NOTES FROM AUGUST 18th Meeting
Present: Shirley Chalmers, Topeka Dixon, Dianne Feeley, Lou Novak, Tom Stephens, Sharon Taylor, Gibran Washington
Reviewed notes from the last DLOC meeting posted 8/19 and committee structure
Continued discussion re: Youth encampment, tents the night of the fireworks and security. The following recommendations were made:
1. The consensus was Friends School or WSU field property would be the best place to have the youth encampment to avoid us having to deal with the city and all their restrictions.
- Dianne is contacting Friends and Shirley is contacting Fran Shor at WSU for assistance. We will still investigate Fort Wayne as backup.
2. We believe that the tents for social forum groups should be placed at WCCC's parking lot area. Seeing that workshops will be held there,as well as Cobo, people would be coming and going. Back up plan: We could add tents to the Hart plaza area AFTER the fireworks (Thursday-Saturday).
3. Ten contracts and/or letters of intent have been mailed. It was decided to also contact Dearborn hotels/motels to confirm space and Maureen is contracting out the airport hotel.
We would like all the housing locations to be confirmed, letters out, contracts signed by the middle of next week so we can start the next steps.
If we can stay on private property for the Youth Encampment and tents (WSU, Friends and WCC) we will avoid the problem of having to be approved by the parks department. (We know that the parks department does not want to approve tents so this would be a question of going to the City Council to override that department.)
4. The Detroit police cadets and/or youth task force will be contacted to help out with security for the entire week. Tom will help line up security.
5. Pastor Butler has agreed to guide us with all the information he has regarding buses, transportation and badges. He worked on the recent Baptist convention and is willing to help us. I invited him to the next DLOC meeting. (NOTE: Angie Garcia is in touch with Dally in the Alley planners re various logistical operations.)
6. We discussed having tours on Wednesday (prior to fireworks and road closings) to such Detroit sites as Earthworks and other urban gardens as the theme of that day is as Detroit and its region. We will need to arrange buses throughout the day.
7. Gibran took responsibility for calling bus companies to see what would be the cost of renting buses by the day, and if there is a discount were to use buses for 2-4 days.
We are thinking that with the city services in crisis, we may need to have buses to do pick up and drop off at the airport on Monday and Saturday. We might need something on the order of 10 buses. (Figuring bus would take 2 hours to load up, drive, unload and return that would be four trips a day--maximum would be about 200 per bus per day; figuring approximately 2,000 will need rides to/from the airport.
We will also need buses for Tuesday, the day of the Opening March. We do not even know where the march will begin (perhaps there will be more than one beginning site).
We will also need some buses or vans for tours in the city. This will have to be considered as part of workshops. Signing up for tours where logistics is responsible for buses/vans will be important.
7. To perhaps get more people to attend the next committee meeting, we are changing our location to USSF office, 4th floor at Central United Methodist.
Notetaker: Shirley
NEXT MEETING, Tuesday, September 15th at 5:30 pm, USSF office, 4th floor, Central Methodist, 23 E. Adams