If you hang around Bellevue Council meetings long enough, you'll find that certain ideas and topics come up again and again, a few years apart.

Most people don't recognize this because, quite frankly, people with intact cognitive functions do not hang around Bellevue Council meetings for very long if they want to remain that way.

Some people, however, must attend because it is their job to do so. And they eventually start to see the stories repeat themselves.

One of them is skateboarders. Every couple years they come to council en masse and plead for an area where they can do their thing without mowing down pedestrians. People on council pretend that they are not secretly afraid of youths with multiple piercings and hair of a color never intended by God or DNA. Then someone contacts the borough's insurance carrier and finds out how much it will cost to have a skateboard park, and the issue goes away for a few more years.

Another issue is the idea of having street sweeping all year 'round. Well, street something, because there's little chance anyone's going to be spraying water on brick streets in January. We hope.

The argument in favor of extending the current April through November schedule goes like this: We can plow the streets when it snows, do street and curb repairs, etc.

That sounds lovely, but let's look at it in light of the fact that the schedule can't be extended without displacing a whole lot of vehicles that are hard pressed to find a parking place on non-street sweeping days.

First, will it really make it easier to plow the streets when it snows? The street sweeping schedule splits the borough into eight different sections, which are swept one morning or afternoon four days a week. If it snows on a Thursday evening, some parts of this borough aren't going to be addressed until the following Thursday afternoon. By that time the plows have managed without cars being moved or the snow has melted.

And exactly what kind of street and curb repairs are going to be done in the sub-freezing temperatures of a Pittsburgh winter? None.

But on the off chance that there might be a premature burst of spring weather in January, people are going to have to park their cars further and further from their homes and hike to their houses in those sub-freezing temperatures.

A more reasonable way of accomplishing the goal of eliminating parked vehicles for special circumstances is to post temporary parking restrictions when and if the circumstances arise. The borough has these neat little signs on posts that they can pop in the ground whenever they want.

People won't mind moving their cars if something is really going to result from the inconvenience. This past winter, people on some of Bellevue's side streets would have parked their cars in Avalon and taken a bus home if they could have gotten the huge piles of snow off their streets. Because -- get this -- there was NOWHERE TO PARK.

With a little bit of planning, everyone with an interest in this matter can be accommodated. It would be nice if our borough officials didn't give Bellevue residents yet another reason to move to Emsworth.