Neighbor blows whistle on street hoops

BANGOR – It’s the middle of summer and all over Bangor, kids are playing basketball at some of the nearly 200 portable hoops that can be found along city streets and sidewalks, especially in the city’s older, well-established neighborhoods, among them Little City.

And though they are placed in spots that violate a city ordinance last reviewed in 1967, even city officials admit that the rule largely has been ignored.

It states: “No person shall play baseball or any ball with a bat or engage in ball playing of any kind or throw any stone, brick, bats, clubs or snowballs or shoot any arrows or use any sling or other device to throw missiles or fly any kite in any street, lane or public square within the built-up portion of Bangor.”

“The practice in recent years has been to respond to complaints,” most of them about the location of hoops and a few about the noise, City Manager Edward Barrett said Tuesday during a meeting of the City Council’s government operations committee.

Each fall, Barrett said the city’s code enforcement officer mails out letters asking residents to remove the hoops from city streets and rights-of-way so they won’t interfere with snow removal.

Though they said the potential for injury existed, neither Police Chief Don Winslow nor Assistant Chief Peter Arno could recall an accident involving a child playing basketball and a motor vehicle in their roughly two decades each with the city’s police department.

Winslow, however, said that while he preferred to see kids outside being active, he could not condone allowing them to play in the streets either.

Whether the ordinance should stand, be amended or scrapped altogether appears to have touched off a feud between a Little City woman and her neighbors.

Despite a lengthy discussion about the pros and cons of allowing the practice to continue, members of the City Council’s government operations committee made no decision on the fate of portable hoops Tuesday night, deciding instead to take a timeout.

City staff were directed to try to come up with a compromise solution to be presented at a yet-to-be scheduled meeting.

Meanwhile, the hoops can stand.

The issue was brought to the forefront by Vicki Karlsson, who said that despite a move from Bangor Gardens to Little City, she has been unable to escape the “nerve-wracking” noise from kids playing basketball close to her home. She also complained about neighborhood kids calling her names, using profanity, ringing her doorbell, stealing a security light and other problems.

She also said that her interactions with neighbors have become increasingly “nasty.”

Among her complaints was that one of the hoops belongs to a city police officer, who lived near her in Bangor Gardens and then moved to Little City not long after she did.

But the bases were loaded against Karlsson. Supporters of the hoops outnumbered her nearly 20 to 1.

Among those who thought the portable hoops were a good thing was Craig Popper, 16.

“I was born with cerebral palsy and my parents got me involved in wheelchair basketball when I was 8 years old, because they saw that I wasn’t going to be able to reach my full potential in any other sport,” Popper, son of former City Councilor Christopher Popper, said. Basketball, he said, allows him to stay fit and he hopes to play in college in two years.

“If you were to move the hoops [back] into the driveway, that would be a problem for me,” he said, adding that the slope of the driveway would require him to spend more time chasing the ball than playing with it.