October 03, 2003
(Updated) Neighborhood Activists Challenge Leonard On Role For Office Of Neighborhood Involvement
Note: This post has been updated. Any and all updates appear at the end of the original post.
This will show you how out of the loop I've let myself become even on issues I've tracked rather consistently on this site. Apparently I missed a recent meeting at which representatives of various neighborhood associations took issue with Commissioner Leonard's plans for the Office of Neighborhood Involvement:
Portland City Commissioner Randy Leonard, under fire at a recent meeting of angry neighborhood activists, pledged to stay as long as needed to explain the revolutionary changes he wants for the 30-year-old system of city-financed citizen participation.
Leonard kept to his word, sweating through 90 minutes of increasingly pointed questions about his effort to shift the Office of Neighborhood Involvement from its role as all neighborhoods' voice to City Hall, into City Hall's service center to neighborhoods.
At issue is what The Oregonian describes as a "sea change from the office's focus on public involvement toward a greater accent on accessible services such as neighborhood inspections and noise control."
I've addressed this before, in an item which includes comments from Leonard which seem to suggest that what he has in mind is a "two-track" bureau combining the involvement of neighborhoods in City decision-making and the providing of services directly to neighborhoods.
The article includes a strange comment from Mayor Katz:
Mayor Vera Katz, who sided with the Northwest District Association over the recent flashpoint plan for what Northwest Portland will look like in 20 years, said she cannot remember a time in her three terms when relations have been so strained.
"Neighborhoods are feeling a majority of council may not be as sensitive to issues raised before the council," Katz said. "Neighborhoods might feel like they're getting bullied and not being listened to. Are we there now? We're close to being there. I think we're closer now than ever before."
I call this strange since many of the various matters over which neighborhoods have come into conflict with the City Council are initiatives prompted by or at least supported by the Mayor herself. Which would sort of make her one of the people doing the bullying she refers to above, so I'm not quite sure what this statement means, exactly.
There's a fairly representative run-down in the article on the sorts of conflicts that have been arising seemingly with increasing frequency. But what remains a little murky is whether neighborhood leaders are opposed to the very idea of using ONI as a delivery network for City services to neighborhoods, or if they simply fear that such a charge will overwhelm ONI as the conduit for public involvement in City decision-making.
Currently, there are two efforts underway which will have an impact upon how ONI performs its traditional function: the Public Involvement Standards Task Force, which is working to create common public involvement guidelines (or standards, a word which has caused much consternation amongst City staffers) across all bureaus; and the Guidelines Review, Empowerment, and Assessment Task Force, which is working on the rules and responsibilities of the neighborhood association system, as well as looking at revisions to that section of City code which authorizes the Office of Neighborhood Involvement.
In addition, this November 15 brings the 4th annual Neighborhood Summit, which arguably might boil over with the sorts of issues discussed in The Oregonian, here on this site, and in meetings of the various ONI-related committees currently underway.
I'm expecting to receive some feedback regarding the article from The Oregonian and the issues involved from some neighborhood representatives, and will add them as an update here. And, of course, it's possible that Commissioner Leonard might have something additional to say as well.
Update
I haven't yet had the time to delve into the specifics, but there's something of an interesting case study of these sorts of conflicts in the various documents of some neighborhood activists opposed to the City's St. John's/Lombard Plan. This does not necessarily have anything to do specifically with Commissioner Leonard -- I offer it as an example of the cultural chasm dividing City decision-making and neighborhoods.
In essence (as was explained to me by the reader who passed this information along to me), the residents fighting the plan conducted their own community survey, with results in drastic opposition to what the City says the neighborhood wants -- a "wide divergence" in the group's own words.
In the group's submission (pdf) to the Bureau of Planning, they identify some possible explanations for the discrepency, including the prominence of City employees, consultants, and contractors are City-organized meetings on the plan; over-representation of people with "large amounts of spare time" to spend at City meetings; and the City's use of broad questions rather than focusing on the specific construction features.
Update
While I'm still waiting to hear from neighborhood leaders who have concerns about ONI, see the comments to this item for further word from Commissioner Leonard. In the end, as far as I'm concerned, the only real issues people might potentially need to address are ones of execution. If Leonard (and whoever ends up with ONI next) can successfully manage a "two-track" nature for the Office of Neighborhood Involvement, I fail to see how that's a bad thing. Much of this will likely depend on the results of the two committees mentioned above. And I do think that Leonard's point about how distributing access to City services out into the neighborhoods being served will foster a more positive relationship amongst residents, neighborhoods, and the city is an important one.
Comments (1)
Randy Leonard on 05 Oct 2003
Having city employees work out of neighborhood service centers located throughout Portland breaks the "downtown" model of our city delivering service. Being able to go to a building within each neighborhood to contact a city employee who's job it is to improve the livability of your neighborhood seems to me to be a better way for the city to serve it's citizens. In other words, if a citizen wants an abandoned car in their neighborhood removed they now have to wade through a bureaucratic jungle to find the right person in the city to help them. With a neighborhood service center, you will find that person in a building in your neighborhood that you can contact personally. I envision having crime prevention staff, the senior neighborhood police officer, fire inspectors, neighborhood planners, nuisance inspectors and any other city employee whose current responsibilities are assigned to a specific area of the city to work out of these neighborhood service centers.
There are some neighborhood activists who are fighting these changes because they think these services detract from neighborhood activism. I strongly disagree. In fact, I believe the changes I am trying to bring to ONI actually will attract more citizens to participate in their neighborhood associations because they will begin seeing the relevance of city services increasing the quality and safety of their neighborhood.
Commissioner Randy Leonard