Weed and Seed area wins coalition’s support


The proposed borders for the Henderson-Vance Weed and Seed area won the endorsement of the Vance County Coalition Against Violence on Thursday night.

The unanimous voice vote came on a motion by Henderson-Vance Chamber of Commerce President Bill Edwards that was seconded by Abdul Rasheed. The endorsement followed by a day the official backing of the anti-crime Vance Organization to Implement Community Excellence, which is serving as the steering committee for the Weed and Seed application.

VOICE will ask the Vance Board of Commissioners and the Henderson City Council for their endorsements Monday night, then will go before the county Board of Education for similar action Aug. 8. The Chamber of Commerce board of directors is due to consider its endorsement July 21, and the Vance chapter of the NAACP, which joined the Chamber in creating the Coalition Against Violence last fall, also will be asked for its official support. The Juvenile Crime Prevention Council already has signed off on the proposed borders.

“I’m really, really pleased with the commitment everyone has shown,” said City Manager Eric Williams, who serves as the chairman of VOICE.

“We’re doing all we can to be designated,” he said.

Police Lt. Perry Twisdale, who worked on an unsuccessful Weed and Seed bid by the Henderson Police Department in 1998 and has helped lead the VOICE effort this time, described the borders of the designated area Thursday afternoon: Starting at the intersection of Chestnut and Garnett streets, the border runs along Chestnut to Spring Street, follows Spring east to William Street, moves south on William to Nicholas Street, and stays with Nicholas south of the city limits to Hawkins Drive, where the line turns due east, past L.B. Yancey Elementary School, to King Street and on to Old Epsom Road. The line moves north to Berry Street and catches a piece of Reservoir Street before heading east along South Carolina Avenue to Pinkston Street. The border follows Pinkston past East Andrews Avenue and Pinkston Street Elementary School to Water Street, where it slides westward to Boddie Street, heads north to Rockspring Street, cuts over to Bridgers Street and up to Hughes Street, back down Roberson Street to Mill Street, east to Boddie Street, then due north to Bobbitt Street, running past the North Henderson ball fields. Bobbitt takes the border west to Main Street, past Harriet & Henderson Yarns’ old North Henderson mill and back to the Garnett-Chestnut intersection.

That area encompasses or borders L.B. Yancey, Clark Street and Pinkston Street elementary schools, Henderson Middle School, the South Henderson Family Resource Center at L.B. Yancey, Harriet & Henderson’s former mill complexes on the north and south sides of town, recreational fields on the north and south sides of town, the soon-to-be-sold Disabled American Veterans building on East Andrews Avenue, the new and old libraries, the police station, the courthouse, the Sheriff’s Office, a fire station, several other county office buildings, the old South Henderson School site and the city’s $653,000 David Street Community Development Block Grant project.

The area extends beyond the city’s jurisdiction on the northern and southern borders. It includes Flint Hill and the old mill villages by both Harriet & Henderson complexes. It excludes the West End.

“It’s a very broad area,” Police Chief Glen Allen said. “It covers the areas that need the most help” but not all of the areas that need help.

He noted that although areas adjacent to the designated zone, such as the Beacon Light Apartments, don’t count in the application, they are effectively included in Weed and Seed. People outside the zone may participate in Weed and Seed programs. Buildings adjacent to the zone can be used as service-providing havens. And law enforcement officers assigned to the zone can respond to nearby crimes.

Allen estimated that 5,200 to 5,300 people live in the designated area. A Weed and Seed area must have 3,000 to 50,000 residents. Department of Justice information indicates that the average is about 20,000 and the ideal is 20,000 to 25,000.

Williams said Henderson’s designated area accounts for an estimated 40 percent of the city’s crimes that the Department of Justice considers in a Weed and Seed application: murder, rape, aggravated assault, armed robbery and drug violations.

“We spent hours and hours refining the borders,” Williams said. A committee including Twisdale, CDBG specialist Gwen Wright, engineering staffer Terry Leyen and Rick Seekins from the Kerr-Tar Regional Council of Governments.

The latest tweak to the map was the additional of the area near Main and Bobbitt streets to include the David Street project, which Don Connelly from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Raleigh said would be a positive addition to the application.

The steering committee must send a letter of intent with a map of the area to the U.S. Attorney’s Office by Aug. 31. The full application must be mailed to that office by Oct. 14, and the final package — no more than 50 pages or 5 megabytes in a computer file, including the map — must be e-mailed to the Department of Justice by Oct. 30.

The Department of Justice will notify the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the results of the application review in the first few months of 2006 and schedule a site visit for the cities that make the cut. For those areas that win official recognition, the Weed and Seed designation will go into effect June 1, 2006, and last five years.

Operation Weed and Seed is a federal program that designates some of the nation’s most crime-ridden areas for special law enforcement attention (weeding) and for follow-up programs to address the causes of crime (seeding).

The program is a highly sought Department of Justice designation but does not automatically bring grant money. Instead, Allen explained to the Coalition Against Violence, being a designated Weed and Seed area pushes a city’s application for various federal grants to the top of the pile.

Allen said the federal government expects to designate only 31 new Weed and Seed sites in the nation during the current application process. “We’re hopeful to get it,” he said. “If we don’t, we’ll go at it again.”

He noted that the application process costs nothing beyond the time and energy expended by city employees. And he said the city has been approved for technical assistance with the application from Romia Smith, a Washington-based staffer in the Justice Department’s Community Capacity Development Office, which oversees Weed and Seed. As a bonus, she’s the program manager for North Carolina and the coordinator of the grant program.

Williams told the coalition that the Weed and Seed designation “has a huge number of benefits,” and Allen said the designation will definitely make a difference in the Weed and Seed area over five years.

Weed and Seed communities “are so much the better for it,” said Marolyn Rasheed, who joined Williams, Twisdale, Allen and several others in attending a regional Weed and Seed meeting last month. She said Greenville officials told her that Weed and Seed was the best thing that ever happened to that community.

(Greenville’s five-year designation has expired, leaving North Carolina’s 1st Congressional District without any Weed and Seed sites. That fact has encouraged the active support of Rep. G.K. Butterfield, D-Wilson, whose Weldon office director, Dollie Burwell, is a regular at VOICE meetings).

According to information available online from the Justice Department, the Weed and Seed strategy must have four elements: law enforcement; community policing; prevention/intervention/treatment; and neighborhood restoration. Those efforts must involve cooperation among agencies, the maximum bang for the grant buck and a way to sustain the strategy beyond the five-year period.

The “law enforcement” component covers the removal of “chronic and violent criminals” from the area through law enforcement, adjudication, prosecution and supervision (parole, probation and community corrections).

The “community policing” component is meant to be the bridge between the weeding and seeding. It must include partnerships, the permanent assignment of police to the area and an emphasis on youth crime prevention. The public’s involvement is encouraged through neighborhood watches and citizen police corps. The designated Henderson area has at least four neighborhood watches, and the coalition wants to establish a citizen police corps as soon as the city can provide start-up funding to the Police Department.

“Prevention/intervention/treatment” covers human services “to create an environment where, simply put, crime cannot thrive.” That element includes “safe havens” with variety of services and supportive programs — educational, cultural, recreational and health.

Under “neighborhood restoration,” at least two of the following five issues must be addressed: economic development; job training and employment opportunities; small-business development; improved housing conditions; and physical environment cleanup. “At a minimum, you should create processes that help stabilize the community and promote restoration,” the Justice Department says.

Williams said the seed component can include anything that attacks the root causes of crime. Rasheed said the broad mandate can range from homeownership education to SAT prep courses and college campus tours.

Williams noted that the program requires specific annual benchmarks and quarterly, semiannual and annual reports.

“Our endorsement is pretty much a no-brainer,” Cathy Ringley said, and the rest of the two dozen coalition members at the meeting at the Gateway Center agreed.