It’s one thing for the Park Board to acknowledge inherent challenges that complicate their efforts to engage diverse populations; it’s quite another to blame people who do engage for the Park Board’s own failure to surmount those challenges.
That’s exactly what happened in the draft Cedar-Isles Plan, as called out in a letter to Commissioners published in this issue of the Hill & Lake Press.
Following 14 pages in chapter 3 that exhaustively document Planning staff’s hard work to recruit and involve “broader audiences” in the planning process, the Reflection on Engagement (section 3.9) declares staff's failure by taking aim at “deeply invested” residents from adjacent communities who had the fortitude to stay engaged for the duration.
These engaged citizens are criticized for sharing input numerous times through several engagement avenues and accused of having the loudest voices, with a jab toward members of the Community Advisory Committee (CAC) for failing to represent all voices in the region.
It’s hard to imagine a more divisive and unproductive reflection on lack of engagement than section 3.9. According to staff, neighboring residents who strongly engaged made it difficult to adequately incorporate and support ideas from underrepresented voices.
In fact, people who participated and demonstrated civility and clarity throughout the process are not to blame for an engagement process that did not hear more voices or produce staff’s desired results.
A productive reflection on engagement would step back and consider the planning staff’s own limited diversity and rigid adherence to a tightly-scripted top-down process that funnels input to ensure that the final plan will maximize funding opportunities for park development, and too often at the expense of our natural resources.
Flaws in this process are already known to discourage participation by underrepresented communities, not just in this case but in other projects. Two years ago, for example, comments on the draft Parks for All Comprehensive Plan called out the CAC meeting structure and decision-making process as rooted in white supremacy and not preferred or effective across the diverse range of Park Board stakeholders. Significant changes to the Park Board’s community engagement structures were recommended but did not happen.
The Metropolitan Council’s Regional Park Equity Analysis requires that master plans include a summary of the public engagement process, advice heard, and how the advice shaped the master plan. The list of stakeholders to consider includes youth, Black, Indigenous and people of color communities, people with disabilities, low-income populations, people age 60 and over, and neighborhood/regional groups that participated as planning staff, CAC members, outreach liaisons and the general public. It’s unfortunate that section 3.9 focuses on blaming some of those stakeholders for the lack of participation by others, rather than on elevating the two major themes that numerous stakeholder groups consistently emphasized throughout the entire planning process: first and foremost, protect our natural resources and take care of what we have before building more amenities. Any reflection on community engagement is incomplete without highlighting these unifying themes that transcend stakeholder divisions and were the biggest and most important ideas to emerge from the planning process.
