The attention of the Times-Dispatch turns quickly from ideas for change to complaints of racial exclusion in its coverage of Richmond's week of work on a new Downtown Plan. Good thing the paper kept its ammunition dry on this one, because they could have covered this issue before the process began and helped to mitigate the problem; or they could have discussed it more openly in their coverage of Saturday's charrette; or they could have addressed it Tuesday morning in the coverage of Monday's contentious City Council meeting.
Apparently, fireworks are more effective when you bundle them.
The city and its planners have gotten plenty of feedback already, some of it not good, about low participation by Richmond's majority-black population.
The charrette drew more than 300 people at its opening presentation Friday, and more than 175 in a hands-on public workshop the next day. But the majority of participants were white.
"I don't want anyone to walk away and think that we don't care about what goes on in our city," said 7th District City Councilwoman Delores L. McQuinn, one of the council's three black members.
Rachel Flynn, director of the Richmond Department of Community Development, said the city and its nonprofit partner, Venture Richmond, reached out to civic associations throughout the city, and especially in the expanded downtown area under study.
"Why would we exclude people?" Flynn asked. "The point of this is the public, the public, the public."
The reaction is mixed among black civic leaders.
"It didn't reach," said Marie F. Coone, a South Richmond business owner and a former City Council candidate who took part in the planning process last weekend.
Coone said the process needs more diversity in its participants to ensure that the master plan takes a hard look at issues that matter most to people in the city, such as affordable housing, jobs and educational options for young people.
"That will not be the case if the myopic, self-serving views of a monolithic group are all that are obtained for the plan," she wrote to Flynn this week.
However, the president of the Historic Jackson Ward Association said the planning process has been open to his traditionally African-American neighborhood.
"I think Jackson Ward got a fair share of attention from those in attendance, even though the process seemed to concentrate on the James River as the center of attention for development of the plan," Charles W. Finley wrote to Mike Sarahan, a former city attorney who raised the diversity issue before the City Council on Monday.
None of the issues that have been raised about the city's pre-event communications or about the lack of diversity in the public events are off-point. But as someone who not only started complaining about these problems but started doing something about them, I find the knee-jerk cries of people like Mike Sarahan to be self-indulgent and as historically reactive as those of a civic leader whose email a week ago said that it would "be be a tough sell to get people ... to come out on a Friday night and Saturday morning in the middle of the summer."
Leadership means getting ahead of problems, inspiring people to get engaged and having enough of a vision to make process matter.
The City of Richmond's PR efforts should have been about six weeks ahead of the charrette. Venture Richmond, as a significant backer of the charrette, should have been cheerleading it more aggressively. City Council members should have ensured more of their constituents were aware that a new Downtown Plan needed their input.
All of that should have happened. It didn't.
At some point in a process like this, you have a choice. Either you bitch about who isn't going to be at the table, or you step forward and ask, "How can we get more people to the table?"
Now that phase one of the new Downtown Plan development process is almost over, it's time to make sure that more people, and more of the right people, have an opportunity to input the process -- as Dover Kohl develops a draft, and as that draft starts circulating the community.
Now is the time for the city, and Venture Richmond, and City Council, and Mike Sarahan, and the local media, and our neighborhood associations to spend a little more time and energy making the back-end of this process more inclusive and participatory. I only suggest that because the front-end of the process was more participatory than any other planning process in Richmond's history -- and it deserves to get better.
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