The local Chadash newspaper always provides good fodder in at least one of it's articles on a weekly basis. This past week's edition provided at least three potential blog posts..

Here is the first..

Chadash reports that the City has removed the fitness equipment from four more parks around Bet Shemesh. To remind you, three years ago the City removed the fitness equipment from a park in RBS. Now four more have been removed from other neighborhoods.

What do these reports have in common (besides for the fitness equipment)?

The removal of all the fitness equipment was from religious neighborhoods, specifically the latest four which were removed in recent weeks were all from haredi neighborhoods. In other neighborhoods around Bet Shemesh, the fitness equipment continues to function.

The article says the reason for the removal was that these parks were cited for safety violations. It seems the equipment was installed not according to standard safety guidelines.

Another point is that they removed the equipment immediately, and said that it would all be reinstalled when they get a budget to do so, which they currently do not have. Hopefully it will be within the year.

It makes me wonder why the low standards are only discovered n the religious neighborhoods..
Do they:

• install the parks initially using lower standards for the religious citizens, as a way of saving money where they perhaps consider it less important?
• inspect in these neighborhoods using stricter standards?
• Make up reasons in order to take it away from these residents?
• make up excuses to cover for other reasons to remove the equipment?

On a separate note, and I only bunch it together here because it was in the same article, a year and a half ago the City decided to save money and cut down on garbage collection around the city. RBS, for example, was being cut from four days per week of garbage collection down to 3.

According to the report in Chadash, the City is bumping garbage collection back up to four days a week. With City Councilman Reuven Cohen pushing hard for a while, Mayor Moshe Abutbol has now agreed that the situation has gotten bad with the garbage piling up, especially in neighborhoods where collection is not done on Fridays and the garbage piles up throughout Shabbos, and he is giving the order to bump the collection back up to four days per week. Good job! This was a no-brainer from day one.  



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