Windsor Park resident wants something done about barbed wire

I got a call from a resident of Windsor Park last week, complaining about an old, ugly barbed wire fence that runs along Canterbury Drive, apparently to keep people away from the watershed lake in the center of the subdivision.

I rode over to Windsor Park and found Canterbury Drive, and had to agree with the caller’s assessment. It’s not exactly like something out of Martha Stewart, unless you count her time in the federal jug. Unfinished round wood poles support a few strands of barbed wire, much of it rusted heavily, and some of it apparently newer and having been twisted on to plug holes. They are 10-12 feet off the road and obviously there to keep people out of the lake area.

Well, maybe not people so much as people on dirt bikes and four-wheelers, because they’re banned by law from such public land. But if you want access to the lake, you just drive around to an entrance off Windsor Drive on the other side of the watershed and you can drive right up to it.

(That little park area, you may remember, is where some folks kept turning a rectangular stone-lined flower bed into a Christian cross (a Constitutional no-no, the city said) and the city kept turning it back into a more secular rectangle. That went back and forth a few years ago until the cross-bearers apparently got tired. It was still a rectangle last week.)

Anyway, back to the other side of the lake and the barbed-wire fence. The caller said that at one of Mayor Teresa Tomlinson’s numerous public forums, someone asked her to do something about the barbed wire, and she said she’d look into it. So I said I’d look into it.

Tomlinson, who was in an out-of-town meeting when I texted her Friday, said she would check and see what the status of the work order was, and she’d get back to me. She told me later that she had checked with Pat Biegler, director of Public Works, and that she would get back to me today, which does me little good for today’s column, other than to say, “Stay tuned.”

To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what the caller wanted done, whether he wanted the fence torn down and hauled away or replaced with something a little more in keeping with the nice neighborhood. Concertina wire is nice and shiny, but that’s probably not what he had in mind.

Update

I heard again from our stalwart City Village pioneer, Lisa. It seems that the city is cleaning up more of its lots in the area, and it’s really sprucing things up. She also said someone from the Rainwater Division called, apologized for not getting in touch earlier and said the city would be out to take care of the unusual storm drain setup on her street.

“Anyway, just want to thank you for the attention. I hope you know how much I appreciate what you have been able to do for my neighborhood,” Lisa wrote.

Just doing my job.

This story was originally published April 24, 2016 at 4:31 PM with the headline "Windsor Park resident wants something done about barbed wire."