Tireless community activist Clayton Johnson reports by e-mail on the Planning Commission today on competing proposals for halfway houses for federal prisoners — from the City of Faith, which has run a house in a residential neighborhood near Boyle Park for 15 years, and from the GEO Group, which wants to get the contract and put the residential facility on Markham Street, a block west of City Hall.

City Hall wants to continue to screw the Boyle Park neighborhood and allow City of Faith to keep operating, but keep a similar operation off Markham Street where there are no residences nearby but where tourists a few blocks east might be polluted.

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Anyway, Clayton says the Commission didn’t have enough people on hand to decide issues tonight, in part because of the ongoing confusion about what the city is to do about members who haven’t had the required city ordinance approval to act despite occasional business relationships with the city. Everything got deferred, Clayton says. But, he adds, not before an objector to City of Faith insisted that the rules required a disapproval for technical reasons on advertising of public meetings on the zoning issue. Planning commissioners — club members — didn’t want to hear THAT, Clayton says.

If anybody else has a report, it’s welcome.

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