Once again the City Council Members’ participatory budgeting season is has arrived, and once again I turn to a discussion of local community participation in government decisions.
There are more council participants in participatory budgeting than ever before. Our members are beginning to amass volunteers and solicit suggestions for small capital projects to enhance our neighborhoods. While our community board has always done a first rate job of interacting with neighbors in identifying our needs, both great and small, it is the council that has money available to directly apply to projects.
If the projects are right sized and feasible, the community gets to vote on those that we believe will best benefit us. We usually get useful upgrades to our schools, parks, safety and transportation. We not only get to play a real part in the process, better yet we get to determine its outcome. It is empowering. The politicians get to tap the energy of their constituents and marshal the community’s support. Everyone benefits.
Even projects that aren’t funded in the current year get an airing and may get funding from an alternative source (i.e. the 7th Avenue station turnstile upgrades), or have an opportunity for approval the following year. Like chicken soup and a cold, it may not cure political apathy, but it can’t hurt.
Contrast that process with the alternative that most often occurs on issues that impact our district, but are critical to the City as a whole. Here, we have a history of activists and politicians encouraging false hopes. They pretend that an exclusively locally driven and determined process like that for participatory budgeting will carry the day. False expectations ignite resentment. After the media fans the flames, we are all destined to be disappointed, and cynicism again reigns supreme. I see it all around me. I see it all the time.
Instead of headlines that scream NO and are followed by those of seemingly endless, costly, and almost invariably fruitless court actions, when will we see positive headlines about projects that benefit the city and are mitigated in the neighborhood to include affordable housing, green elements, commercial protections and amenities? Not anytime soon I fear.
This is a tough city, and we all feel put upon by significant changes. The privileged can marshal more resources, and they are the most vocal in expressing their outrage. But everyone dreads additional burdens that the changes from development will bring. Grassroots opposition to projects often obstructs and delays, while inevitably increasing the cost of development without yielding satisfactory results. The sense of impotence and disillusionment is magnified on all sides.
Local views of acceptable change frequently conflict with projects planned with the benefit of the city as a whole. This is true whether the discussion is in Chinatown, Cobble Hill, or Brooklyn Heights. A local NYCHA project will soon become the subject of an organized and vocal opposition. Fears of displacement may spread, causing resistance, the only means of gaining sufficient funding to rehabilitate deteriorating buildings.
There is, however, an alternative. Brad Lander, Councilman for District 39 – and one of the initiators of the participatory budgeting process in the city – has stuck his neck out to offer such an alternative approach. When he chooses a different template to promote community input into major rezonings, it is obviously not an arbitrary choice.
Bridging Gowanus plan
As much as he might want to, Lander does not singularly control citywide policy. He has devoted a great deal of time, applied years of intellectual and practical knowledge and expended a great deal of political capital to develop a “Bridging Gowanus” process that will not be brushed aside as mere NIMBYism. Taking into account, if not totally satisfying, concerns of all of the various constituencies, he has taken great pains to be inclusive.
There are some who feel constrained by such a process and deem it inauthentic. The constraints exist outside the process, and by recognizing those constraints it is far more authentic and productive than a community wide gripe session.
Our neighborhoods are changing. They are becoming less affordable every day. Doing nothing about it doesn’t work. We cannot get the housing we need or required infusions of funds for infrastructure in the existing “no new taxes” environment if we blocking large-scale development.
Lander’s office has compiled a great deal of data and reproduced all of the comments as a result of the Bridging Gowanus exercises. They are online, as promised.
It is no accident that this is moving along in seeming coordination with the final determinations of cleanup and storm water retention tank placement at, or near, the former Fulton Manufactured Gas Plant. A great deal more will become clear with respect to the disposition of properties in that footprint when this process is completed.
In my article appearing in the August issue of the Star-Revue, I indicated that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – having ultimate jurisdiction – was saying that the cleanup would center on the Douglas/Degraw pool; the storm water retention tank would be placed there.
A recent EPA meeting, held with public officials and interested parties, confirms that conclusion. Happily for the neighborhood, it was also indicated that there is likely to be a replacement facility created during the deconstruction and reconstruction period.
The time to engage in detailed discussions with the Department of City Planning is drawing near.
