It's Time We Changed Our Codes About the Medians

Almost everything in the Village is controlled by Codes, and our public spaces are no exceptions.  Although some Village residents complained that we did not hold ourselves as a municipality to the same standards that our Codes say applies to individual residences, the Codes are the same everywhere in the Village, and they're enforced the same everywhere.

The Code for the medians is simple.  It has one main feature.  No one can park or drive on the medians.  Except...  People can request, and can be approved for, temporary parking either for themselves or on behalf of someone doing work at their house, assuming the work vehicle can't park on the homeowner's property, driveway, or swale.  Also, no one can drive on the medians, and no one can dump garbage on the medians.  Some, but not all, of the medians have signs saying you can't drive on them.

But here's the problem.  First of all, we do in fact allow temporary parking on the medians, with permission.  Second, there are generally not waste receptacles on the medians, except for a few of them that have animal waste stations, and like it or not, people clearly do dump debris in the medians.  Third, and perhaps most dispositive, and conspicuous, the medians are not generally developed in any meaningful way.  There are plantings on all of them, and those plantings are mismatched trees.  The canopy is spotty and incoherent, and there is no understory.  The ground cover is ratty grass, weeds, and open dirt.  So anyone who assumed that it was OK to drive along medians to pass a car stopped in the street, or over them to make a U-turn, or dispose of something in them, would have little to suggest this kind of usage was unwelcome.  Unless there's one of the very infrequent keep-off-the-median signs.  Those signs say something, but the evident condition of the medians doesn't seem to support the message written on the signs.  "Keep off the medians?"  Why?

Now, at risk of harping unbearably, I will say that I have made a kind of campaign of wanting the medians in BP to be more respectable, and some kind of credit to the Village, apart from the mere presence of them, but I've realized I'm talking to myself.  I have made very many public pleas for median upgrades, I have leaned hard on the Parks and Parkways Board, and I have even pleaded with the Commission, even when I was a member of  it, to create a median plan (really to task P&P to create a plan), so the Village, or even interested and ambitious Village residents, could begin proper development.  And all of my pleas have fallen on very clearly deaf ears.

I'm the only one who appears to be interested in this.  And I'm only one of about 3000 people who live in the Village.  And most of the people who live here own property here, just as I do, so they're potentially, or theoretically, as motivated as I am, and for the same reasons.  But very clearly, they're just not.

The medians look awful (I haven't heard anyone who disagrees with that), and the vast, vast majority of VBP residents have no meaningful problem with that.  Or if they wouldn't, in a perfect world, prefer that the medians look awful, they're more unwilling to do anything about it than they are to tolerate it.

So I think we should change the Codes regarding the medians.  We should take away the few keep-off-the-median signs, allow people to park or drive on them (they're a convenience to use for U-turns, if you can't be bothered to go all the way to the end of the block), and allow dumping of debris there. If it's sort of in piles, WastePro can pick it up on Tuesdays and Fridays.  What we've left ourselves at this point is the worst of both worlds: medians that look terrible, but we can't even make them useful.