This fall’s “Cotee River Cleanup” will be this Saturday.  Folks will gather at 8am at the New Port Richey boat ramp.  You don’t need to have a boat or a kayak to help out.  All you need is a few hours that you can spare to help out.  We generally wrap up just before noon with a hot dog cookout.

Wear stuff you don’t mind getting dirty and come on out.  There will be free t-shirts for the first 100 folks to show up.

This event has been on “the calendar” for months, but it has been a bit of a secret.  The Rec. Department created a facebook event page less than two weeks ago.  Neither the West Pasco Chamber of Commerce or Greater New Port Richey Main Street are promoting this community event on their calendars.  I can’t criticize them though… The cleanup isn’t even on the city’s calendar or its news feed.

This isn’t the first time that the word on some event hasn’t gotten out.  When there isn’t a single place to look for events around town, events simply don’t show on any calendar.  This isn’t rocket science guys.

Main Street appears to be planning a Fall Festival in Sims Park for October 2nd and 3rd.  Good luck with that.

The Chamber is planning the Cotee River Bike Fest for the following weekend.  They plan to use the stage in Sims Park.

Given that both of these events are scheduled within the next month and Sims Park is surrounded with construction fencing, I hope the organizers have backup plans.

The 9/11 Rememberance this past Friday night was held on the edge of Orange Lake this year instead of at the Sims Park amphitheater.  It wasn’t on the city calendar either.

While you won’t find any of the weekend events coming in October or November on the city calendar, it does indicates that the Land Development Review Board will be meeting at 2:00pm on November 26th.  You can go to that if you want.  I suspect I’ll be enjoying a Thanksgiving dinner with my family about then.

The lack of coordination has yielded some interesting conflicts.  Imagine attending a Liberace tribute concert while a band outside cranks up the bass loud enough to be heard inside the theater.  Yep.  Last month.  Long range planning and coordination could have avoided the conflict.

The issue isn’t just for large events either.  We’ve had a couple of occasions in the last year where multiple public meetings were scheduled for the same room at the same time.  If these meetings had been posted to the calendar, it would have been immediately obvious that there was a problem.

The largest event held every year in New Port Richey is the Chasco Fiesta.  I’m positive that the Chasco folks know when the 2016 event will be held.  It needs to go on the community calendar now.

Again, this is not rocket science.  We need a single calendar that shows EVERYTHING going on in New Port Richey.  It needs to show events months out so that others can plan accordingly.  The technology exists to set up a calendar where multiple event organizers can enter their own information and where location scheduling conflicts are automatically blocked.  The same calendar could even be displayed on multiple websites (the city’s website, Main Street’s website, the Chamber website, etc.).

We can make this happen.  This Saturday’s cleanup should be the last city event that nearly gets lost in the shuffle.  Now that it is on MY calendar, I’ll look forward to seeing you there!

Rob Marlowe, Mayor.