July 08, 2005

(Updated) City Officials Launch Community Visioning Process

Recommendation No. 1 From The Bureau Innovation Project

Note: This post has been updated. Any and all updates appear at the end of the original post.

At yesterday's meeting of the implementation team for the Bureau Innovation Project (a group sometimes referred to as the "Mayor's Cabinet"), Gil Kelly of the Bureau of Planning unveiled the initial thoughts on the Mayor's call for a "community visioning process" which eventually will lead into creating a strategic plan for the entire City of Portland government.

Of the twenty recommendations (now instead to be referred to as "goals" according to Ingrid Carpenter, the director of the Project), the first is "[t]o develop a citywide strategic plan in consultation with the citizenry of Portland" and is expanded upon in the original BIP report released in early May.

Rationale for Recommendation:

An extensive community process, taking place in 2005, will identify the shared values of all Portland citizens. The results of this process will be used as a platform to develop a citywide strategic plan, with a vision, mission statement and goals for bureaus to link to and develop performance measures. The strategic plan framework will focus the work of the City and provide a basis for measuring progress and to make further organizational changes within the City bureau structure.

Goal:

This recommendation provides the foundation for determining the City's future and is the basis on which future funding, programming and City restructuring will take place.

Suggested Approach:

The Bureau of Planning will spearhead a community-wide visioning process under the Mayor’s leadership beginning in July 2005. The bureau will work in partnership with all City bureaus and all elements of the community in conducting the visioning process.

That recommendation is also part of the equation which led to our realization that, for better or worse, Mayor Potter is putting into place the pieces of what we termed a "foundational moment" -- one which "which enables the nearly wholesale rewrite of Portland's civic structures" should Portlanders opt for such an all-encompassing task.

During the setup for Thursday's meeting, staffers busily were tacking large and long sheets of paper onto the walls which graphically represented the results of a "Citywide Visioning Process Scopring Session" which apparently was held back in June, presumably by the Bureau of Planning. If this meeting had been a major public event, it would have been a tremendously poor move because the manner in which this representation had been rendered and colored produced little more than the appearance of a jumbled mess of confusion.

Given the criticism the Bureau of Planning sometimes receives, especially in the local blogopshere, that impression might have doomed some public opinion of the forthcoming visioning process right from the start.

Fortunately, staffers also distributed a handout with a better-rendered and much more easily-understood version of the same information. You'll still find a good dose of jargon (bonus points for anyone who can tell us what "build the cadre" means), but it does provide context to what potentially is at stake in such a process.

We were told, however, that this diagram wasn't online as of yet. We haven't had the chance to scan in our own copy, nor have we yet had any response to our emails asking if there's already a pdf available that could be forwarded to us. We will update this post when we have an electronically-accessible version of one sort or another.

(Someday, perhaps we will become so influential, all-powerful, and much-feared that City staffers will know better than to not post this sort of information online somewhere prior to conducting a meeting such as the one in quesiton here. Inevitably, we ask about such online availability, and more often than should be the case the response is that the material has not been posted online.)

Kelly called the visioning process a "clear priorty for the Mayor since his campaign" and said that the last time Portland engaged in any similar conversation was thirty years ago -- a time he described as "a very bold era."

Now, he said, for reasons and concerns both internal to the City and external from the larger community, there's a need to take such a look again, arguing that there is a thirty-year political cycle through which the communities cycle back to "asking the fundamental questions."

"I think that's very clear with this new Mayor and new Council," Kelly said, adding that the question on the community's mind is, "Who are we, and where do we want to go?

Kelly explaiined that the notion of such a visioning process was raised by Potter at a "transitional retreat" after his election. At the time (all of the quotes which follow are Kelly's descriptions) Commissioner Sam Adams said he was "ready to go," while Commissioner Erik Sten said "if you can make it the right level of questions, I'm in. Commissioner Dan Saltzman "politely raised an eyebrow and said, 'Well if you must,' but added that he was "game."

"I wouldn't even begin to chararactize Commissioner [Randy] Leonard's reaction," Kelly said, indicating that Leonard had remained silent -- to which Leonard chimed in, "Unusually so."

"The anxiety" over broad conversations such as the one planned "was the first thing I was concerned about," Kelly said. He offered four typical shortcomings the community visioning process needed to avoid.

First, he said, "Make sure we involve all of the right people." Kelly suggested there is a tendency to get a narrow group of people who may all have the energy to go to meetings, but who think and talk alike. "In this case," he said, "we really need to reach out into all corners of the community."

Second, he said it was important to be "making it real," which he described as meaning "making it specific enough that it has a real, enduring meaning when we move into the next phase." Kelly offered the idea that the issues for the community visioning process were "larger than the budget process" but at the same time "more specific than blue sky." He also said it was crucial to follow up with whatever comes out of the visioning process. "That's where the atrategic plan comes in."

Third, he said "having a great design for the right discussion but failing to link it to the realisitic" must be avoided. Part of this is determining how the visioning process ties into other current or forthcoming projects, such as measuring City performance under the Managing for Results approach ad the eventual Charter review committee. "These are all major discussions," Kelly said. The visioning process, he suggested, needed to be informed by those other discussions, and they in turn needed to be informed by the visioning process.

Fourth, Kelly said it was important that the visoning process not be "an exercise where citizens and business are gathered" to discuss the issues and the "end result is a long wishlist." Of that sort of process, Kelly said; "We all know that's not going to work." Rather, he said, the Mayor is asking for a real look at "the future of this community" and how we get there through some sort of shared responsibility. "Not just a matter of what can the City do for you," he said. Because citizens have "capped the cost of government," Kelly argued, new approaches need to be found. "The old model doesn't work."

Currently, according to Kelly, the City is interviewing "some community leaders and bureau directors" for a sense of their take on the issues confronting any visioning process, but stressed that those are just "internal questions" and that "we may get a whole other set of questions from the outside."

Kelly said there are "two boxes" into which the visioning discussion would it. First, the "plan for development" -- meaning not just the City's physical development, but its longterm economic and social development. Second, the "social contract." Here, Kelly offered the "yellow recycling bins" example -- meaning that turning to residents themselves for the sorting of their household waste helped solve a potential garbage-handling problem without resorting to a large goverment program requiring financial resources.

"By the Spring of 2007," Kelly said, "we want to have both the vision in place and at least a draft of the strategic plan in place."

In the shortrun, they are asking community members and bureau directors to identify their critical issues "to start out with," and asking the major bureaus and members of Council for their"short list" issues. A "one-time" staff will be hired, and with a limited budget for the process, all bureaus are being asked to be involved.

Currently, the staff is in the process of developing the visioning committee itself, which will oversee the larger community process. That committee is expected to consist of 35-55 people who "will not be asked to develop the vision" but to "make sure the participation is there that needs to be there."

Kelly said that the committee will be "using a number of techniques to get into the community" -- some of which you can see in the graphical representation we mentioend earlier in this item -- including a "variety of survey methods which may or may not be the norm." His example was the recruiting of skateboarders to handle the surveying of other skateboarders.

That process is expected to be "ramping up" over the Summer and into this Fall.

During discussion, a number of other issues were raised or specifics established. On the quesiton of how the timeframe for the visioning process plays into the budget cycle (and the potential that, if the priorities and tradeoffs aren't clear in January, "some budget fights" could interrupt the strategy"), Kelly said; "We've been wreslting with that very question."

On the premise that "the issues facing the City really are regional or multijurisidictional issues," Kelly referred to the diagram (mentioned earlier) which makes some reference to that. "We hope to learn for our strategic plan what those entities are facing," he said, "but also help them get out of it a sense of their share of the responsibility."

One team member expressed concerns about the community outreach, arguing that while the process may "check with community leaders" those leaders "don't always have the everyday pulse" of the community, citing specifically the "gap between communities of color and the City."

"That's a really critical part of this effort," Kelly said. "I don't know if we have the perfect answer yet." He indicated that there will be key staff positions "focused entirely on outreach." Without such efforts, he said, the visioning process is "not going to be very balanced or very pertinent."

Also raised was the potential pitfall of "vision" being impacted by "assumptions coming in," and whether or not one approach could be to pitch different sets of scenarios or assumptions about the future and examining how they might come into play. "We've substantively talked about it," Kelly said, "[but] haven't settled on it process-wise."

Kelly also said that they are considering any number of methods for the conversation, from using the media, to community fairs, to "living room chats" and argued that "part of this is hearing, part of it is educating" -- by which he meant a discussion not about "what can the City do for you" but about "here's what the future could portend" and what people think about it.

Potter himself jumped in to say that part of this is about "social values" and that the process must be one in which we "stand back and ask ourselves is this what we want."

He argued that people can put too much emphasis on, "What do I get from this?" Instead, he said, "We have to expand that conversaiton to have people understand that they have a personal interest in our City." Or, as he extended the thought, an "enlightened self-interest." He said that the "fundamental question" the community had to ask was, "What are we willing to do to help solve some of the problems of our society?"

"It begins to beg the question about what really is the role of government and what is the role of individuals in our society," said the Mayor, "and do we all have this common good we're all striving for?"

He reiterated that "this conversation is going to be as much about values ... as it is about what is government going to do for us" and asserted that while the visioning process will be "philosophical on the one hand" it also would drill down to the specifics of "if we are going to develop programs ... what is the role of the community in doing that?"

Another exchange about the inter-relation between the City and other jurisidctions, and how the public often doesn't think about what jurisdiction is a responisible for a given service, only about whether or not that service is being provided, yielded an interesting observation.

"The boundaries we set up politically," Potter said, "I'm not sure they're justifiable." He suggested that there may eventually need to be a conversation about whether or not new approached or alignments are necessary. "I don't know what a new configuration would look like," he said.

There also were further echoes over concerns that the process notbe limited, and that the visioning committee doesn't end up a "handpicked" group that isn't "inclusive of as many people as possible."

"Be wary of gatekeepers," Potter said. "They don't let people in, they keep people back." He added that he would "like to see 100,000 people in Portland involved in this process" -- adding that he's actually like to see 500,000, but that 100,000 maybe was "more realisitic."

Since starting this item, the Mayor's office released a newsletter which invites people to become involved in the community visioning process, and opened a section of the Mayor's website for the effort.

Currently posted are the Mayor's letter introducing the community visioning process and a descirption of how the community visioning committee (which will oversee the outreach and public engagement, but not craft the vision itself) is intended to function. That latter document includes the specifc information for applying to be a member of that committee. In addition, applicatons for the positions of Public Engagement Manager and Vision Coordinator now are available as well.

You can general information or inquiries about the Community Visioning process, contact them via email or call the Community Vision Hotline at 503-823-7838.

As should by now be obvious, the community visioning process being launched out of the Bureau Innovation Project is no small effort, and will involve a great deal of activity.

It's a story that properly requires something akin to the deliberateness with which we followed the work of the Public Involvement Task Force during this site's first year -- but taken to an entirely different level. When covering the PITF, we often in essence had what might be called the "public involvement beat' entirely to ourselves, as we routinely were the only media present for the gruntwork meetings such as those with various constituency groups around the City.

Just that sort of thing, but on a much more greatly involved scale will be required to adequately cover the visioning process.

We're not quite sure how -- or if -- that will work, given that the current level of activity and financial support for this site is barely sustainable as it is. But it's important that we at least set tht degree of coverage of the visioning process as our goal.

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