The official City Council hearing on the proposed development of the Squires Road Peninsula on Reservoir #4 will be held on Tuesday, April 18th, at 5:00pm in the Council chambers (200 East Main Street, 2nd floor). Though we were disappointed by the Planning Commission's 8-1 vote to approve the Ball Homes development plan as presented, we expect the City Council to give us a much fairer hearing. The City Council has been known to flat reject developments that have been Planning Commission approved, as they did recently by unanimous vote regarding a neighborhood near Fayette Mall. We need everyone against Ball Homes' current proposed plan to attend this meeting, preferably wearing green to show your support. We are guaranteed there will not be the (endless) postponements––this is a firm City Council date––and hopefully the 5:00pm hearing time will be more convenient for people's work schedules than the middle of the day hearings of the Planning Commission. We feel we have a good chance of getting some of our suggestions––like a wider conservation buffer, a trail system or a protective fence around the water's edge, and fewer houses and apartments–enacted. But we need your help. We had an amazing turnout for the first hearing and folks gave lots of wonderful comments in appeals to save the Peninsula. We can't thank enough those of you who showed up to protect this special piece of land and the wildlife it supports and those of you who were with us in spirit. Now we need to implore you once again to come to the hearing and stand with us as we try to protect riparian buffer and wildlife habitat from disappearing forever. We need to fill the building AGAIN to show that the community does not want this area abjectly destroyed. Please come. If you can't be there (or even if you can), please write a letter of support for the Peninsula, sign and scan it, and e-mail it to the Squires Road Smarter Development Group so the letters can be presented en masse. For more info, see the Facebook page.

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So after a too-long period of not really knowing how to make the Central Kentucky Audubon Society Web Page Events Calendar functional, we finally rolled up our sleeves and did a little research and made a few phone calls and tried and tested a few platforms and figured some things out that might help us better communicate upcoming activities and events to everyone who might want to participate in them... If that opening sentence feels a little heavy, well, that's kind of how we felt throughout the process... Mostly, we just like to watch and help birds; we're not so good with web page stuff. But we're pleased to announce a new CKAS Event Calendar that we guarantee will show up on your regular computer, and even display in your choice of formats––monthly, agenda, or pin-board, all of which you can toggle at the top right of the page. Better yet, whereas our last calendar would not, this one will show up on your smart phone so you can check event info from the field. You can also push individual events to your personal calendar via links at the top of each event; and there may even be a way for you to subscribe to groups of events like "all bird walks," but we haven't yet figured out how to do that. (If you figure it out, tell us! We repeat: we're not so good with web page stuff.) And if you have an event you'd like us to list, the new calendar now lets you submit it for review.

Thank you to all of you who pushed us to get this done so we can once again post events someplace other than Facebook. We understand that building a community to watch and help birds requires we find a way to post events in a manner accessible to everyone and in all formats. We promise to do better. In fact, we're hoping to have the whole web page overhauled by mid-summer to better reflect CKAS's goals. If you want to be part of that process, by all means let us know. We could use the help.