INC NEWS - Guest Column: Helping neighborhoods navigate bureaucracy (today's Durham News)

[John Schelp]

Guest Column: Helping neighborhoods navigate
bureaucracy 
By John Schelp & Tom Miller, Durham News, 29 Mar 2008

Many thanks to The Durham News for its coverage [March
22] of our request to create a new position to help
citizens and community groups.

There are many reasons why we can all support a
Neighborhood Advocate in Durham:

Durham depends upon neighborhood organizations to
collect public opinion on planning issues. Why not
help neighborhoods in this effort? Why not have an
independent expert to whom neighborhoods can go for
information and assistance?

Under the current process, developers work with the
planning and other departments to refine and ensure
their plan complies with the Unified Development
Ordinance and other standards.

Developers have the financial resources and teams of
experts -- lawyers, land planners and designers,
traffic and civil engineers, consultants, lobbyists
and others -- to ensure their plans comply with the
standard required for approval.

The UDO is complicated and dense. It effectively
excludes from the planning process the citizens it
presumes to protect. Neighborhoods don't have the same
amount of resources, expertise or time to communicate
and negotiate improvements on a project.

Under the current system, developers work with the
planning department shaping their plans long before
citizens find out about what's going on. The staff
stakes itself out on what it likes and doesn't like
about a developer's plan long before any attempt is
made to find out what citizens like and dislike. By
then the developer has altered his plan to make staff
happy and the staff feels committed to back the
developer because they have influenced the developer's
plans. This is human nature, but it puts a
neighborhood -- which is already unsure where the race
course goes -- standing at the blocks because it can't
hear the gun go off.

A Neighborhood Advocate would be the community's
expert for plans in the project pipeline. In essence,
the new position can turn the planning process from
the reactive/confrontational dynamic we often see to a
more proactive/cooperative one.

Elected officials can refer questions from citizens
and neighborhood groups to the Neighborhood Advocate
to help community groups understand what's happening.

Business advocacy is so institutionalized in local
government that we no longer recognize it as such.
Economic development and planning staff members are
pushing for rezonings and incentive payouts all the
time. We make no argument against this; however, after
30 years of growing neighborhood organization and
participation in government, it's time to recognize
neighborhoods as a constituency that deserves the same
attention and advocacy within local government that
the business community takes for granted.

The Morreene Road warehouse controversy could have
been avoided with a Neighborhood Advocate on the
inside, looking for potential problems.

The recent Trinity Park-McPherson Hospital zoning
controversy could have been avoided with a
Neighborhood Advocate on the inside -- by suggesting a
development plan that would have clarified so many of
the issues that would later become conflicts among
neighbors. (At the time, the planning director
discouraged the neighbors from establishing a
development plan.)

A Neighborhood Advocate could help neighborhoods avoid
the tension in the community that may arise when
developers change their plans (as in the case of the
Trinity Park condos).

Neighborhood Improvement Services doesn't have the
knowledge, capacity or institutional culture to
advocate for neighborhoods. The agency needs to focus
on code enforcement, not planning and zoning.

Durham's Neighborhood College was established
following a successful grassroots campaign to
adequately regulate the location of asphalt plants. At
the time, the planning staff had been quietly working
with the asphalt industry for months -- getting
everything ready for swift approval of new plant sites
in low-income communities of color. A Neighborhood
Advocate could have helped avoid this controversy over
environmental justice and public health.

After recent planning disasters in Trinity Park, on
Morreene Road, along Fayetteville Street and on N.C.
751, public confidence in the planning process is at
an all-time low. Isn't it time to create an
independent, expert officer within local government to
help neighborhood constituents -- and to give
something other than lip service to the neighborhood
protection policy expressly adopted as part of the
UDO?

Are not neighborhood organizations, and the citizens
they represent, constituencies that city and county
governments should serve?


[The authors are writing on behalf of Durham People's
Alliance.]