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Health & Fitness

Open Letter to the New Owners of the Dundalk Village Shopping Center

I am writing to you to make sure you're aware of two things. One is the steady flowing force of good policing actions... Two is the previously installed fiber-optics...


To Blue Ocean Realty,

You have only been in Dundalk for about a week now. It appears to me that you’re good landlords. So I am writing you to make sure you’re aware of two things. One is the steady flowing force of good policing actions happening in Dundalk Village Shopping Center, which are to our mutual benefit. The second is the previously installed fiber-optics cable and it’s potential for upgrading your commercial and residential rental units.

Both things are great for enticing good people to rent from you and having them making mutually beneficial, positive use of Dundalk Village amenities.

A newly-assigned Baltimore County police officer is now on foot patrol at Dundalk Village, working out of the Dundalk Renaissance Corporation office on Center Place. Also, the homeless people, drunks and drug addicts who hang out over in Veterans Park (whom many people in Dundalk complain about as being a reason not to go to Dundalk Village), are consistently being checked on and moved out by police officers patrolling in vehicles.

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The police are steadily doing their job there – the right way in my opinion. The long-term effectiveness of their positive police pressures requires your continued cooperation and aggressive actions, because (as you probably already know) some people like to hang around on your shopping center’s sidewalks and benches - occassionally harassing shoppers and bank customers by aggressive panhandling. The police sometimes chase the panhandlers off the shopping center property, too.

Residents of the apartments in Dundalk Village tell me that you've ordered your employees there to get rid of any problem people, incuding the bad tenents, whom the Dundalk commmunity also wants for you to throw out. I thank you for already having begun doing your part. I believe – from having researched you on the Internet – you will always do so. The Veterans Park of Dundalk appreciates your cooperation with our ongoing efforts to make Dundalk Village more hospitable and safer.

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Fiber-optics cable service is a fantastic, communication signal transmission technology. It’s a valuable resource, but has never been used in Dundalk Village. And where the cable runs under Shipping Place, it was set up as a major hub for regional fiber-optic cable services. All over the U.S., fiber-optics are being installed with the capabilities of handling the projected heavy loads 50 years from now. Today, America’s fiber-optics usage only equals approximately 4 percent of the system’s full capability.

I feel that the prior owners of your Dundalk real estate – JMJ Properties – were fools for not installing fiber-optics through all three of those buildings you now own. JMJ had all three of those buildings’ upper floors stripped out and completely rehabbed, which was the perfect time to run the readily available fiber-optics.

Dundalk’s fiber-optics were brought in by a telephone answering service that had planned to move into the former five-and-dime store commercial space that Caring Hands now occupies. A family friend,  who worked for that answering service and most of the other answering service employees from what I gathered, objected to their employer moving into Dundalk Shopping Center because of public safety reasons.

That area does not have a horribly dangerous crime problem, but it is bad enough that employees of a 24-hour-a-day 365-day-a-year answering service understandably might not want to walk to and from their vehicles during midnight shift change times. Sooner or later, one of them would be robbed.

Fortunately, according to some of your tenants in Dundalk Village, you – Blue Ocean Realty – are already taking steps to seriously knock out as much of the criminal activity as you can.

On behalf of everyone of us in the Dundalk community who shares in having faith that there are better days coming for Dundalk Village Shopping Center, I thank the fine folks of Blue Ocean Realty for reading this; and thank you to all others who have read it, too.

Sincerely,

David R. Crews

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