This is all well and good, But this sounds like the consultant basically just punted on coming up with a solution, and instead agave a spiel on how the city should come up with a solution. Isn’t that what he was hired to do?
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ugh. I’m so sick and tired of campaigns.
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I thought so too, at first. But then I realized I misunderstood his mandate: Mickey Fearn was not charged with just coming up with a replacement mechanism for CACs. Rather, it sounds like he was asked to find a better way for the city to serve the needs of Raleigh residents.
This sounds like a subtle change in semantics, except for one powerful difference: unlike the former goal, the latter does not restrict him to the task of making a “replacement” if it’s necessary. This lets him question all of Raleigh’s red tape, and encourage city staffers to re-design how city governments work from the ground up.
In that light, I think what he’s saying is that the lack of citizen engagement is too complex of a problem to be solved by a single mechanism. A single mechanism will not solve the problem of NIMBYs having an outsized voice. A single mechanism will not let new parks and development projects be built faster while hearing from the people it needs to listen to. A single mechanism will not enable people who are under-represented in city governments to have their voices heard.
The problems CACs (poorly) tried to solve is not just complicated. Rather, **we have to address a complex system. And dealing with a complex, systemic issue requires a complex, systemic solution.
Same. But read the above: I would not think of what he’s doing as a campaign. I would think of it more as a hard reset for how we do things in the City of Raleigh, the beginning of the end for how most of us think of how we interact with the City in our daily lives.
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This isn’t much of an update IMO. Some of the old CAC proponents see the new upcoming system as the same as the previous CACs but I’m sure the differences are in funding, support, and the details, which we’ll have to wait and see how they work.
Main takeaway from me is that the city will have the opportunity, if they choose, to drive the level of engagement evenly across the city. In the past, the CACs were left to do that themselves which they, more or less, didn’t.
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Do you get the sense that this will quiet down the NIMBYs who wanted their CACs back?
Mickey Fearn (the consultant)'s final report did make specific recommendations that went into those details. You can see them in his slide deck if you want, but I felt like it’s strangely organized and wasn’t any more concise than the full report:
The TL/DR I got from this is that CAC-shaped advisory arm of government may come back, but NOT as a NIMBY cesspool or a rubber-stamp ceremony for developers.
Instead, he’s recommending that it works truly like a group of locals scrutinizing the City’s work in good faith. Despite his mild manner and lofty word choices, I got the vibe that Fearn is strongly accusing NIMBYs, YIMBYs, and bureaucrats alike of poor citizen engagement and undemocratic practices, and says the city must invest more people and money to do things right.
The report does make a few more specific recommendations, though. (click to read)
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Integrate naturally-forming local communities (block clubs, religious organizations, book clubs, youth groups etc.) more formally into city decision-making processes
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Use city-citizen interactions (e.g. when you stop by City Hall, go to a public park) as a chance to informally probe people for opinions
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Create “a City interdepartmental community engagement Core Team composed of staff from appropriate departments”, nonprofit funding, and volunteer support in the interim, as a permanent Community Engagement organ forms
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“Create a Reimagine Raleigh (Seattle) website” as a continuous pipeline for citizens to pitch possibly-helpful ideas to how the City could work. …not sure if this is talking about Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods or its “Reimagine Seattle” storytelling project.
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Holding regular “Welcome to Raleigh” festivals for newcomers to the area to impress to them that continuous, constant engagement is fun and awesome to do
Remember, though, that more specifics are still coming up. In response to John’s post, because the report doesn’t go much further than core principles (i.e. steps the city government can take to explicitly list what it believe in), I think it’s still too early to tell…
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I’m not sure but @keita makes a good point. A common theme of this crowd is that the details aren’t there. They constantly demand granular details on basically everything and lifetime commits to those details. I’m exaggerating to make a point but nothing in life is set in stone. And that’s ok as processes need flexibility to adjust over time so basically what I’m saying is I don’t think the old CAC crowd will ever be happy.
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Council member David Cox, whose vote was one of two against abolishing city support for CACs last February, is not enthused about the prospect of creating a new city department to facilitate community engagement.
“The formation of a community engagement department will simply continue to obfuscate and shove serious community engagement out of sight and out of mind,” Cox wrote in an email to the INDY . He said the city is worse off for community engagement than it was a year ago and that he’s disappointed in the community engagement report, which he found “lacking in specifics.”
Just now reading through this thread, but something I didn’t appreciate about “Livable Raleigh” is they took email lists from the CACs and started spamming with their unsolicited email agenda.
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Is that even legal…? I’m not a lawyer, but that sounds like an abuse of power, and you could scare them into shutting up using a lawsuit if you had the time and means.
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Maybe I’m jumping the gun on it, but I can’t think of another way I landed on their list other than through the CAC. I’m pretty anal in terms of which emails I use for spamable things, and maintain one email account that I guard pretty tightly.
Anyone else suspect the same?
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That’s true. I have been getting emails from the CACs that i have at least attended once so I figured it’s cause I signed in with a name and email.
Now, I’m interested in what’s going on so I don’t mind that much but I get your point. If they can’t drop you at your request then clearly that shows how unorganized they are.
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While we wait for the finalized specifics (as well as the pearl-clutching and faux-drama from CAC lovers), what do y’all think of the informal, more cultural recommendations Fearn made?
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When the new engagement happens if in CAC form they should have no say in any development whatsoever in there district of not. It should just be criticism of the city.
You know, they had no power to block things in the past. Their vote was just “for information”. The CC had the final word, whether the PC or CAC voted against.
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And thank god they didn’t! You get 1 kind of person that goes to CAC meetings (I don’t really mean 1) and 5 of those people shouldn’t decide the future of our city. The CACs didn’t represent their region. I bet there was never a single CAC vote that actually represented 1% of the respective region.
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Are there statistics showing how the CAC used to vote?
I only went to 1 meeting (the last one before they were dismantled) so i cannot tell. While I was at the five points CAC, my wife attended the Atlantic CAC (they were happening in the same building). She told me that Patrick Buffkin was present, they discussed the CAC suppression and apparently she was told that 80% of the time, the CAC voted in favor of projects. I don’t know if this is true or not.
I think some people from livable raleigh tried to use the CAC to expand their movement but as far as I know livable raleigh is not a representation of what the CAC were. Not all people attending the CACs are member of this organization.
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Thought this was an interesting video that dabbles into the wonderful world of our CACs, at least tangentially.
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I’m not sure where stats are or if they exist, I’m also only speaking from experience attending and seeing results in CC/PH/PC meetings. They were often in single digits with some being LOW double digits representing regions of thousands.
Oh, I agree with you on that. Not convinced that the new proposal will be better.
I guess my point was that I don’t think CACs were as nimby as some depict them. It looks this way now because livable raleigh puts so much emphasis on their suppression + they are pretty much against everything the current CC does.
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