First, best wishes to Councilman and chair of the Comp Plan Board Dan Herring who is reported to have injured himself fairly badly while on vacation and recovering from surgery in an out-of-town hospital. We hope to see him back and healthy soon!
So July. It's a hard month to get anything done in, but Albany's Comp Plan Board squeaked to a quorum (which for a board this large is a substantial number of people) and put in a solid, useful hour of work on Tuesday evening, pressing through the niggly but necessary details of how to word the consultant RFQ and how consultant applicants will be vetted and interviewed.
Board member Karen Strong, who gets major points for attending with her 8-month-old son on her front in a sling, joked with me about looking forward to reading about "how boring we were," but you know, this is where some of the most important work gets done.
The basic gist of the meeting is fairly straightforward. Doug Melnick reported that the planning department had done an internal assessment of what it was able to do itself, and what was appropriate for it to do. He reported that the department can handle all the necessary mapping in-house, a substantial money-saver, but that while they were all capable of leading community meetings they felt it would be more appropriate to ask the consultants to be in charge of public input and public meetings, offering a more "objective" forum. (I agree.)
There was some back and forth about how specific to make the RFQ, with various board members wanting to be sure that certain elements of what we're looking for, from riverfront revitalization and natural resources to the importance of getting input from a diverse cross-section of the population, were
spelled out and others, especially commissioner Mike Yevoli (who, as vice chair of the board was running the meeting in Herring's absence), itching to get the RFQ out there and reminding the group that an RFQ is a request for qualifications and to some extent you don't want to spell everything out, you want to see what the consultants figure out and prioritize for themselves because it gives you a sense of their priorities and competence.
While I think that if it had been a more contentious issue there would have been a problem with Yevoli both facilitating and participating in the discussion when he has such a firm position, in this case it didn't seem to be a very big deal. Mostly, he's right, as long as the very good issues people were raising make it into the interview questions and the scope of work, they don't need to be spelled out now.
The board also decided to create a 5-member selection committee to handle the interviewing, but to let the entire board vet and rate proposals first and jointly choose the finalists for the committee to interview. While I was amused at the argument that having the whole board audit the interviews that the committee holds would be "overwhelming" for the consultants (aren't these people we're expecting to run large, chaotic, potential contentious public meetings of hundreds of people?), overall it seems like the process they're heading toward is a good one, balancing full board input with practical process.
It's especially good to see general agreement on weighing "project approach," which will include the part about how a public input strategy is crafted, heavily when assigning points. It will be interesting to see the criteria and weighing formalized and the interview process go forward.
In general, it was clearly a benefit to the board to have members with experience in hiring consultants and working on planning issues, but also a benefit to have those who don't just fall into what feels like a familiar process and were willing to point out things like the fact that even if the board agrees that it is intangibles--personalities, how well they're likely to engage the citizenry, etc.--that are going to be most important, the group could still stand a discussion of its own vision of what the perfect consultant is before deputizing a committee to judge those intangibles. After some digression sorting out "vision" for the comp plan itself from "vision" for the process and the consultant, it seems like that conversation will be part of the next meeting.
I for one hope that the board goes with Scott Townsend's suggestion that the scope of work include a formalized implementation plan, despite Yevoli's caution that it will take extra "time, effort, and money" from the board and the consultant. Everyone wants to see this plan acted on (you know, presuming it doesn't suck. But I don't think it will), and having the firs several steps laid out can go a long way.
So there you go. It's underway, the board is serious and seems to be working pretty well, and things will only get more interesting from here.
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