The proposed Weed and Seed area for Henderson shifted southward during a meeting Wednesday morning.
The meeting gathered technical experts with leaders in the push for the federal program to rough out borders for the area. Weed and Seed is a Department of Justice program that designates high-crime areas for weeding (uprooting drugs and violence) and seeding (planting community programs to prevent the return of those problems). The highly competitive program comes with the probability but no guarantee of federal funding, as well as an increased chance of winning non-Weed and Seed grants.
Weed and Seed has become the top priority for the Vance Organization to Implement Community Excellence, and the chairman of that group, City Manager Eric Williams, convened the special committee Wednesday morning. Joining Williams were Police Chief Glen Allen, police Lts. Perry Twisdale and Irvin Robinson, Vance County Coalition Against Violence leaders Marolyn Rasheed of Team Vance and Margaret Ellis of the Gateway Center and the Vance Board of Education, Henderson-Vance Youth Services Director Leon Robinson, Gwen Wright from the city Planning Department, Terry Leyen from the city Engineering Department, and Rick Seekins from the Kerr-Tar Regional Council of Governments.
Leyen brought the maps. Twisdale brought the crime statistics. Seekins brought expertise on census tracts. And Williams brought the colored markers to highlight the streets under consideration as the group sat around a table at the Aycock Recreation Complex and tried to decide where to draw the Weed and Seed lines.
The trick is to make an area big enough to satisfy the Weed and Seed rules — at least 3,000 residents — but small enough to make a difference with the community-based approach advocated by the program.
“The smaller the area, the more intense the improvement can be,” Allen said. He said the Weed and Seed borders are sure to cut off some needy areas, but “there is only so much overtime you can work with limited resources, limited manpower.”
No one is excluded from the programs and resources within the Weed and Seed area just because they live outside the zone, Twisdale said, and even the extra police manpower focused in the area could stretch beyond the borders in an emergency. The Weed and Seed zone is just the area of concentration for efforts.
At Williams’ suggestion, VOICE initially focused on an area north and east of Garnett Street and Andrews Avenue, following the lines of the North Henderson Redevelopment Area being considered by Mayor Clem Seifert’s housing task force. Twisdale showed Wednesday that the North Henderson area closely tracks the Police Department’s 2nd District, whose border is Montgomery Street rather than Andrews Avenue. (The Police Department has broken Henderson into five districts for purposes of organizing patrols.)
But the 3rd District, the area below Montgomery Street, has seen more of the crimes the Justice Department considers when scoring Weed and Seed applications: murder and manslaughter, rape, aggravated assault, and drugs. Twisdale said that in the past four years, District 3 has seen six homicides or attempted homicides, 11 rapes or attempted rapes, 164 aggravated assaults, 885 drug arrests and 334 other drug incidents; District 2 has seen two homicides or attempted homicides, seven rapes or attempted rapes, 150 aggravated assaults, 542 drug arrests and 184 other drug incidents.
Those numbers do not necessarily mean District 3 has a higher crime rate than District 2; that’s where Seekins’ census numbers will come into play. Allen said the city needs to create an area with as high a crime rate as possible for the past five years to win the Weed and Seed designation; an application from Fayetteville, for example, failed because crime wasn’t a big enough problem in the specified zone.
Twisdale said the next step for him is to break the crime numbers down by street. Those statistics then can be cross-referenced with Seekins’ census data.
The 3rd District and the southernmost areas of the 2nd District “would make one heck of a district” for Weed and Seed, Seekins said.
The group agreed and accepted that the core of the Weed and Seed area will be based on the 3rd District. Assuming Seekins’ population numbers produce a sufficient crime rate with Twisdale’s crime statistics, the area will include most or all of the city south of Garnett Street and east of Raleigh Road. By using a border running due east from the city’s Raleigh Road border to Andrews Avenue, the area will encompass a chunk of Vance County south of the city limits.
In planning its Weed and Seed application, VOICE has sought to cross the city limits into county jurisdiction, thus bringing resources such as the county Sheriff’s Office into play. Williams said that cross-jurisdictional cooperation will set the Henderson application apart; none of the Weed and Seed programs represented at a statewide meeting last week stretches outside a city’s borders.
The new southern Weed and Seed area includes Flint Hill, excluded from the area VOICE first focused on; the old Harriet & Henderson Yarns complex on Alexander Avenue, now owned by W.W. Properties; and L.B. Yancey Elementary School, home of the South Henderson Family Resource Center.
One of the primary benefits of the Weed and Seed program is the designation of “safe havens” that concentrate resources for families and provide a safe place for children. Twisdale said anything with four walls and a roof could be a safe haven.
Allen said the South Henderson area tentatively added to the Weed and Seed zone brings an obvious safe haven in the South Henderson Family Resource Center. Other sites that could be adapted to that use include parts of the old textile mill; the Disabled American Veterans building, which the group is in danger of losing along with its charter; a city-owned vacant lot in Flint Hill that has been discussed as a possible location for a police substation or community center; and the collapsed South Henderson School, which is $25,000 away from being a city-owned, fenced, cleared 2-acre lot.
Seekins, Twisdale, Robinson, Leyen and Wright have the task to firm up the borders of the Weed and Seed zone, and their biggest issue is likely to be how far to push beyond Andrews into North Henderson and past Garnett into the West End.
As a tentative border, the VOICE committee talked about Rockspring Street and Chestnut Street. The resulting area would incorporate much of the population and crime of the 2nd District and would cover downtown Henderson, including such potential safe havens as the Gateway Center and the new and old libraries.
If the line moves beyond Rockspring Street, the David Street area could be included. The city has a pending application for Community Development Block Grant funding to overhaul David Street.
If the area moves past Chestnut Street toward Elmwood Cemetery, the Orange Street corridor could be incorporated.
Because some people are going to be outside the borders, wherever the lines are drawn, “they better be damned defensible,” Seekins said.
The area being looked at already includes neighborhood watch groups on Flint Street, Pinkston Street, Lehman Street, Highland Avenue and the Beacon Light Apartments, Robinson said.
Ellis said the area also has dozens of churches that could provide services and perhaps serve as havens. A Weed and Seed zone can have as many havens as needed, and the services provided can vary based on the needs of the immediate area.
“We need resources in those areas,” Wright said. “We need community centers.”
The Weed and Seed effort could work with the Coalition Against Violence committee forming the Boys and Girls Club of Vance County, which could be a safe haven.
“As word gets out (about the Weed and Seed zone), groups might come forward to be safe havens,” Twisdale said.
Williams said he plans to approach certain corporate leaders to assist with marketing the Weed and Seed concept. “There has to be a buy-in from across the community.”
The full committee will reconvene at the Municipal Building at 11:30 a.m. June 29 to review the proposed final borders, then bring that plan to the VOICE meeting July 6 for approval.