The Big Questions

But I digress: comp plan board

Mayor Jennings introduced the SDAT meeting (and then left, which is too bad. Even though the team has briefed him on their recommendations, it would have been instructive for him to see which items hit a chord with the audience).

But, my point is, he is still accepting resumes for his appointments to the comp plan board. He told the audience so. So if you think you can make a case to Jerry about why you should be on the board, by all means, do it.

And all the rest is implementation: SDAT report

I had a good bus day getting to and from the final presentation of the SDAT team at St. Rose tonight (you bus riders know what I mean), so I'm in an optimistic mood. I'm not going to try to report all the details of the presentation, since the power point will be available to link to shortly and a more full report done in a few months.

Overall, I was impressed. This is with caveats—I thought the quality of the presentation was uneven and unusefully vague in spots, and I still haven't shaken my feeling that a lot more use could have been made of the collective brain power of the people who showed up with more focused, facilitated charettes. However, the good news is that there was a lot of good stuff in this presentation that I haven't actually been hearing said elsewhere, some of it that we clearly need to hear, and some of it very concrete about what we can do.

As before, I'm going to make several smaller posts roughly by theme. Please chime in, add, disagree, etc.

presentation tonight

Contrary to my previous post, the SDAT presentation tonight will be from 5:30-7:30, not 5-7. Sorry.

It's at St. Joseph's Auditorium on the St. Rose Campus, 985 Madison Ave. (#4 on this map.) Parking at the LaSalle Lot (Entrance at 415 Western, P7 on same map).

The best laid signs...

The best laid signs...
Originally uploaded by miriamjoyce

This little scene is what greeted me when I arrived (late, it must be admitted) to the afternoon charette. I found it amusing. It is worth noting, though, that at least one person who didn't arrive by car and who therefore showed up on the other side of the building, in the St. Rose quad, was not so amused that there were no signs on that side even indicating that she'd come to the right place. That was also true if you arrived at St. Joe's hall from the quad (the side that made sense if you'd parked at La Salle as instructed) for the town hall meeting. This is why some people get to make their whole living as event planners.

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Props

By the way, it's easy to critique, especially for someone like me who is interested in all the little nuts and bolts. But I think it's important to take a step back and throw out some kudos:

To the planning department, for all their prep work

To the people who showed up, many of them despite skepticism and being unsure where the process will lead, and who engaged in many hours of exchange

To the team, who, I was surprised to learn just yesterday are volunteers. That's a lot of work on a volunteer basis. It was a recurrent theme at the town hall meeting last night for participants to offer their heartfelt appreciation for the team's time and attention, and I second that.

Flyer language

OK, I looked at the most common flyer again, and I don't actually see the term "charette" on it. Perhaps it was on another one? The language at the top of this one—"Your city, your voice. Design Albany. Led by local citizens . . . guided by national experts"—is quite straightforward, even if "SDAT", which is fairly meaningless to anyone not in the know is in the largest font of all.

In which I prove yet again that I am a process nerd

It is, perhaps, a good thing that despite my great interest in it, that I am not actually a planner. The reason being that I have a great deal of impatience with off-topic comments and vague wandering unfocused discussions.

Alan Mallach, the SDAT team leader, seemed to be doing quite fine at pulling useful themes out of the conversations at the charette today, and remarked unperturbedly when I mentioned the people who couldn't stick to a request to discuss strengths of the city that most people came to something like this with something particular to say and they were going to say it whether it matched the question or not.

He is, I'm sure, right, and there is value in using such conversations to get the gestalt and tease out what's on the top of people's minds.

But I'll admit that as a participant, I was hoping for conversations that were a bit more focused: specific questions to answer, visioning exercises, brainstorming sessions about feasible solutions, group prioritizing efforts, team members offering examples on the fly of how people's concerns are dealt with in other cities for people to react to (this did happen some). I would have liked to have more interaction and even to have been pushed

I very much respect the power and creativity of the public to step up and participate in crafting its own solutions, but sometimes we all need to be shaken off our own little hobby horses and work through a structure to make that happen. At least in my experience with strategic planning processes and such, more structure leads to more useful results.

I assume that part of why this didn't happen is they didn't want to limit the direction of conversation or range of topics, and I appreciate that. Perhaps I am asking too much.

A few SDAT themes

Since I was only at the town hall meeting and bouncing between rooms at one of the three charettes, I imagine the SDAT team itself will do a better job than I of summarizing and synthesizing the recurrent themes that Albanians came up with in terms of sustainability and Albany, but I will note a few things that I heard repeatedly:

• We value our local businesses and want to support them
• Albany is in desperate need of some help to become more bicycle friendly
• 787 should come down so we can have access to our waterfront
• We need mixed income housing, and housing downtown
• We need to buck up and be willing to give up some parking spaces or travel lanes in order to get things like better transit or bike lanes.
• Our history is an asset and we should find ways to preserve it and celebrate it
• We need a way for our elders to age in place, and get about safely

Andrew Harvey, the irascible head of the Park South Neighborhood Association made a stirring speech about catering to the people who want to be in an urban setting, and giving them a good one rather than trying to convince the knuckleheads who really like Clifton Park to come downtown. (I'm paraphrasing here, but I'm not exaggerating the sentiment.)

In the transportation discussion, DOT and CDTA got down to brass tacks over the implementation of bus rapid transit along Route 5, while the neighborhood development group covered every topic you could possibly think of.

Amusingly (to me at least), while at the charette I saw the neighborhood room unable to keep from sliding into complaints when asked for strengths (despite everyone there loving the city and being quite able to come up with assets when put to it), at the town hall meeting when people were asked to tell the team about Albany-specific issues they wanted addressed, a large number of people instead proposed their favorite sustainability solutions, from green roofs to energy efficiency. I have to admit that from time to time I found myself thinking, "OK folks, I'm pretty sure they've heard of that idea already. They are, after all, experts at this. Maybe we'd do better to be trying to help them understand Albany better." No transportation planner worth her salt needs to be told about Curitiba, Brazil's bus system, for example. It's legendary.

But then I decided I was being curmudgeonly and inconsistent. Generally I would give my eye teeth for a room full of Albanians to be talking about solutions, possibilities, upbeat things. And there was definitely some Albany-specific info in there (including, sadly, the observation that some of the public feels so unheard in other public contexts that they were thrilled just to see the SDAT team actually taking notes on what they were saying, and occasionally asking follow up questions).

Oh so many white people

In the preliminary conversation at today's SDAT afternoon charette, before the group broke into smaller groups to talk about neighborhood development, downtown economic development, transportation, and open space, there was a decent amount of discussion and concern about the fact that the people in the room were overwhelmingly white and middle class, mostly the usual highly civicly involved stalwarts who are familiar with the business end of a public-comment microphone.

It was striking and disappointing and will weaken the results. Without letting anyone off the hook for doing it right, I will say it is true that the planning dept put more effort into outreach for this than I have seen the city put into outreach about anything else of citywide import. Getting beyond the usual suspects is hard. There's a whole field devoted to it: It's called community organizing.

So it's good that the planning department is seeing this as a warm up to the comp plan, which matters much more in the long run. That will be more accessible by it's nature, because there will be dozens of meetings, in every neighborhood. But also they've now learned just how hard it is, and have time to start planning to take it to the next level for the comp plan: Beyond snacks to child care, beyond direct mail to congregations to be direct contact with pastors and other leaders. Participants today also suggested a mass leafletting campaign--really hitting the streets, face-to-face contact. Any organizer will tell you there is little replacement for that.

Also, one astute high school college student (Albany High grad, my bad) at the Town Hall meeting noted that while she knew what a charette was (because she'd read my column), no one else did, so it was not a very productive term to use on the flyers that were out there as people would glaze over it. Things you don't think of until someone points it out to you, and then you smack yourself on the forehead.

The day was still worthwhile, certainly. But I won't pretend to know what we were missing by being so unrepresentative.