September 21, 2004
Neighborhood And Public Involvement Standards Update
Catching Up With Some Old Stories
One of the things we should probably do during the two-month period leading to our final post is take a look at the current state of some stories we've followed over the life of this site. We'll start with a brief-ish item on the current status of two committees related to the Office of Neighborhood Involvement, since there's a bit of news there.
Of the two groups in question, the one we followed the least was the Guidelines Review, Empowerment, and Assessment Taskforce, charged with examining the "roles, functions, responsibilities of Portland neighborhood system partners including Neighborhood Associations, District Coalitions, Business District Associations, Office of Neighborhood Involvement and other City agencies."
If you click through the link to this committee, you see see that the final draft product of its work recently was completed and now is open for public review and comment. Interested parties can provide written comment through Novemebr 12, 2004, and a pair of public hearings have been scheduled, one for October and one for November.
Since the announcement of GREAT"s final ddraft, we've been wondering whatever happened to the Public Involvement Taskforce, whose early work we covered in some exhaustive depth during the first year of this site. This committee was charged with "[recommending] strategies for improving the city's public involvement processes that are in accordance with the Public Involvement Principles and [taking] into account the needs of city staff and a diverse set of public interests."
So we asked Brian Hoop of ONI about the current status of the PITF, who told us that it's work was put on hold until the work of the GREAT committee was completed. When the PITF was last at work, according to Hoop, it focused on "reorganizing the draft list of recommendations to be more
understandable." He believes that the work product of the PITF could be ready to come before City Council sometime this Winter.
We (and others) sometimes referred to the PITF as the Public Involvement Task Force and sometimes as the Public Involvement Standards Task Force -- so it may take a few searches of our archives to find all the previous material we reported back when the committee was hard at work.