The Big Questions

Report back: Comp Board Meeting, 7/15

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.

The skinny on the comp plan board/committee

We also learned a bit about the status of comp plan committee (I guess it's being called a committee now, not a board?) at the meeting tonight. People have been asking me what's up with it, so here's the word:

It seems that the deadline for resumes/letters of interest was extended a couple times in order to get a sufficiently diverse pool of applicants (and it's still open!), as the response by the first two deadlines was a little anemic. They have about 80 applicants now, and are just starting to interview people.

The planning department is hoping the Council will be able to approve the final membership by January, although Doug was careful to say that might be optimistic.

Wow. On the one hand, you want to do it right, and rushing together a non representative committee would not have been the way to go. But it does also seem like there's a danger of losing the momentum from the SDAT, tonight's meeting, etc. if the committee isn't even seated until more than six months after the enabling legislation passed. I guess as long as the committee is able to shoot out of the starting gate and get going it will be able to rekindle things. But only a small number of people, even devoted citizens, have unlimited attention spans.

Guess we'll do our best. In the meantime, take your last chance to apply for that committee! Send a letter to your councilperson, or [email protected].

The Art of Public Meetings, Part II

So meetings are not one-way streets. There are facilitators and there are participants. As I wrote about with the AIA Sustainable Design process in August, I find myself a little conflicted at many of these public meetings. I am a die-hard believer in the importance of public process, but then I also frequently find myself wanting to shake people and say "Stay on topic!" or "Didn't you listen to what the man just said?"

I'm trying to balance this tendency with a growing suspicion that if you want people who are not meeting junkies to participate in a given public process, the first step has to be letting them have a chance to vent about whatever's on their minds before you can nail them down to focused contributions to solutions. In that light, that's what tonight was for many people, I think.

There were a lot of personal pet peeves (like the tangent of people complaining about historic codes that won't let them paint their house the color they want or how there are too many bars on South Pearl) and general storytelling about how the neighborhoods used to be and how it's all gone downhill.

Much as at the beginning of the SDAT charettes, there was also a lot of concern about the comprehensive plan process not duplicating all the neighborhood planning that's been happening. Doug answered that quite well by saying that they would be drawing together the existing plans and looking at how they relate to each other and how the city relates to its larger region. A comp plan, he noted, should be, among other things, a single document that can sit on the podium at every planning board and zoning board meeting, making sure that all decisions are being guided by a single vision for the city. (Archie Goodbee, in a characteristically brief appearance, compared the need from a comp plan to a business with many branches needing a guiding vision for its presence in a region.)

It's a good answer. It will be, of course, harder to answer the people, especially those who've been part of the recent South End planning, who are complaining about general meeting burnout. I'm not sure there's a good way around that, except to draw in new blood.

In amongst all this, though, there were also some clear planning themes emerging that could definitely carry into a comprehensive planning process: vacant buildings/lots; infrastructure, especially failing water and sewer; local hiring for public works; and getting useful retail into underserved neighborhoods. The people in that room had some very detailed knowledge of how the water/sewer problems and vacant buildings and codes issues were playing out in their neighborhoods.

Given that, I wish again that these folks had been part of the SDAT process. Not only would they have contributed a lot to the discussion, but they would have been, I think, heartened to hear the very concrete, achievable  suggestions about changes to the handling of vacant and abandoned properties in particular that the SDAT team suggested and that the city is looking into trying to implement. I did wish that some of that had been brought out in response to some of the comments.

In general, I think that one key to getting folks like those who came tonight involved long term in this  planning process may be being able to show some concrete action on issues they care about so they don't feel like they're treading water. In fact, that wouldn't hurt for any us, of course.

One of the women at the meeting said to me afterwards that while the overall tone may not have been quite what the organizers had been hoping for, she thought it was a good and hopeful meeting and that when people were given a chance to get into the meat of the issues, they would. That could be pretty neat, I think.

The Art of Public Meetings, Part I

Tonight's comp plan info session was held in the lobby of the Albany Housing Authority, and moderated by Barbara Smith. It began with a short presentation by Doug Melnick, the city's planning director, and then Doug and Barbara listened to comments and answered questions.

The content of Doug's presentation was right on target and really nice to see. He started at the beginning and laid out all the basics: What is a comprehensive plan? What does it do and what doesn't it do? Why should you care? What topics might it cover? How will the process work? This is exactly the kind of information that is often skipped over, which leads to only people in the know feeling welcome and able to get involved.

How much of the audience got as much as they could have out of the presentation isn't entirely clear. Doug had competition from the singing in the neighboring meeting room, but even without that, he was speaking softly and quickly. As countless older people have beat into my head at places I've spoken, slowing down and speaking up is essential. And tough, I know.

Also, he fell into a very common problem with Power Point presentations: He had put a fair amount of information on each slide, and he seemed to think it would be repetitious to actually say everything on there, so he'd start to describe each slide and then trail off. Even for the speed readers like me in the audience, this made the presentation a little hard to follow and made Doug seem more unsure about what he had to say than he probably was. And many people don't absorb information visually that well at all. Making sure you are always amplifying what's on the screen, rather than summarizing, is much safer (Doug has promised to make the Power Point available. Perhaps I'll be able to  link to it or post some it later.)

Both Doug and Barbara handled the wide-ranging discussion (more on that next) quite well.  Barbara has a knack for diffusing hostile comments without dismissing the concerns expressed. And I in particular have to give Doug major kudos for being a city official who is (1) willing to say "I don't know but I'll find out" and (2) willing to say "We didn't do X as well as we could have; We've learned from that. We're going to do it differently next time" (in this case outreach to communities of color for the SDAT) instead of being defensive. Or really just being able to respond to hostile questions in general without seeming defensive. These are simple, but very very powerful and all too rare things (especially the latter). They are much harder to learn than the finer points of public speaking.

Report Back on South End Comp Plan Info Session

As I mentioned earlier, tonight was a meeting organized by Councilwoman Barbara Smith to encourage residents of the South End, Arbor Hill, West Hill, and Park South (i.e., people who are often underrepresented and especially people of color) to get involved with the comprehensive plan. As usual, I'll break my notes on the meeting into a few posts based on theme.

Overall, this was a very hopeful meeting. They had a great turnout—I counted in the vicinity of 50 people, about half people of color (and of the white folk most were actual residents of those neighborhoods). And while there were some familiar faces, there were a lot of folks who have not been involved much with citywide issues, and some that even the regular neighborhood activists said were new. So the basic goal of the meeting—expanding who was participating in the conversation about the comprehensive plan—was clearly met. Not that it's all over and done; this was the first step. But it's started.

Also, and I hadn't really processed this before when I passed on the meeting announcement, this was technically the first official public community information session about the comprehensive plan. It was nice symbolism not only to be really working to get these neighborhoods represented, but to actually go to them first.

So, on to the details...

The Heart of It All

So, of course, beyond the specifics of vacant property, the big money questions are what insight did the SDAT team give us into how to make Albany a healthier, more sustainable city, and how likely is it that their recommendations will bear fruit?

As I said before, the quality of the presentation was uneven. While some bits homed in on some fairly concrete strategies or needs in terms of vacant properties, downtown residential, and building better relationships between the city and its institutions, others wandered quickly through outlines of broad or boilerplate concepts ("stormwater management," "energy efficiency") that the city "should address." They weren't wrong, but I hope there's more detail in the final report.

I would have loved to have a much shorter list in most sections and then hear some specifics spelled out. For example I would have loved to hear much more about the following things that were mentioned in a breath or two:

• connecting our various parks through greenways
• connecting better with our waterfront (Grace Perdomo: "Everyone would obviously like to see I-787 removed. And it would be unprofessional for me to hope that it would happen by flooding.")
• putting in a skate park
• needing more streetscape on East-West routes
• a citywide bike/pedestrian safety plan
• multi-modal transportation corridors and the trade-offs that need to be made to set them up
• focusing neighborhood development around assets like new libraries or bus-rapid-transit stops and matching zoning to that
• having the citizens involvement in developing the RFP for the planning consultants for the comp plan so that we're sure we get someone who knows how to do public outreach and will follow our various specific directives.

Again, I hope that will be there in the final report.

I think for the SDAT process to have been successful and worthwhile, a few things will have to happen:

1. The city and residents need to prioritize from the report a handful of the top recommendations, both on process and on programs, and turn them into an agenda that can be rallied around and used to draw more interest. (Said agenda should not, however, be fixed or exclusive until participation broadens.)
2. The city should move on the vacant properties suggestions immediately. That doesn't need to wait  for the comp plan: no one is going to come to the comp plan and say "Please leave the vacant rotting building on my corner." Implementation of something, a proof of not "sitting on the shelf," and a systemic change that will have such a major impact will do tons to lift cynicism and engage further residents. It will also provide a good and ongoing media hook. One of the more disappointing parts of the presentation last night was the absence of any media beyond myself and the TU. (That I noticed. Apologies to the Gazette if you were somewhere in a corner that I didn't see.) There were certainly no TV cameras.
3. The SDAT process and any coverage generated by it need to be learned from and capitalized upon to craft a comp plan process that is actually representative of the city's diversity. (More on this later.)
4. Some of the more open-ended questions and topics presented by the SDAT team could form the structure for comp plan meetings so that citizens are still coming on the ground floor, before a plan has been drafted, but the meetings none the less have some focus and can inspire creativity in participants beyond the usual litany of issues. (It should be noted for balance that at least one person I talked to was thrilled by the charettes and their breadth and could have "kept going all week.")

When the presentation and then the report are posted, I will propose examples of what #1 and #4 might look like.

Outside Looking In

One of the things I think the SDAT team did really will is help those of us at the presentation take a fresh look at our city. Whether they extracted it from our ramblings or from their whirlwind research or the material the city provided, they got a number of distinctive things about Albany and made the audience chuckle in recognition or burst out into applause on several occasions. They were also incredibly upbeat about the city, in a believable way. "Thank you for getting us excited about our city again," said Bill Newman in the comment period.

A very random collection of interesting points that were made, some which were new to me, most of which it was just nice to hear confirmation of:

Albany's strengths include its location, its urban fabric, its distinctive neighborhoods, its historic buildings, its institutions, and its neighborhood associations. It's unusual for a city as small as Albany to have the kind of cultural richness that it has.

Though there are neighborhoods where this is not true, overall the city has the lowest unemployment rate in the state, and its employment base has been growing, albeit modestly. (So why do students still think they need to go elsewhere to find a job?)

There's very little "transportation constraints on suburban commuters" (i.e. traffic) into Albany. Low commute times compared to the rest of the state or country, and housing prices in the city that aren't much lower than in the suburbs means that the city will be more successful marketing itself to "lifestyle" residents: people who want to be in an urban area, live in cool old buildings, enjoy culture and walkable neighborhoods, and live sustainably.

We have one of the best housing authorities around. (Some of us knew that, but it was nice to see it identified so strongly. In very few cities can the housing authority be a point of pride.)

To quote Alan Mallach, "Albany is a funny place." In particular he meant that the concentration and size of our major institutions—state government, the universities, and the hospitals—is very large for the size city we are. This means that what they do and how they grow is makes "an enormous difference to the city." And though the rest of the state likes to bash Albany in the abstract, Mallach specifically and directly exhorted state government to take an interest: "The future of Albany is important to the entire state. It should be right in the center of the state's agenda."

Pedestrian and bicycle safety and accommodation are huge issues in the city.

We actually have a pretty good transit system, but no one knows how to use it. It's unclear, not well advertised or marked. We have a guaranteed ride home program for swiper users but no one knows about it. The system is also short on crosstown routes.

Albany is doing just well enough that it could probably coast, noted Mallach in conclusion, but that's not what people want. Albany has the potential to become the kind of sustainable community that "others could only dream of."

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.

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).

SDAT begins

I made it to the afternoon charette and the town hall meeting of the SDAT process today. The charette had well over 50 people, clearly considered a good turnout by all involved, even though there were few surprises in terms of who was there. The town hall meeting had maybe the same number. There were some less familiar faces there, mostly people who appeared to have particular interest in the environmental side of sustainable design. I'm going to try to break up my thoughts into several small posts. Clearly, the most interesting part will be to see what they come up with on Wednesday. Please write in and give your impressions, especially if you were at either the evening charette or if you go to tomorrow morning's.