ConcordiaSpeaks
The UNOP conducted a “Community Congress” over the weekend. The eyebrow-raising outcome reported in the Times-Picayune was that the money released by the federal government to restore a city devastated by flood instead be directed to the neighborhoods that need it least. In Survey backs plan for smaller footprint Michelle Krupa writes:
bq.. Parts of New Orleans that suffered minor damage during Hurricane Katrina and thus have the heaviest concentration of residents and open businesses should be given priority as limited money is directed to repair shattered utilities, streets and other infrastructure, most participants in a citywide planning meeting said Saturday.
Nearly half of respondents also said it matters little or not at all whether New Orleans remains “the same physical size,” perhaps addressing the inflammatory question of whether the city’s geographic footprint should shrink to exclude some of the worst-flooded areas, which tend to include more black and poor residents.
The demographics are an outrage. Yet, it is too convenient for Concorida to pin this outrage on the 3/4 white attendance where 40% had an income over 75,000 and 90% came from less-effected neighborhoods.
Before we allow ourselves to be placed in the neighborhood Thunderdome for yet another battle of the footprint, let us together ask questions of the organizers, and let us insist upon answers.
Assume that those who attended the meeting are the civic-minded die-hards, with cable television and Internet, who were reached by the paltry outreach. They happen to be from dry neighborhoods because there was no outreach in flooded areas. They chose to waste a Saturday morning playing neighborhoods planning with Nintendo controllers, because this group has not yet been worn to tears by meeting after meeting where the only deliverable was the promise to get it right next time.
If they unwittingly incriminated themselves, by answering clumsy, leading questions, then let us, please, for once, hold the organizers accountable.
According to Becky Houtman, the questions were clumsy, and the presentations leading. At times during the presentations, it seemed that the representatives of AmericaSpeaks felt the only weak link in their technology were the rubes with the joysticks in their hands. From her blog post The Ballroom Speaks:
Also eyebrow raising were a couple instances when AmericaSpeaks president Carolyn Lukensmeyer prefaced questions with admonitions of what to consider while voting. In one case involving funding for parks and recreation areas, she told us to remember the presentation we just heard, and how important it was For The Children (who were probably out enjoying parks and recreation areas rather than sitting in a dark ballroom pretending to be a market-research focus group). If you’d like to capture the true Voice of the People, AmericaSpeaks, you’ll do well to let us remember what to consider on our own. In another case, regarding whether it’s important or not for New Orleans to be the most populous city in the state, Ms. Lukensmeyer brought up Galveston and Houston, raising the specter of becoming a tiny, boutique tourist town while all the real industry moves upriver.
If only those keypads would punch themselves. It’s almost akin to the ominous, “Is that your final answer?” from that game show with the keypad wielding audience, “Who Want’s To Be A Millionaire?” In 1997 keypad voting might have been novel, but in 2006, in hurricane ravaged New Orleans, it is a farce that lowers citizen participation to the level of audience participation.
The People Get Ready blog rightly questions if “[AmericaSpeaks] may be more interested in using New Orleans as a proving ground for its methodology than in making sure the outcome is demonstrably robust.” In We Have More Than That At The 4:00 Mass On Saturday he writes:
Still, the “21st Century Town Meeting®” sounds like a whole lotta mumbo jumbo for what we in the United States have for over 200 years more popularly called a ballot box. No, no, no. We’ve outlived that antiquated technology. As Steven Bingler can frequently be heard to say, in apology for poorly-planned meetings that collapse into chaos and accomplish little of substance, “somebody once said democracy’s a very messy process.” No, he can’t remember who said that. It might have been him, as a way to ameliorate his own failure to create the conditions for public input in an organized manner (it has also been said that it may be personal style to create chaos as a way to divide and conquer in forums with potentially contentious groups). It certainly may be true that issues can be controversial and emotional, but the means to decide on those issues without bloodshed and chaos absolutely do exist, and have worked for over 200 years in this country, as long as the affected participants feel like they’ve had a fair playing field to express their views.
Indeed, it was Stephen Bingler who said glowingly that “sometimes democracy happens in chaos” in an interview with WWL’s Lee Zurick at the “first UNOP meeting at the Pavilion of the Two Sisters. It is Stephen Bingler who puts forward theories about Healthy Chaos. The word “chaos” leaves his lips with drinking-game regularity. How can one expect anything concrete with someone who has an obvious chaos fetish? Stephen Bingler must wallow in the chaos of post-Katrina like a pig in muck. If chaos is healthy, then who needs medical services? New Orleans must be the fittest city in these United States.
The demographics of the “Community Congress” were tragic owning to the failure of Concorida to perform outreach. Once aware that they were speaking to a specific group of people, they did not have to raise the specter of the footprint and pit dry neighborhoods against wet.
You can guide a meeting to come to accord and resolution, or you can throw out the inflammatory questions that bring about discord and dissolution.
I have questions. I’m sure you do too. I’d like you to ask yourself:
- Should an organization, AmericaSpeaks, with no stated plans to be in town on December 3rd, 2006, be allowed to shape the dialog of our recovery?
- What sort of organization would dive into New Orleans recovery politics with two weeks or preparation?
- If the 5 city “Community Congress” dissolves into chaos, will Concorida and AmericaSpeaks take the blame, or will they allow the blame to fall on New Orleans?
- If they can’t get it right in New Orleans how can they get it right next time, when the “Congress” spans 5 cities?
- Who is going to watch over them in in Houston, Atlanta, Dallas and Baton Rouge to make sure they to not ask leading questions and coach people on the answers?
- Can we trust them not to lead us into angry and divided spectacle in front of the entire United States?
If you can imagine the abysmal chaos of the Pavilion of the Two Sisters, with people enraged and in tears, replayed with thousands of people instead of hundreds, across five Southern cities, before the entire nation, then you can also imagine the rest of America tuning into their 11 o’clock news to have their worst suspicions about about New Orleans confirmed. That we are racist, angry, incompetent, and unsalvagable.
We must not allow our tragedy and our recovery to become a public relations tool for the self-deluding architects and futurists. We have been through enough trauma already to permit ourselves to be subjected to experiments in chaos or keypads.
As for last Saturday, don’t take the bait.
Hold the organizers accoutable, but ignore the outcomes “Community Congress”.
Please. It ain’t us. We’re good people.
Update: What questions do you have for the UNOP? What questions do you have for AmericaSpeaks? Already, I’ve gathered so much feedback from my friends and neighbors. If you have stories of the UNOP or Community Congress, send them to alan@thinknola.com or leave them in the comments and together we can work to get our questions answered.
16 Comments | 2 Trackbacks |
comments feed  |
Comment Pages: « 1 [2] Show All
Comment Pages: « 1 [2] Show All
It’s good to hear that the goal is not to produce media coverage that shifts political momentum in the New Orleans rebuilding process, which was a concern as I left the Convention Center. New Orleanians already have the forward momentum, the fervor to rebuild. We are still waiting for the money.
“Wet areas†are assured that our plans will be woven into one that can now include the hopes of “dry areas†as well.
So where are our plans in your Congress that quote decides the most important projects to fund in order to rebuild New Orleans endquote.
An example of a question that addresses interlocking needs of both wet and dry neighborhoods that could be a unifying rather than a divisive question,
As our streets are repaired, are you interested in seeing raised neutral grounds (medians) around the City that create a network of internal levees to protect New Orleans from another crippling citywide flood in the future?
1 very interested
2 mildly interested
3 only if bike paths are on top
4 bad idea
That would be a question that an arbitrary group of participants can answer without harming the citizens who don’t have the time or energy to participate your event and without derailing ongoing recovery efforts.
“2) What sort of organization would dive into New Orleans recovery politics with two weeks or preparation?
While AmericaSpeaks is always hesitant to get involved with a process that we were not involved with developing, we believe that we need to do whatever we can to make this process as strong as possible.”
Why? Why, Joe, is AmericaSpeaks interested in this process? What do you aim to do, or prove?
Like Maitri said, this dialog AmericaSpeaks is having is encouraging, but I fear that, in the end, it may be no more than a distraction. The questions asked at the Community Congress were largely irrelevant when rebuilding plans for most neighborhoods have already been drawn up. The UNOP process is supposed to be creating a citywide master plan from the existing neighborhood plans. People’s feelings about whether they value schools and hospitals and better levees have already been resolved.
We’re all trying to figure out where to go with the process in this rudderless ship. That’s a major part of people’s frustration. The only reason most people attend meetings anymore, I suspect, is to make sure that there’s accountability in case someone tries to do something we wouldn’t approve of.
I suspect that most people feel like they don’t need more exhaustive meetings where their input is recorded using keypads (rather than dialog and ballot boxes), but feel that what they really need now is leadership to carry their ideas to the mayor and city council, get them approved, and get the money rolling!
We’re all fed up with the process. We’re fed up with gatekeepers. We want action. Where’s the friggin’ money???
I did not attend the infamous Saturday meeting, but I am on the “steering committee” for my sector of my planning district of UNOP. At the meetings I have attended so far, the local architect/facilitator has been completely open to every suggestion made by every individual citizen and has incorporated all of the suggestions into the plan, as well as notating them on a map of the district. During the large meeting at the church on Canal Blvd. the participants in our sector of District 4 flatly refused to make any planning decisions for the St. Bernard projects because no one was present from that neighborhood as representatives. We insisted that outreach be made to bring them to the table before any such planning take place. I never saw any local announcements by the Lambert group to participate in their planning process until the process was finished and they were presenting it to US. I do not criticize their plan, but I didn’t experience the level of community participation (at least for my neighborhood) that I see with UNOP. “Can’t we all just get along?” — Rodney King
[...] There is a rundown of several of these issues at Think New Orleans [...]
I am working on a project through the Preservation Resource Center which is funded by the French Heritage Society, Vieux Maison Francaise. We have been given a mere 20K to restore two homes in the Treme neighborhood. We found two candidates, both in historically signifcant homes who need help to do structural restoration. These homes are falling down around them. My contractor, bless his soul, and myself, are working for free on this project so the money goes to materials and skilled manual labor only.
If you look at the result of previous ‘planning’ in Treme, you see that we have had the I-10, which destroyed a significant amount of French Quarter quality housing stock and also the construction of Armstrong Park which took away another great amount of housing stock. Both now are out of control elements in our neighborhood. We are working to preserve the little that remains in this historic neighborhood. There is hope that Armstrong Park can be brought into commerce as an elegant feature but this has been promised to us for years. There is only one solution to the
I-10, it must go.
When I look at the budgets for the UNOP, of 5.5 million dollars and the America Speaks budget of 2.3 million dollars and then look at the money we need to really finish these two homes in Treme, it would take only about 50K total to stabilize them and make them livable, it saddens me to see the money spent on the UNOP process. 7.8 million dollars in planning! And I look at the the result of previous “planning” in Treme, I see nothing but warning flags.
I see the poor being exlpoited. I see organizations such as UNOP and America Speaks as vipers, who plan to use the needs of the people of New Orleans to get money for projects that help consultants create fake jobs and for big contractors and in the end, it can hurt the working class residents who do not have the resources for representation in the process. This is what drives me to be, not an activist, as people like to refer to me as, but as I see it, an advocate.
My own property was destroyed in Treme, but I am working to help people who do not have the knowledge nor the time to negotiate the municipal political system to help them get back on their feet. Rodney, one of our candidate works for the city, his wife suffers from osteoarthritis. They have three kids. Their house has become too much for them to maintain under these circumstances. As they have seen us helping them, they are becoming more engaged in the neighborhood association, realizing that we can accomplish more together than if we did not organize together to fight for our interests, which are simple. Fight blight and grime and you’ll have a positive impact on crime.
We can turn Treme around as many neighborhoods are trying to do too. But we aren’t doing it in big meetings, with PR or 21st century anything. We are doing it by blood, sweat, tears, and collective common sense at the hyper local level.
Someone from the LRA told me, “Keep Doing What You’re Doing!”
Laureen Lentz
Dear Joe,
Will you please tell us about the $2.3m donation? The source of the funds should be public information. Your group should not be able to participate in our public input process, and cannot claim to be transparent or accountable, without disclosing your backers.
If there is a conflict, and we find out later, the whole process will be discredited (and a monumental waste of OUR time). If there is no conflict there should be no problem with disclosure.
Also, I would like to know, if you found that the UNOP process, be it by selective outreach, or shaping the questions, or electronic vote hacking, whatever it could be, was manipulated to serve a special interest group with a specific agenda for the city, would your organization disavow those results of your process?
Thank you.
Amy
Amy,
You are absolutely right that we need to be transparent about who is funding our work. We’ve not been able to announce our funders to date because we have in most cases only gotten verbal commitments without foundation board approvals yet. We were asked to join the process only a few weeks ago and the timetables with which foundations make decisions official tends to go a bit slower than one might otherwise hope (to say the least). We’ve been pushing on this and I’m told we should be able to announce them by the end of this week. That said, the funders are by and large all major national foundations whose primary interest in supporting our work has been to get the voices of people in the diaspora into the process. Sorry to not be able to be responsive immediately, but I wouldn’t want to jeopardize any of the funding by going public with a name before board approval. I hope that will suffice for now.
With regard to your second question, manipulated results would not be legit pretty much by definition.
joe
We have not had a single planner come to visit the leadership of our neighborhood. Edgewood Park (on the lower east side of gentilly) wonders just where DPZ got its input when it concerns Edgewood. I was at 2100 St. Roch this last Friday night and listened to some guy talk for 2 hours and then he said he wanted us the think about his ’stuff’ and would not take any questions. I interupted and asked exactly where on the internet was this Gentilly Plan that he was using, anf future plans. Now this is afetr he advised us to get the stuff on our own (swear to God). The best thing he could say was that he did not particularly like putting out drafts and we could find it on the GCIA web site. That was laughable. I went to dinner after thsi session with Scott and Ladonna of GCIA and neither had any idea that fast was coming. The GCIA web site should not be DPZ’s official repository for these plans. Oh I’m upset. I wonder if they are listening to Ms. Natham.