The New Orleans Citizen Participation Project

Residents are rising up in New Orleans and demanding more and better opportunities for input!

One of the most damaged areas of New Orleans in the post-Katrina levee failures was the lower 9th Ward.  To this day, this area is less than 50% rebuilt.  However, those residents who have rebuilt and returned are a dynamic, motivated group.  They also feel -- with justification -- that they are very under-served by both government and the private sector.  So, while our city administration continues to tell us that the community is not ready for Participatory Budgeting (PB), a collaborative of organizations and residents from the lower 9th Ward has come to CBNO and asked us to help them conduct their own PB process.  With the tenth anniversary of Katrina approaching on August 29, this group is producing a Lower 9 Resiliency Festival, with cultural, recreational and faith activities.  The funds they raise from sponsorships, merchandise sales and the events themselves will be used to create a pool of money for the PB process.  CBNO will then guide the community through the process, culminating in a vote by lower 9th Ward residents on how they want to spend the money to improve their community on their own.  Not only is this a powerful statement about community self-determination and resiliency, we are confident that it will garner a good bit of media attention.  It will prove to our city leadership that people in New Orleans are more than ready for Participatory Budgeting, and is likely to create a demand for PB from other segments of the city.  It is so gratifying to see residents themselves take the initiative, ask for our expertise and support, and put together a shining example of community participation!  We are doing everything we can to make sure that they do raise the funds necessary for a really strong PB process.

Speaking of resiliency and community leadership, New Orleans has been selected to participate in the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities initiative, a worldwide program about building resiliency to acute shocks and chronic stresses.  While many of the other cities in this program have strong civic engagement structures, or are including them in the Resiliency Plans that are the required initial component of the program, New Orleans is once again lagging behind on this subject.  In fact, the public comment period for the Resiliency Plan will happen seven months into an eight-month planning phase, which makes clear what kind of a priority city government places on community input.  However, the Citizen Advisory Committee for the New Orleans Citizen Particpation Project has stepped up in an attempt to correct this grievous oversight.  They are in the middle of a series of meetings to design an organizing and advocacy campaign to demand that the city include a permanent, formal, inclusive structure for meaningful, comprensive community participation in the Resiliency Plan, and that the structure be based on the NOLA CPP model.  Already one of the people involved has published a very aggressive op-ed piece in our local on-line media outlet, The Lens, and the group plans to have a major presence at the public meetings in July.  In the interim, CBNO is preparing a substantial white paper that makes clear the inextricable link between civic engagement and resiliency, and the group is going to demand a meeting with the leaders of the Resiliency Plan effort to push for a commitment to meaningful community engagement in the Plan.

Despite the continued reluctance of key city leaders to embrace meaningful community engagement, New Orleanians themselves are making it ever clearer that they want their voices to be heard, and to be heard right now.  This creates an extraordinarily powerful momentum for change, and CBNO is doing everything we can to guide and support this energy.  Both lower 9th Ward Participatory Budgeting process and the Resiliency Plan are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.  To our friends and supporters out there, we welcome any comments you have on this, and hope you will join us in maximizing our ability to seize these opportunties.

Links:

• Op Ed on Resiliency and Public Participation

Spring is in the air here in New Orleans, and we are happy to see more fruits of our labors sprouting up like the leaves and flowers!

Within a week, we will be submitting to the City Planning Commission our report on the Neighborhood Participation Plan (NPP).  The NPP is the first major part of the overall Citizen Participation Program to be adopted by New Orleans city government.  Over the past twelve months, we have surveyed residents and applicants (primarily business owners and developers) regarding their experiences with the NPP.

We are very pleased to report that overall, there is considerable appreciation for, and recognition of the value of, the NPP.  Not surprisingly, we received quite a number of recommendations for improvements, and will be including 17 specific recommendations in our report.  Rather surprisingly, satisfaction with the NPP was actually higher among applicants than residents.  Some people had predicted a business backlash against the NPP; instead, while there was a little bit of grumbling about the time it requires, the large majority of applicants appreciate the opportunity to discuss the project with their neighbors-to-be, and to begin building a relationship with the community.

From the residents' standpoint, there are issues with the notification timeline and process, and opportunities to improve the productivity of the NPP meetings.  Most of the complaints/suggestions (from both sets of respondents) are easily addressed.  Only a very small number of people were strongly negative.  This gives us plenty of information to make improvements, and a strong base from which to advocate for expanding the NPP to other city agencies that could clearly benefit from getting direct community input for their decision-making.

One interesting outcome from the survey was that both residents and applicants felt that having a city staff member present at NPP meetings would be helpful.  A few other comments from both sides also indicated that a stronger city presence throughout the process would be an improvement.  These comments clearly help build the case for implementation of the full Citizen Participation Program, as this is the only way to accomplish this.  Stay tuned for more on this ....

On another front, we are nearing completion of the website that will enable people to track the city's actual spending compared to budget over the past seven years.  We actually thought this was ready to launch, but the city did a little deeper review and asked for an additional set of numbers to be included.  These would reflect the large number of amendments to the budget that are made over the course of the year.  While we regret the delay, we agree that this will be good additional information for the site.  We have a tentative agreement now to launch the site in early April.

The city's long-deferred, comprehensively revized new Zoning Ordinance is about to come up for discussion again, and CBNO will be working with other community partners to make sure residents are informed about the content of the Zoning Ordinance and aware of their opportunities to provide input.  While more work remains to be done on this, the current Ordinance is tremendously out of date (roughly 40 years old and amended so many times as to be almost impossible to use); we will be working with partners and community members to get the new Ordinance into shape and across the finish line as soon as is reasonably possible.

Finally, we are preparing for our participation in the East-West Institute's program on the role of community engagement in post-disaster recovery.  The institute is bringing together representatives from five different entities in each of two American and two Japanese cities for a three-year program to exchange and develop information on this subject, concluding in a major symposium at the University of Pennsylvania.  CBNO was chosen to be one of the five from New Orleans.  We greatly appreciate this validation of our work and take our participation very seriously.  The first major activity will be a trip for the U.S. participants to Japan in June; look for our report in the next project report.

As always, we thank you for your interest in, and support of, this challenging, rewarding, essential work.  Your role in its continued flowering cannot be overstated.  Thanks, and Happy Spring!