Blog from the 'burbs

Brad Rourke of Rockville Central has posted some well-written summaries of his interviews with the three candidates for Rockville Mayor in the elections coming up on November 6. There are even links to podcasts of the interviews available.

Of all the candidates running for City Council in the November elections, there are two that I will vote for without hesitation: Carl Henn and John Britton. Both have been actively involved in Rockville civic life for years, as thoughtful and articulate spokespeople for issues they are concerned about. Carl Henn has been a tireless proponent of the need to seriously address issues of global warming and oil dependency in a real and immediate way in Rockville. He has a concrete plan to improve public transit and make Rockville more pedestrian friendly and energy efficient. John Britton is a friend of our family, and another example of someone who has devoted considerable time to improving the quality of life in Rockville, through his work with RORZOR, the Cultural Arts commission and most recently, as chairman of the Rockville Planning Commission. As he says in this Gazette article, Rockville is ready for changes to our code and ordinances that will impose a higher standard of environmental quality on our living. We agree.

Over the weekend, I wrote a script I've been meaning to get around to for awhile: one that runs through the database contents and converts URL's like "rockvilleliving.com/listcategory.php?cat=94" into something more meaningful like "rockvilleliving.com/apartments_townhouses", creating a list that can be put into an htaccess file in this form:

RewriteRule ^apartments_townhouses$ listcategory.php?cat=94 [NC,L]

(where NC means ignore the case, and L means don't process any more rules if this one is a match). This does an automatic redirect to the right php page, as is done with the Quick directory lookup at the top of this page for example, and makes those pages more search-engine indexable (they won't appear to be dynamically generated) and also more recognizable and memorable. This page has a good description of the how and why of doing rewrites.

This morning I joined a tour (organized by Aileen Klein of the Town Center Action Team and David Levy, Rockville's Chief of Long Range Planning and Redevelopment) of the soon-to-be-open VisArts Center and the already-open Rockville Innovation Center, both housed in the Arts and Innovation Center in Rockville Town Center, on the corner of Gibbs St and the main square, next to the library and above La Tasca Restaurant. Both promise to be very welcome additions to the Rockville community. Harriet Lesser, VisArts' Director of Exhibitions, led the tour of the two-level VisArts center, which houses several working artists' studios, a gallery (where the opening show on Comic Books & the Arts will be), a large events room, ceramics and photography labs, and studios for painting and drawing classes. The Center is scheduled to open September 30 and will be offering all kinds of art classes beginning this fall.

Lynne Benzion, Associate Director of Rockville Economic Development, Inc introduced us to the Montgomery-County-run business incubator on the 4th and 5th floors of the building. The center offers a well-located, well-appointed place for start-up businesses (with tele-conferencing plasma screens in every conference room and WiFi available throughout), and one in which tenants may also take advantage of programs that teach business skills and offer support with licensing, intellectual property, financing and other issues from the Center's several sponsors (including Shulman, Rogers, Gandal, Pordy & Ecker, P.A. law firm, Adventist Health Care, Montgomery College, and Watkins, Meegan, Drury & Company, LLC, a Bethesda-based accounting firm). There are already several tenants, some of whom are listed on the REDI website.

The Rockville City Council voted in July to end the highly successful once-a-week trash pilot program that was carried out over several months in the Hungerford and Monument Park neighborhoods, and provide city-wide twice-a-week trash collection instead, a disappointing outcome to those of us who support a less costly, more environmentally friendly once-a-week solution. But we have not given up hope. I was gratified to see at the end of this article in the Gazette that Susan Hoffman considers the choice of this "expensive, least efficient, most polluting system" still open for debate.

Art Stigile, one of the participants in the pilot program, has been very active in rallying people to support the extension of the successful pilot program to the whole city (though it appears most residents in the pilot neighborhoods don't need much rallying -- they're already in agreement), and has created a petition to be collected and sent to the Council in September. I put up a modified version of the petition for residents of any part of Rockville which you can fill out and send if you feel so moved. And here's a list of some local resources that provide alternatives to throwing things away.