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PORTSMOUTH The City Council is slated to vote Monday on a motion to change a portion of the Middle Street bike lane by returning parked cars to the curb instead of closer to passing traffic where they are now.
City Councilors Esther Kennedy and Petra Huda want to change about 1,600 feet of the protected portion of the bike lane from the intersection of Middle and Highland streets to the intersection of Middle and Lincoln Avenue.
They also want to designate Lincoln Avenue as a “Safe Route to Schools bike route.”
If the motion passes, Huda said recently, the bike lane – which runs along Middle Street from Portsmouth High School to downtown – will still exist but will “look like every other bike lane in the city.”
PORTSMOUTH – PopUp NH’s request to use the city-owned Worth parking lot for the second season of its outdoor performance and food venue is headed to a city committee for review.
The City Council voted 6-3 to send the request to the newly formed Mayor’s Blue Ribbon Committee on Arts and Non-Profits.
PopUp NH operated last year in the nearby Bridge Street parking lot, offering food and other vendors and entertainment as a way to help businesses make more revenue during the coronavirus pandemic. This year, the group is seeking to hold a six-month second season in the Worth lot beginning on May 1.
PORTSMOUTH On New Year’s Eve, the city’s two new ordinances banning single-use disposable plastic and polystyrene, more commonly known as Styrofoam, went into effect. Only one, however, is being immediately enforced by city officials.
Bert Cohen, chair of Portsmouth’s sustainability committee, said with a spirit of goodwill and public compliance with the ordinances, the city is headed in the right direction toward creating a greener environment.
To continue doing so, he said, “We all need to be systems thinkers.”
“I’m aware that there are many bioplastics being produced and experimented with and they will obviously have their upsides and downsides, but we can use cellulose to make plastics which will be biodegradable,” he said. “By moving off fossil fuel-based plastic, which is what Styrofoam is, if we went to a biofuel produced by natural cellulose, in five years we might have products that we can put in natural gardens that can decompose. That would be a
PORTSMOUTH – The City Council on Monday voted unanimously to give struggling restaurants a small ounce of predictability by guaranteeing the return of outdoor dining on March 1, 2021 weather-permitting.
Councilors also voted to turn the Citizen Response Task Force into a formal city Blue Ribbon Committee – a conversation that began with much pushback by some councilors but ultimately ended in compromise. Per the final vote, the task force membership will remain the same, but a city councilor will join as a non-voting member, ultimately reporting back to the City Council on the committee s work.
The Health Subcommittee of the Citizen Response Task Force was also made a Blue Ribbon Committee to work hand-in-hand with the city Health Department.