Whenever something is happening in the Greenville Avenue area, there’s a good chance Bobbi Bilnoski is involved.
She has been at the forefront of efforts to include homeowners’ interests in the City’s traffic management plans. She has communicated neighborhood concerns to merchants, City officials, DART and the police department. She has produced newsletters for the Greenland Hills Neighborhood Association, the Stonewall Jackson Elementary School PTA and two business associations. And 10 months ago, she started a business that makes whimsical promotional maps.
Bilnoski is, in short, devoted to weaving her life as tightly as she can with the community where she has lived for 19 years – half her life, and longer by far than she ever dreamed of living in one place while growing up in an Army family.
“As a child, the only constants in my life were changed and Tennessee,” Bilnoski says. “Relatives on both sides of my family lived in Tennessee, so that is where we would always visit during vacations and holidays.”
Bilnoski moved at least 13 times before she graduated from Bauder College of Interior Design in Arlington, married and moved to a house on Monticello Avenue.
“I always thought it was so amazing that people could spend their whole lives in the same place and have connections to the history of the area,” she says.
Living in East Dallas gave Bilnoski the perfect opportunity to get involved, particularly during the 13 years she stayed home to raise three children. The list of projects she has participated in easily fills several typed pages.
Greenland Hills is an older neighborhood, and over the years, numerous houses had become rental properties with absentee owners. Plenty of code violations needed to be corrected, and Bilnoski worked with the City’s Housing and Neighborhood Services department to pressure violators to shape up or ship out.
Of 22 problem addresses, Bilnoski says, 19 have been sold to resident homeowners.
“I wanted to improve the quality of life if I was going to stay in this neighborhood,” Bilnoski says.
The area’s age, location and transitional nature made it an easy target for government agencies that wanted to create wider thoroughfares to relieve congestion on Central Expressway or to build facilities for commuter trains. Bilnoski helped mobilize residents, property owners and merchants to present their views to the agencies and worked to develop alternatives that preserved the area’s small-town character.
Many of these projects required years of work, and Bilnoski was among those who stuck with the efforts from start to finish.
“If Bobbi comes up to a wall, she’ll work her way around it,” says Gary Lawler, president of the adjoining Vickery Place Neighborhood Association and a frequent partner of Bilnoski’s in community projects.
“She’ll hang in there until something happens, and she wins a lot. Most things she’s involved with seem to work out.”
One of the projects Bilnoski and Lawler pursued longest was getting “road humps” for heavily traveled residential streets being used as high-speed shortcuts between Greenville Avenue and Central Expressway.
Obtaining these deceptively simple-looking ridges of asphalt approved and installed took about six years and resulted in a new City policy that enables other neighborhoods to obtain humps when they are needed.
More recently, Bilnoski has become a liaison for business owners along Greenville Avenue and in the Knox-Henderson area. She edits a quarterly newsletter for the Greenville Avenue Area Business Association, and in late 1992 helped from the Knox Henderson Merchants Association in a 100-year-old business district that spans Central Expressway.
“Bobbi knows us and understands us, so she knows what we’re trying to project,” says Valerie Barrett, president of the Greenville Avenue Area Business Association, who has worked on projects with Bilnoski for several years.
“It’s kind of like doing something with a friend.”
