Once again, jobs were the hot topic at the Croton Facility Monitoring Committee meeting last week held across the street from the gaping hole that will one day house the Croton Water Filtration Plant.

With the city’s late-August deadline for presenting design requirements – in the form of a Request for Proposal (RFP) – for the redevelopment of the Kingsbridge Armory fast approaching, Community Board 7 members recently took a tour of the massive landmark.

Did you know that there is a public board comprised of community residents that meets regularly to designate priorities for $450,000 in federal funding known as Community Service Block Grants?

On a recent Friday afternoon, Korean War veteran Harold Hekimian pointed to the side of his house where sand from the construction site next door has spilled onto his property, under his porch, into his basement and onto his backyard.

After a year’s hiatus, highlighted by a sharp rise in gun violence, the 52nd Precinct is once again becoming an Operation Impact precinct – gaining 70 fresh recruits to police three designated hot zones over the next six to eight months.

At the Chamber of Commerce luncheon during Bronx Week, the mayor announced a new task force to create a plan for the south Bronx. Many of us remember other plans for the south Bronx; some of them have gone a long way toward being implemented. What interests us is, that in this case, the area to be reviewed is Community Districts 1 to 4. The term ‘South Bronx’ has referred to the area below Fordham Road or Districts 1 to 6 since, at the latest, the work of the South Bronx Development Office, which started in the late 1970s.

In the back room of the New Orleans office of ACORN, a national grassroots community organization, grows a culture in a Petri dish. A young organizer named Elliot told me, with only a little hyperbole: "It’s going to save the world." Well, maybe not the world. But if it works, it could help 200,000 families return to their Crescent City homes.

Last November, a well-known Korean supermarket on East 204th Street between Mosholu Parkway and the Grand Concourse quietly closed its doors for good. Suzie’s Oriental Food Market – or Suzie’s as it was commonly known – had been in the neighborhood since 1974.

Beginning this fall, more than a dozen northwest Bronx public schools will be granted a greater degree of autonomy as part of Mayor Bloomberg’s ambitious new Empowerment Program.