up because they don't think we should have those doors on our garage,put a new gutter up....blah blah blah. Why don't they do something useful with our taxes such as eliminate the idiots that harass people and start paying people to come up with good ideas on what to do to improve the city? Telling the residents they need to do this that and the other isn't fixing the city. Business doesn't come to a city to look at the houses.They look at the city in general and look at how well kept it is.

So my thoughts are,tear down all those crumby old buildings they say they're going to use downtown and slowly start building new ones.Forget about the ideas about the "historical" part of Middletown and the way it used to be.Think of the way it needs to be now.Bring in some recreational stuff.Some museums.Look at some of what Gatlinburg,Tennessee has.Sure,it's a tourist attraction town.But hey,it brings in money.I'm not saying go all out and put in a lot of in-door putt putt courses and game rooms,but it wouldn't hurt to bring in something.Put up some go-kart tracks here and there.Not a lot because we don't want the kids skipping school and all that,but enough to give people something to do besides worry about whether the city will be after them about a small bit of space that needs a touch of paint.

Middletown has plenty of room to bring in business and recreation,but instead they want to focus on being dictators and trying to control people.In some ways they're like Hitler.They know the people want to leave,but they know they can't because they don't have enough to just go.So they continue to do stuff to either push people to suicide or they push stuff on people to keep them paying the city to where they have nothing at all.

Sorry if some of this sounds corny.But hey,I'm venting and I think more people should.This is my first post.So hopefully it isn't too bad.lol

Another idea for Middletown would be,if they want to keep the historical part of Middletown is,make the old downtown the historical area and build an entirely new up to date downtown.And the way I mean this is,I went to Ft.Worth Texas back in May.I seen the actual city itself.And then I went to the Stockyards.The Stockyards is basically for tourist purposes now,but it is the historical part of Ft.Worth. They had the old streets from way back when.Still had the old buildings that were fixed up to look nice,but still remind you of what it looked like back in the day.I know Middletown's not as big as Ft.Worth,but hey,it's an idea to get things flowing.They mostly had museums,shops,and restaruants,with a bull riding arena(yes the one you see on ESPN if you watch it).Billy Bob's Texas is the name of it.

If they'd fix the old downtown up like that and get rid of the bars and pawn shops,and tear down that waste of space they call a parking garage,downtown would look nice.But they're going to have to work on their problems and stop looking at the residents' small tiny problems that we can deal with as time goes on,when we have the money to deal with it.

Since they're constantly building out by I-75,they need to just go ahead and start making that section the new downtown.It'll be by the highway,where lots of people drive through,and there is plenty of room to work with.

RealDeal:

I lived in the Dallas-Ft. Worth metro-plex for about three years in the mid-80s, and was involved with new industry to the south as well as the first attempt at DART (Dallas Area Rapid Transit). While you are correct in your assessment of the old versus new in Ft. Worth, what you may not realize is this:

All of the restaurants, shops, etc., and yes, even Billy Bob’s, were all the visions of PRIVATE developers, and were implemented with “at-risk” venture capital. Some of the early ventures in that area failed (unfortunately) but there were always other entrepreneurial types waiting to test THEIR visions at those same locations. Fortunately for Ft. Worth, their leaders actually DID encourage business and tried to make it EASY for the visionaries to take their shots at success.

Such is not the case in Middletown. In Middletown, a small group wants to control ALL goings-on and do so with little regard for what makes sense commercially. They simply want what THEY want, and if others go broke trying to provide it…well, that’s just too bad. If anyone proposes a business that THEY don’t like, even if the business plan is sound, well…the Planning and Zoning folk, the Historic and Landmarks Commission, and every other red tape-wielding bureaucrat at 1 Donham Plaza will soon put the kibosh on it.

Can you imagine the horror that would result if someone wanted a zoning variance to put a stockyard in downtown Middletown for a Billy Bob type enterprise??? They would have only two chances…SLIM and NONE. And Slim won’t even make it across the city limits with the livestock for the first rodeo!!!