Alright, leave it to the near east side to get embroiled in a big misunderstanding based on personalities and political agendas and a whole lot of mistrust.
It all starts with this innocent email, the development chair of the Tenney Lapham Neighborhood Association just trying to do his job, as he has done in the past.
On 10/26/2011 5:29 PM, David Waugh wrote:
Neighbors,
As your Tenney Lapham Council’s Neighborhood Development chairperson, I invite you to give feed back on a proposed development that fronts on the 700 block East Washington and continues through to East Mifflin. This property was part of the Don Miller parcel purchased by the city. Many of you saw the developer’s proposal last week at the annual meeting/Spaghetti dinner. A link to a pdf of the proposal:
http://www.bark-design.com/tlna/700N-Gebhardt.pdf
Now is the time to roll up our sleeves and help the developer guide this project into a win win solution for both the neighborhood and the city. To that end, I am meeting with the developer next week. I would like to have a small committee of 4 or 5 people to sit down to a few meetings and hash this through with them. Once we have things well underway, we will hold another public meeting to show results and get more feedback.
Please send me comments on the proposal as presented in the pdf , and also let me know if you are willing and able to serve on the development committee. I would appreciate volunteers contacting me soon.
Thanks much
David Waugh
Address
Phone
This is the way things get done. Not everyone can attend every meeting and in fact, they don’t want to. People who are interested step up, work through the issues, consult with the neighborhood about what they want, hold meetings to get feedback and generally do the heavy lifting and then show up at city meetings to provide that impact to the commissions and if it doesn’t happen, committees and commissions delay action waiting to hear what the neighborhood thinks. This helps hurry the process along, is often designed around the developers timeline and is inclusive, efficient and helpful to the process.
Of course, this led to this missive from our alder . . .
Dear Neighbors,
The redevelopment of the Don Miller parcels are an important step forward for our neighborhood and the city as a whole. With the City as a partner in this process, we must be quite public and the city and its development process must be forefront in our handing of this project. I must write a response to David Waugh’s previous email to the neighborhood and outline the public process under which this project will be handled.
Interested citizens are always free to gather in each others’ homes to discuss policy, however, development proposals demand that everyone is included in an equitable fashion, and a steering committee made up of a handful of individuals does not make for the thoughtful and thorough conversation we would like to see on this project, no matter how well-intentioned.
Therefore, after considerable conversation with the Mayor’s Office, Common Council Leadership and the head of Planning & Community & Economic Development, we have advised the developers of the 700 N Block development not to meet with small groups in private discussion. There are several reasons for this. First, comments and feedback on this (and any other) development proposal need to be made in a public setting. Secondly, it sets a dangerous precedent that developers are expected to meet with any individuals or group that seeks an audience. Not only does that create a conflicted communication path, but it sets development proposals on a sideward trajectory through the city’s well-defined development process. Additionally, no one group should unduly influence the development process and the proposals being made. The purpose of committees like Urban Design and Plan Commission is to balance the public interests and opinions of various groups.
The Gebhardt development team has had two public meetings on their proposal with the neighborhood to date, in addition to a lengthy discussion with the entire Tenney-Lapham Neighborhood Association Council. These conversations shall continue regularly as there are new developments and designs to consider. They are now working to further refine their plans, based upon these public meetings, and when there is additional information, we will be working to organize a follow-up neighborhood meeting. It is imperative that this project is shaped by us all, not a small group of individuals, because there are many important stakeholders on this project not just in the neighborhood, but city-wide, and opportunities to share opinions need to be open to all those groups equitably.
Additionally, discussions on height to the proposal are of question at this point. The city’s RFP committee recommended the project while there is an ordinance related to the urban design district that would preclude parts of the proposal. The question of height has been being debated both off-line and in public by many for weeks now. In the interest of an open public dialogue on this matter, Tuesday night I will be introducing legislation so that the commissions and Common Council may hear your opinions on the ordinance and make a decision as it relates to this project site. I have attached it to this email. It would allow for a building height of 10 stories, with 2 additional floors as allowed under the existing conditions set forth in the ordinance for the portion of the 700 N block that Gebhardt would be purchasing from the city. The site in question currently is written into the ordinance at 8 stories, plus 2 additional floors as allowed. The proper place for this debate lies before the city and its committees. I look forward to your participation in this process. It will be referred to the Plan Commission and Urban Design Commission. The tentative schedule would have it at Urban Design on November 23 and Plan Commission on December 5. You may visit the city’s weekly meeting schedule to check on committee meetings and agendas. http://www.cityofmadison.com/cityHall/WeeklySchedule/
I want to thank David in his capacity of Development Chair for TLNA for setting up a website to disseminate information on the project as it develops. I’m sure it will be an invaluable resource. There are many folks who must be a part of “hashing this through” and I encourage you all to be a part of this public process for the city.
Sincerely,
Alder Bridget Maniaci
Dripping with irony, eh? A call for a public process on a project and process that the alders and city staff shrouded in secrecy from the beginning. You can’t make this stuff up. Classic pot. kettle. black.
If you can pick your jaw off the floor and get past that I have several questions. Does every time the Chamber or DMI meet about a development project, are they required to have an open meeting? Or how about when city staff meet with the developer, will the DAT (staff committee) meetings start getting noticed? What exactly constitutes an open meeting? If sending an email to the neighborhood listserve and inviting members isn’t enough, what is? Does the city have spaces they can let us use to meet in for free so we don’t have to meet in homes? Can they pay for notices to make it more public? Are neighborhood steering committees, even tho they were considered best practices, now prohibited in the city? What happens when we get to the plan commission or urban design and they want to know what the neighborhood thinks? Won’t this just make the committee process longer, leaving the issues for the committees to work through instead of being resolved by the time they get there? How is this good for anyone – unless it is designed to make the neighborhood concerns irrelevant because the committees won’t have time to deal with them and they get blown off.
Finally, more irony. I didn’t know the developer met with folks twice, why were those meetings ok? What was the difference? I live 3 – 4 blocks from the project, haven’t gotten one single notice about any meetings. I actually lives closer than many TLNA council members who were able to discuss this, but I wasn’t invited to participate – and now can’t participate in a process I and others were invited to. Do we in the James Madison Park Neighborhood now have to come up with a sanctioned process and make the developer come to more meetings? I could go on, but I think you get the point.
David explains what he was thinking:
Dear Bridget,
It is common practice for there to be a steering committee from the neighborhood association. You yourself I believe attended steering group meetings for the StoneHouse development on the 700 block of Johnson. Indeed, this neighborhood’s work with the very large Gorman proposal on the Don Miller lot was lauded by the city and is held up as an example in the city’s Best Practices Guide for Development, still current, and on the city planning website.
I have some experience in this area. Here are web sites I still have active that show examples of our work with developers and how a steering committee engages the neighborhood and developer:
http://www.eastmifflin.com/
800block/
http://www.eastmifflin.com/627
http://www.eastmifflin.com/700north I’m sure more than a few neighbors and neighborhoods are scratching their heads here. Anyone is always welcome to attend, the schedule is on the website for 700North. And there will plenty of public meetings and emails and newsletter articles for everyone to stay informed and engaged.
The mayor’s office also weighed in. I think they were misled about the nature of this meeting, but this is what they said.
Mayor Soglin’s view is that: “When the developer comes to the Plan Commission, that is a public process. When the developer meets with neighborhood groups, we expect the same. We advise the developer not to engage in private meetings.”
So, given this directive, I really am hoping that all business meetings are held to the same standards as neighborhood meetings. I expect to be seeing DMI and Chamber of Commerce meeting agendas made available from now on so when they meet with developers and take positions on projects we can all attend and comment. Hell, I hope the EDC work groups and committees are as well for that matter.
Are neighborhood steering committees to become a thing of the past. Are we throwing out our best practices? Is the Capitol Neighborhoods process that was held up as a model for neighborhoods now passe. I don’t recall any of this being mentioned in the Economic Development Commission review of the Development Process. Where did these new rules come from?
I hate what has happened to my neighborhoods. The city once wrote this about the very same neighborhood.
Neighborhood Role: 800 Block of East Washington Avenue
The Tenney-Lapham Neighborhood Association worked closely with the developer and alderperson on this project. The neighborhood association designated delegates to meet with the developer and alderperson. These delegates then presented their findings to
the Neighborhood Association Board, which approved the findings as official recommendations to the developer. Interested neighbors gave feedback to the developer through several means including a survey, and an activity where neighbors indicated their vision for the site by placing dots next to their preferred option. The neighborhood also recognized that combating urban sprawl, and making East Washington Ave. a more visually attractive, vibrant corridor are important goals for the City. They felt that this project was an
opportunity to address these goals. As one neighborhood resident remarked at the Plan Commission, “we are happy to play our part.”
Now, the developer has completely stopped communicating with people in the neighborhood and we don’t know if they will show up to the neighborhood meeting mentioned above tomorrow.
Great. process. eh? Perhaps if this is the way the developer was being directed at the Edgewater, we see why it was such a disaster of a process. This is exactly the kind of process the Mayor ran against. Where people show up when the bulldozers are coming and meetings are a sham of a process. I’m at a bit of a loss as to how to resolve this, but feel bad for the Urban Design and Plan Commissioners that are going to have to deal with the fall out from this. If neighborhood folks are left to keep their questions and comments until a public process, we better bring blankets and pillows and coffee to the meetings. This seems so backwards.
