Editor's note: This is the first in a series of articles on new developments on Quad Cities-area downtowns. When you have a lot of dreams, it's sometimes difficult to prioritize them. Karen Pohl didn't have to.
There are a lot of festivals that piggyback a culture or holiday to cash in. This weekend's Ya Maka My Weekend, though, isn't one of them. The Jamaica-themed festival in The District of Rock Island has the seal of approval of the Jamaican Tourist Board.
• The Family Museum of Arts & Science in Bettendorf is now recognized as an official National Wildlife Federation (NWF) Backyard Wildlife Habitat site. The Family Museum's habitat area was organized under the direction of museum Education Coordinator Kathy Wierzba.

Taming Cable

The current franchise agreement between the City of Davenport and the city's provider of cable-television services was drafted in 1974. Nixon resigned that year. Pong was a state-of-the-art video game. Of course, nobody had even heard then of terms such as fiber optics, digital cable, or the Internet, or had any conception of how they would impact the way people watch television or communicate in the 1990s and beyond.
In its third year, organizers of the ArtStroll street festival have stopped making predictions. After drawing an estimated 2,000 people at the inaugural event two years ago, planners expected 4,000 last year. They think they ended up with about 5,000.
• Operation T.I.P.S. (Terrorism Information & Prevention System) is a new nationwide volunteer-reporting government program scheduled to begin in August. According to a government Web site, "The program will involve the millions of American workers who, in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to serve as extra eyes and ears for law enforcement.
This is the situation that Linda Downs is jumping into. When the Davenport Museum of Art began raising money for a new facility, it bypassed the charitable Friends of the Davenport Museum of Art for the job.
A look at Linda Downs' career shows one thing for certain: She knows how to stick with her jobs. After getting her Master of Arts in art history at the University of Michigan in 1973, she was an adjunct faculty member in that field from 1976 to 1989 at Wayne State University.
• Vera French Housing Corporation (VFHC) and Heartland Properties (the housing subsidiary of Alliant Energy Resources) have joined together to address the housing needs of persons with mental illness in Scott County with the construction of a 10-unit special-needs housing development for persons with mental illness.
When public-radio station KUNI finished last month's "Drive to Survive" having raised $106,000 over five days, it didn't see the total as a failure even though it fell far short of the massive budget cut it was about to endure.

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