Public safety

Holiday Party and Community Revisioning When: Thu Dec 8, 2011 6PM-8PM Where: Freedom Foursquare Church Village Square Shopping Center (West side of the building) 660 SE 160th Get Map!

You're Invited!
the Rosewood Initiative is hosting a potluck Holiday Party and Community Revisioning Exhibition on Thursday, December 8th from 6PM-8PM. DINNER PROVIDED! Please bring a dessert to share if you can! This event will be held at the Freedom Foursquare Church located on the west side of the Village Square shopping plaza on SE 160th St.

Thank you to everyone that came to last week's community meeting. Once again it was a great turn out! The Rosewood Initiative is always inspired and encouraged by the show of support. It really proves that we are "Building Our Community Together."

Walking and biking to HB Lee Middle School will soon be safer and easier. The Oregon Department of Transportation has awarded the City of Gresham and Reynolds School District $169,000 to add bike lanes, signs to slow traffic, and new crosswalks on 172nd Ave between NE Halsey and NE Glisan.

New crosswalk, signs and paths
The Gresham project includes extending a bike and pedestrian pathway and building a covered bike structure on the HB Lee campus. It also includes a new mid-block crosswalk and two signs advising drivers of the school zone and their actual speed. The improvements are expected to make it safer for students who face speeding drivers and have difficulty crossing the street as they walk or cycle to school.

One of 10 statewide awards
The project is one of 10 Oregon Department of Transportation awards statewide to promote healthy living among children and reduce congestion, fuel consumption and air pollution around schools.

A partnership for healthy students
It also highlights a new public health partnership between Multnomah County, the cities of Gresham and Portland, and local school districts to prevent obesity and chronic diseases by boosting children's physical activity and healthy food options.

Max rider, 162nd & Burnside

Neighbors helping neighbors The Rosewood Initiative is a non-profit organization launched in 2009 dedicated to making the Rosewood area a safe and desirable place to live, work, and play.

Working Together
To accomplish this goal, they are partnering with residents, apartment managers and owners, businesses, churches, government agencies, social services, neighborhood associations, and public safety agencies.

Rosewood is a roughly 15-block area around the intersection of NE 162nd & E. Burnside. The neighborhood is most commonly defined as SE 157th to SE 165th and NE Holiday to SE Alder. About 70 percent of the area’s 6,500 residents live in 46 apartment complexes.

Unfortunately, many residents in the Rosewood area are at risk due to the influence of gangs, drugs, and human trafficking activities in and around the community. For that reason, the Rosewood Initiative is developing an outreach program called RISE (Rosewood Initiative Sisters Empowered) to help identify at-risk youth and connect them to appropriate mentorship and service programs.

National Night Out website

Send criminals a message! When: Tuesday, Aug 2th, 2011 7-10PM Where: Your Neighborhood!

Last year millions of people, from every state, across 15,000 communities participated in events to help make communities safe and raise awareness about anticrime programs.

National Night Out is a time when individuals and groups are encourgaged to gather together after dark in parks and other public places for wholesome activities. The idea is to symbolically reclaim our public spaces by using them, encouraging other people to use them and making the space feel safe, and discouraging illegal and anti-social activity.

Don't let crime control your neighborhood.

More graffiti trouble at Glen East.

Oh no, not again This past week has seen another increase in gang graffiti near 162nd & NE Glisan, and north along NE 162nd Ave in the southwest corner of the neighborhood -- an area of West Gresham that has been plagued for some time by crime and graffiti.

The latest round of graffiti begin to appear last weekend near 164nd & NE Glisan; at the Glen East apartments, and on the traffic controller in front of Walgreens at the nearby intersection. Two large 'scribbles' (above, below), one on each apartment building, were found Sunday morning. On one building, the scrawl was especially disturbing as it included the tag "RIP MOCO". By Monday evening the graffiti on both buildings had been painted over, muting the message.

Later in the week, north along NE 162nd Av between Holliday & Wasco, neighbors who have been victims of several previous graffiti strikes woke Thursday morning to find themselves once again the victim, with new gang tags on their property.

Gresham Is... A Great Place to Live

A Shining Example While walking to downtown Gresham we experienced an incident that really exemplifies what "Gresham is".

Celebrating a 'mile'stone
As my wife and I walked along the busy street chatting to each other she told me she had traveled nearly 500 miles on her twice daily neighborhood walks over the past 2- 1/2 months. In addition, she proudly stated the weight loss from all that walking has made it easier for her to run and jump. As I congratulated her we came upon a low retaining wall with a wide ledge. I grabbed her arm and held it upward and encouraged her to jump up and walk along the top to demonstrate her new agility. She declined. Again, I encouraged her to jump atop the small wall as I held her arm upward to assist her.

We've got company
At that very moment a Gresham Police car was passing by. The patrol car suddenly braked, made a u-turn, and with lights flashing intercepted us at the street corner. (Oh, this is not good.)

Road repairs, 165th & NE Russell Click to enlarge

Street Repairs Underway, Now through Fall 2011 Pothold Hotline Available Beginning this week and through the Fall five hundred individual street sections will be repaired within the boundaries of the City of Gresham.

Increased funding = More neighborhood repairs
Twenty-five percent of the five hundred scheduled repairs this summer will be residential. This is all made possible due to the increase in the gas tax and licensing fees. In total $3 million dollars will be spent on this project. In the past Gresham has only had $1 million dollars available at a time to repair city streets.

Got a Pothole? Give'm a Call
An adjunct to this project will be a Pothole Hot Line. Call 503-618-2626 to report potholes in your area.

UPDATE: Prowler strikes June 2 Neighbors Beware Sometime between 9PM Monday May 23rd and 6AM Tuesday May 24th a prowler ransacked several cars in the Capri Terrace area stealing receipts, vehicle manuals, registrations and insurance cards.

The next morning neighbors woke to find discarded items strewn across their lawns by the thief as he moved from house to house searching for unlocked vehicles. Locked cars were undisturbed and no car alarms were heard.

At 167th & NE Hoyt the thief ransacked several cars from three adjacent properties, rummaging through the glove compartments and throughly checking underneath and in-between the seats for items with name & address information.

The Gresham Police was called to the scene Tuesday morning after neighbors realized they had been robbed overnight.