Planning and the Public Voice:
Charrettes, Democracy and the Growth Management Process Transcript

Dr. Bush: This is the fourth in a series on Democracy in Miami: A Work in Progress. I want to start, as is fitting I guess, by thanking sponsors…the College of Arts and Science, the Urban Environment League, the League of Women Voters, the Richter Library Staff, and tonight Joe Keefe and Coral Gables TV for helping with putting all this together. We are planning a second series starting in late August and I want to invite anyone interested in discussing future topics to meet Bobbie Brinegar of the League of Women Voters and myself and several others at Michenau’s Restaurant for lunch at 12:30pm on Tuesday, June 8. So we want to be as inclusive as possible in planning the future of this series.

In the previous three programs, we heard from a wide variety of people about issues not often discussed together concerning democracy in Miami. Our guests have included Tomasina Williams, Meredith Sternheim, Michael Putney, Katy Sorensen, Robert Session, Leo Napast, and those who are here this evening for adding your conversation to all this perspective. I also want to encourage those of you who either see some of these programs, because they’re all up on streaming video and transcribed, to send comments to me. My e-mail address is gbush@miami.edu, and no I’m not related to the President. I get that a lot, although he also on I think right about this time too this evening.

I’m concerned that this community needs more regular television forums that address issues linking both local and national concerns. I think we’ve heard enough of the yelling out of Washington talk shows to fill a lifetime it seems to me. Unlike most of them, which have such small audiences, more of our forums should be televised, transcribed, and become part of our history. This evening we’re gonna be addressing questions of planning and the public voice. It was not long ago, as some of you may well know, that planning was simplistically associated with communism in the minds of many. Today, most thoughtful people acknowledge that the sprawl that surrounds us and the sad state of our inner cities has been in large part created by the lack of growth management and good planning in the past. The charmless dominance of our highways, traffic congestion, strip malls, and impoverished public spaces speaks to the need for new ideas and really a new generation of constituents who can approach questions of growth with fresh eyes. Today, our presidential contest is pre-occupied with debates over Iraq and gas prices, health care costs, education, and such issues as stem cell research. Unfortunately, planning which indeed touches most of these issues in one form or another gets short shrift it seems to me.

Much has changed in the last 30 years. We’ve had a new organization such as the Environment Protection Administration (NEPA) come in under the Nixon administration. Florida has created a growth management law in 1985 as many of you know under the leadership of Ruben Askew and later Bob Graham. Florida is also the site of many novel planning experiments under the leadership of New Urbanism, a movement led in part by Liz Plater-Zyberk who is sitting here on the dais. So again I want to thank you all for coming and ask a couple questions at the beginning to try to focus some of our attention. The idea of charettes and of design workshops has been a concept that a lot of people had heard about in one form or another, probably in this audience, over the last number of years. It really raises a question in my mind of what is a charette, how is it to the planning process, how can it be improved as a concept, and what is the experience of a number of people especially on this panel been in relation to charettes.

My own experience having been involved in Bicentennial Park on several different charettes is that sometimes you really have a limited group of people showing up for charettes. Some people might argue that some charettes are stacked in one form or another. I think that those kinds of questions really do need to be raised. I personally am biased at the outset that we need much better educated populace to understand the design the process in urban planning and the different governmental units involved so that more and more people can think that they have a real voice. That’s some of what we’re gonna be talking about this evening.

Let me introduce our guests and stop talking. George Burgess, on my far right, is the county manager for just about a year now from what I read. He was formerly with the school system and assistant county manager for a number of years. He was originally educated from the University of Maine. Next to George is Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, head of DPZ (Duany-Plater-Zyberk) town planning firm. She is the author with several others including her husband of Suburban Nation and Dean of the U-M School of Architecture, and also one of the founding people of the Urban Environment League, which is important to say. Next to Liz is Beth Dunlop, author and current Miami Herald architectural critic. She’s won more than 30 awards for her writing, and has a BA from Vassar College. Next to Beth is Maria Anderson, who is a member of the City of Coral Gables Commission having been elected in 2001 following tumultuous struggle over spaces in Coral Gables. So thank you all for coming.

Let me start if I may by asking, and we’ll go almost down the line here, asking George Burgess how effective you think public meetings have been in your experience at eliciting the public voice if you will? How can it be improved and some of your own observations of the process? You now have a design charette unit in the planning department from what I understand, so it’s becoming institutionalized to some degree. I’m just curious in your own reflections first.

Burgess: I think that its really kind of mixed. It’s ultimately a function of the involvement of the citizenry in the meetings. You can have a meeting and if its not a heavily attended, meeting if the participants aren’t engaged, you don’t necessarily get the information from the group that’s really reflective of what that area may want. I think the key thing is that we do the best job we possibly can to advertise and inform folks of the meetings, the purposes of the public meetings, whether they be for charettes or otherwise. Everything we do, frankly, in public service, is driven off of our customers, our citizens. It might sound a little idealistic but its true. We only do as well and are only as informed as our efforts to listen to our citizens. Our efforts to listen to our citizens are a function of our being responsible and asking and using every possible form we can to ask those questions. It’s also a function of our citizens and our customers really engaging with our government. There’s a lot of other things that folks have going on in their lives. Sometimes maybe its hard to make that time to get involved in your community, but we are only going to be as informed, our elected officials are only gonna do as much as they hear, I believe, from their constituents. So the more people that are engaged and are actively involved in public meetings that are heavily attended, they’re really reflective of the desires of the neighborhood, a community, a county. I think the more informed the decision makers are, the more likely they’re gonna be responsible in the decisions they make.

Dr. Bush: I assume in numerous public meetings in the last 20 years, what is your own feeling about their effectiveness?

Burgess: I think it’s mixed. I really do. I think that it’s a function of the commitment of the folks that are conducting the meetings to genuinely listen and care about what is being told to them. It’s a function of how well attended and how engaged and involved the community, the constituency is. We’re in the process now, I’ll give you an example, of putting together for voter consideration and the electorate can vote it up, they can vote it down, but at least we’ll give them something to vote on and to consider. I would like maybe to touch on a little bit more in the evening is this general obligation bond program. It’s an opportunity to invest in infrastructure to deal with community needs, neighborhood needs, regional needs. We’ve had in a three-month period over 100 meetings, about 55 of them facilitated and others just open meetings where we’ve invited folks to attend. Some were heavily attended, some are not. Some had more folks that were promoting a specific area of infrastructure and not broad array of infrastructure. Some of those meetings were more productive than others. When you ask the question, how successful are public meetings, I can’t say they’re a failure and I can’t say they’re a glowing success. I think it’s really a mix and it’s a function of the commitment of the folks conducting the meetings, how effectively they’ve informed folks of the purpose of the meeting, and how well they’re attended. Just having people in the chairs is only halfway there. They also have to be actively engaged in participating and providing that input that folks need to be able to better understand what their public wants and expects.

Dr. Bush: We’ll come back to that issue. The format of this evenings program that I should have mentioned before is that we’re gonna have each of the speakers speak for a few minutes at the beginning. We’ll have some discussion and then we definitely want to open it up for public comment after a little while. Liz, do you have some comments having been through numerous charettes? I wonder how many you’ve been through over the years. Do you have any comments looking back at how the public voice has changed and your approach to it over the years?

Dr. Plater-Zyberk: I’ve stopped counting about my own participation. I think it’s important to understand that we’re talking about public participation relative to the physical environment when you’re talking about charettes. So it’s about growth, it’s about issues of development, re-development, and some pretty tough decisions, which are unique to our time. I understand that we like to think that almost everything about our time is unique, but if you think about it public participation and decisions about the physical environment really has not happened before this. Way into the 20^th Century, it was the purview not necessarily of the monarch as it used to be, but of the bureaucracy of the government, of the public sector, of the experts. Something happened along the way, which may have had to do with the success of those or failure of the experts were, or perhaps there were growing expectations for participation in everything you do. Everything the public sector does. There’s a much higher expectation for participating in the decision making process.

That of course has spawned many acronyms like NIMB…Not In My Backyard…and BANANA…Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything else…because there is such a concern and unhappiness with how the physical environment is developing. I use that physical environment, as it’s too long when I mean everything, whether we’re eating up the farmland, whether we’re rebuilding downtown, absolutely every aspect of that. Are we conserving enough open space? Do we have the right kinds of parks and so on? I suspect that the acronyms have come up because our desire to participate is ahead of our methods. The charette is a pretty…perhaps, we’ll think it’s a pretty primitive method for an advanced social structure. So yes, you’ve already mentioned that the process can be hijacked, or if not enough people or a full range of people participate then the success is limited. We know that there are certain groups of people who don’t like coming out for charettes. Then of course there are all the people who are too busy and working very hard making a living and just can’t deal with it.

I’ve heard of a slightly more advanced process used in Australia, which may be worth experimenting with here if we’re not happy with we’re developing these processes. This is almost like the legal system’s jury formation, which asks not only the people who want to participate. Some number of the participants are the stakeholders and the people who will come out by themselves and who were affected by the project. Another part is in fact citizens from a wider community who are drafted to participate, who give a kind of supposedly objective voice. I think participation and decisions about the physical environment are here to stay and will only become a more human situation. We probably need to think the process through a little bit more and be proactive about creating and forming a process.

Dr. Bush: That’s part of what I’m hoping that we do this evening, maybe with some new ideas to broaden the range of people involved and questions. Perhaps Maria could be next? From a very local perspective, you engaged in a charette for Coral Gables about a year ago with Liz, I know, and others.

Anderson: I know it’s her favorite charette, right? I was kind of reflecting back, and George you have a daunting task in county government. The beauty about local government, and what I feel is really nice to be an elected official in a smaller city, is that you live by and drive by your decisions. The essential formula is the same. It’s communicate and it comes from the culture. You say you’re trying to change culture in county hall, and what I believe and like you say, the times are unique…one would think this time is unique…but the times since 2001 in the Gables, I would like to think there was an air of openness. We’ve got a lot of opportunity just by fresh faces on the dais to give the citizens a sense that they’re city hall is open to them.

So we began to change the culture, and the communication has to follow because people are busy. People don’t engage and sometimes they engage late in the process, and then that’s where mistrust happens with people. Government has to respond and communicate all the time and continue to educate knowing that people are busy, that people are gonna come into the process late. Those are kind of general thoughts as to the charette that we had in the Gables. I think our city was so primed for that particular process. The whole election of 2001 was about taking a fresh look and it was about not only about a city hall annex or about street closures. It was about the way we looked at the city on the whole. I was really fortunate to be able to spearhead that, though with my colleagues and the help of the university, is to put together a charette. Over 1,500 people over the course of three or four months between boards and before the actual charette produced what I’d say gave us the permission and the road map, the permission to make changes in our city government.

This is one of my favorite books that I carry around. I don’t like the bound version because I like this one. It opens up and it’s tabbed. One of the things people say is what are you gonna do with a charette. It’s about setting expectations. The expectations that follow, you’re never gonna meet them and people don’t understand after a charette that things aren’t gonna happen overnight. I think if we had to do it over again, I think I as a commissioner and the city might have communicated better of where we were gonna go. I’m really proud that the bones of this particular process has already laid the groundwork for a complete re-write of our zoning code in our comprehensive master plan. It’s kind of given us the freedom to explore. We even have called two moratoriums to look at things. We were looking at things in a different way. We were looking at our city and we’re listening very actively to what our citizens are saying and they’re very clear. There’s no mistaking what they feel. For them, the issue of the physical environment is all wrapped up into one. If they see the traffic on their street and they see a trash pile and the look to our downtown and they see cranes, they get really very upset and they want action. I think that this particular document has given us the permission to change and a very viable and important change.

Dr. Bush: How do you have follow through with citizens on an on-going basis with that plan?

Anderson: You have to keep talking about it. It’s a matter of just talking about it. I know that a part of our planning and zoning board, they’ve used and developed a layout of plan implementations. In the back of this document, they have policies and designs. When they make recommendations to our planning and zoning board, they will actually pull out a recommendation. It’s about constant reinforcement. It’s about us on the commission talking about the charette. It’s about talking about the zoning code and how on page so and so where it all happened. It’s communicating, continually communicating and knowing that you’re not gonna reach everybody but you’ve gotta keep trying to put it out there.

Dr. Bush: Thank you. Beth, any initial comments?

Dunlop: This is such a huge subject and I get to be the cynic here. Before I say anything too cynical, I want to say that I sat through most of the Coral Gables charette and I thought that was showing the pubic participation process really at its finest. It did exactly what Maria said. It gave citizens a framework for understanding government and government a basis for going ahead and making changes of authenticated and validated a whole new way in which the city government could think about its city and the citizens could think about the city. I actually had this long, ill-formed dream that someday there would be this really long and really big charette for all of Dade County. They actually did something in Boston that wasn’t dissimilar. Many years ago, the late Charles Moore had a job re-doing the Dayton Riverfront. He had a television walk-in, call-in show which we could do so much more interestingly now with computers. Like I said, it’s completely ill-formed but somewhere I just really would love to see it all just get out on a great big table rather than underneath it which is what I’m going to talk about next.

I’ve sat through a number of charettes, not a hundredth of as many charettes as Liz. I’ve actually seen charettes at various levels. I wrote Greg when he asked me to do this and said I’m not so concerned about the charettes as much as what happens after the charettes when the actions start being implemented. I’m just gonna throw two examples out on the table. One we know what the results are, sort of more or less as we’re midway. The other we don’t know the results. One was the Performing Arts Center, which was created not with one charette but with two charettes. There was an original charette, or maybe three…I’m not sure how many charettes there were for the Performing Arts Center. There was one that planned the whole area that is in some dustbin someplace. Then there was one during the selection process, which actually brought a whole lot of people into the selection process and made it a very public process. Interestingly, people could walk in and see the architects at work.

Then we got to the later selection in which a publicly designated committee does the selecting, at which point…and I’m the journalist so I’m also the fly on the wall…I’m in the back and I hear the guy who’s in charge of the foundation say to the guy who’s the chairman of the PAC Board, "I can only raise money for one of those guys so you really don’t have a choice." I started seeing the finagling and the politicking and I see the planners of the other two teams falling by the wayside. I began thinking about this because it was not the first time I’ve seen a planning selection process gone sort of astray. I realized that, in Dade County in particular, there are two ways in which we end up selecting our master builders and our master planners. One is what I call the result of the smoke and mirrors technique, and I can give you a few examples.

Like the time that the proposers for the Jackie Gleason Theater of the Performing Arts came in and said, "We don’t have to give you this building. We can give you a whole new building." Or the architects proposing the Bass Museum said, "We’re gonna give you a museum and a beautiful sculpture garden that will go all the way down to the ocean." Of course, that wasn’t in the program. There wasn’t any money for it. It wasn’t even a vague possibility, but the people doing the selecting said, oh, we can get two for the price of one…it’s a bonus! There’s that and then there a cult of personality that also is like the snake charming approach. I saw this happen recently in a selection process for a planner for Bicentennial Park. It was very interesting because there was a charette…actually there were two charettes. I think…maybe there were three charettes. How many…two? It was two for Bicentennial Park plus the earlier charette that was the Performing Center area charette. That had dealt largely with Bicentennial Park in connecting it back to the Performing Arts Center. That one was twelve or fourteen years ago, that was pre-Hurricane Andrew, so it was way back.

All that is cast to the side, a small group of people go to a "public selection process" which is in a room in the city of Miami’s Riverside Building, which P.S. cannot be found on MapQuest. It can barely be found by many citizens of the city of Miami, but its there. You just have to know to turn left and then left and then left and then right and then left. Anyway, up in a little obscure room in the middle of the 7^th or 11^th floor that’s where the so-called public selection process for our Bicentennial Park planner. It’s our park, but there they are six people appointed in a little room are making this choice. I know I’m taking kind of a circuitous route here. Two points…one, the person they picked had the most personality. Not the most qualifications, but the most personality…he was a charmer. Two, what happened to all those charettes? This guy basically said, "Well, you have some plans but they basically seem like 19^th Century plans and I think I’d start over anyway." If the process isn’t kept alive and kept vibrant, the way it was in Coral Gables, and if the selection process isn’t done by people who are true stakeholders, then the whole public process has been completely hijacked or subverted.

Dr. Bush: That raises a question in my mind that maybe Liz could answer in this regard. In your experience, when you get all the public input from a design workshop or a charette or lets just say a several day period and it goes in house where it is dealt with and then something comes out…I’ve often wondered what that process is in terms of counting people’s opinions or the creative process and then how legitimate is that in your view? Is the mystery kind of mixed?

Dr. Plater-Zyberk: Yeah, this may be part of what I started out saying. We haven’t figured it out yet. I’d like to point to one process, because there is an extension…its not just the charette, we just identified that…to one that I think was successful locally. It remains to be seen as it fills out. Mr. Burgess will be glad to hear this was a county project. The downtown Kendall plan, which was first of all importantly initiated by that third sector, by the not-for-profit sector Chamber South. I think in our time that’s an important issue because both government and the private sector are suspect, and we just have to acknowledge that. It had lots of public funding and lots of both private and public participation, but the fact that the Chamber called it together I think was a good start.

There was a guiding committee that was enormous. Usually thirty or forty people would show up, although there were more, and they were from government agencies as well as from stakeholders and residents surrounding the area, which the county had selected. I suspect Lee Rawlinson had something to do with it or maybe the Chamber did. It went through a charette that Dover Cole ran which they do very well with large groups of people. Then the committee was reformed after it was seen that people liked the results of the charette and that county commissioners ratified it or confirmed the desire to go ahead with this idea. The committee was called back together again to produce the code, in other words to do the implementation. That lasted unfortunately, or maybe this is the way it has to be, it lasted a long time. It was many hours over many weeks, possibly a year, to write that code which is probably a little bit too complicated because it was written by a committee.

Nonetheless, it did a lot of what it was supposed to do which was to focus urban development in that area close to the two train stations and release pressure of development on the surrounding neighborhoods. Also, it was to develop some guarantees of some quality as well as incentivize people to start building on the empty land. There was a second phase that involved the public and its implementation. There’s now I think a process where most of the work with the builders is being done through the county’s planning department because it was set up to be that way. We understood that there was no CRA or specified government for this area. Every once in a while, the committee is called back together again. I don’t think that’s the formula. I think probably this is about tailoring, just like all of our governments are tailored for their different situations. We’re gonna learn how to do that better.

Dr. Bush: George, could we talk a little about the government bond issue and how that process involves the public? My understanding in general terms is that you would send out notices, there would be notices in the newspaper, you have a hundred meetings and yet how many high school or university kids are ever involved in that process? Or senior centers? Are there special meetings that go to senior centers? I guess I’ve just wondered about the pro-forma nature of a lot of what passes for going out to the public and trying to get the public voice. Not to say that it’s not done genuinely, but that really probably needs to be a lot more creative ways of going out to the public. I know Liz, you’ve had a lot of experience with that too.

Burgess: There probably are a lot of creative ways to get input from the public. I got a say a couple of things first. First of all, democracy is not easy. It is inherently hard. It only works if everyone is engaged in it. We can get a litany of success stories and a litany of horror stories, and it’s a function of how well people are investing themselves and trying to make democracy work. Democracy takes a lot of time. It’s not easy to have a process that really ensures you’re getting input for various kinds of initiatives. We’ll talk about the bond issue, but there are many different kinds of things that we want to engage with our public on. In the case of the general obligation bond program, we want to know from neighborhoods and communities what kinds of infrastructure needs they have, the kinds of things that are important to them as they express themselves at the polls in November.

No, we didn’t go to high schools. We want to focus on folks that pretty much live here, that raise their families here, that will benefit from those infrastructure investments. We utilize the Internet. That only hits a limited population, but we certainly have interactive if you go on our website. You’ll see a lot of efforts at using technology to get input from folks. We are meeting with homeowners associations, we’ll go to senior centers. We haven’t hit every single senior center, but we’ll go to groups and speak as often as folks would like. In order to hit the community in as geographically distributed a manner as possible, we scheduled formally about thirty-four meetings which grew to fifty-five. All these were facilitated by an outside, non-county employee that would basically make sure the folks had an objective, rational way to express their concerns and to tell us what their priorities were without any one or two people in the audience or a group in the audience controlling the discussion. Beyond that, we had another fifty meetings with groups that some of which we reached out to and some reached out to us. All of this done in a three-month period of time. In my perfect world, I might spend eighteen months. In this particular case, we had about eleven months to go out and seek input.

A lot of the project information that we’ll formulate will become part of this bond issue. Also, it is input that we’ve received through a lot of our county departments. Our parks department has ways of getting input from neighborhoods on needs for their local parks and regional parks. The same thing with our water and sewer utility on sewer extension. So beyond just the input from the public through these facilitated meetings or these scheduled meetings in the last three months, we also have a wide array of public input processes for each of these respective service areas…from human services to housing, and a lot of the needs for housing are coming from the tenants from the Affordable Housing Board. They’re coming from a lot of different forms, and it actually is a pretty broad spectrum of input sources that feed a list of unmet needs that totals approximately $7 billion. Now the challenge, of course, is to take that and prioritize it into a list which is still gonna sound like a big number but in the scheme of a county the size of Miami-Dade it actually isn’t as big as one might think. It’s about $1.8 billion.

Dr. Bush: What is the process for prioritizing that?

Burgess: The process is looking at investments that will have some kind of an economic benefit to the community. I could say it very parochially…we want to make sure they’re investments that are not gonna have an onus or over-burdened operating impact. Or if there is an operating impact, we have an ability to deal with it. We want to make sure that they’re investments that will have an economic or a cost benefit that is positive to the community, not just the government and its budget but the economic well being of the entire community. That’s measured in terms of jobs, it’s measured in terms of the potential that investment, creating some kind of a multiplier in the community. It’s measured in terms of quality of life. Investments that will actually improve neighborhoods, investments that are really sensitive to what we heard when we talked to the public.

We heard a number of different things. One of which may not sound particularly profound, but to me it was really a pleasure to hear, if we were to ask questions ten or fifteen years ago about the kind of infrastructure needs you have I think that people would have been concerned about their safety. I think that would have been something that we would have heard repeatedly. We don’t hear that at all in these meetings today. It’s very interesting. It’s like we’ve moved up on the hierarchy of needs. We’re talking now about parks and things that improve my neighborhood, my quality of life which isn’t just the quality of life in my immediate neighborhood but there seems to be an appreciation that my neighborhood is larger than the two or three blocks around my home.

That’s something that I think reflects a community that might be growing. Now I’m not gonna tell that everybody out there is thinking that broadly, but I think we’re moving in the right direction. To me a community isn’t just the neighborhood. The community is ultimately the region. If I have a vibrant, thriving core city, and I’m developing infrastructure that encourages responsible development toward my urban core, then I think at the end of the day that I’m making a sound investment for the quality of life of my entire community. We talked about the Kendall charette or the Dadeland charette. We’re talking about trying to do things and target infrastructure in ways hopefully that will encourage the right kind of development in the right kinds of places with a little luck locating peoples’ residences with the work location. Hopefully doing things through an infrastructure program that will actually recognize the wide array of amenities or features that make our community what it is.

Liz was talking about rural land. To the extent there are things that we can do on the bond issue, and this might be somewhat controversial, but there are strategies we can employ in that program to help encourage people to realize there may be alternative choices in how they might utilize their land in the future. Maybe it doesn’t have to be sold off and lose that rural character entirely and see a lot of residential development. Maybe it’s a blend of that and some strategies that will allow people keep the rural character of their land because that’s a big part of what makes us what we are. I could go on and on, to the extent that there’s infrastructure money that’s targeted at environmental investments. Infrastructure has many shapes and sizes. It’s many different things. It’s not just parks, it’s not just sewers, it’s an array of things. When you talk about what are the criteria we’re employing, it’s listening to people.

Frankly, most of what we’re talking about is not nuclear science. Its all about talking to people, communicating with people repeatedly, making sure as you talk to them that hopefully you are conveying to them your strengths and weaknesses. You’re hopefully improving their perception of you, that if they have a negative perception of you then you should listen to them and figure out why they do and deal with it. Hopefully, as time goes on and you change the culture, you change the perception, you continue to talk and you continue to listen. If we continue to talk and continue to listen, it sounds simplistic and I realize that, but really the more successful charettes I think are a function of talking and primarily listening and following through and making sure that you deliver on the things that you heard. I think it falls apart when you kind of give it the old "yeah okay…yeah sure…I’m gonna listen…here’s my plan." You throw it under the table and you go off and do what you wanted to do anyway. The only way to stop that is to have a community that’s engaged in the process. If they are very engaged, they’re not gonna allow it to fall underneath the table…are they? If they find out that it went under the table, they’re gonna make some noise. Somebody is gonna listen and they’re not gonna let it go under the table.

Dr. Bush: Yet, from what you said and others have said, there are very few people that do show up to a lot of these meetings. So how is that because there are some that have been quite well attended?

Anderson: In our city, they are very well attended. If it’s an issue that’s emotional to them, if it’s an issue that’s on their street…it’s a small area and I’m speaking only for myself absolutely. We have a cable TV channel that’s very much in tune. We have a government that is engaged and we do respond to our e-mails. It is a function of our size, absolutely, but more and more what I’ve been finding is that people are very engaged in our city. Actually, the county had a meeting in our Coral Gables library. I went just to see what was going on and what we were gonna do. It had people from the Redlands there. I could see that there was a constituency that traveled just to make sure that their farmlands were safe. I thought that well that’s great, because they traveled all the way up to make sure that we did what we said we were going to. I think that happens more and more.

Burgess: Different communities are gonna engage differently. Some communities are older and more established than others. Some issues are gonna be more hot and more emotional. People are gonna be more passionate about them than other issues. All of these different things drive citizen involvement in an issue. You could have an issue of regional significance that might bring out an Army of folks because of maybe indifference and insensitivity of their regional government. That anger could draw them in. Frustration could draw them in, or a genuine excitement about the initiative could draw them in. I think there’s just a lot of factors there.

Dr. Bush: I guess I’m thinking that Coral Gables is a very highly educated community. You have a TV station that engages people, I know quite a bit. I’m wondering how the county in one sense through TV can engage more of the community and in more creative ways? I guess Coral Gables is not really typical in that sense.

Dunlop: Miami Beach is very similar, although I’ve never seen Coral Gables TV. Miami Beach broadcasts all its public meetings and its boards, planning board, historic preservation board, board of adjustment, and broadcasts and re-broadcasts some sitcoms. We have two stars of the Miami Beach there.

Dr. Plater-Zyberk: I think you’re bringing up the fact that there might be, at the risk of generalizing, two broad groups of people that are probably hard to engage. One of them is, there is a part of the county, it may be place oriented but it may be more spread out, who don’t want to be engaged. There is always a group of people who say just leave me alone, I want to exist on my own, I’m not interested in government, government only means trouble, they never do what they say they’re gonna do anyway, so just count me out. Then there are a lot of recent arrivals in our community who either probably more often than not just don’t have the time because they’re working several jobs and they’re raising families. They also may not understand well what the participation is, or else they have a kind of skewed idea of what that’s about. I think there’s…I think actually the county channel does a nice job of trying to communicate educational issues about our region, about the environment, about its history in a way that I often wonder about. I think it’s the right thing to do to help people who are new at every income level. I wondered how far that really goes to help people who are new get engaged.

Dr. Bush: I guess what I’m getting at to some degree is kind of class bias with a lot of charettes. People can afford to go there and spend the time and that the whole process of decision making of where the money goes is ultimately biased. I wonder how that is factored in…you’re saying that you’re going to community groups which I’m sure is true.

Anderson: I don’t think class bias is anything.

Dr. Plater-Zyberk: An economic bias?

Anderson: Yeah, I mean there are people who are never gonna be engaged and there are people, like you mentioned, who can’t be engaged because they don’t know about it or they’re busy making a life.

Dr. Plater-Zyberk: I’ve always thought that the Miami Beach engagement, especially some of the more entertaining hearings that I’ve been at, have had a lot of people who had time on their hands.

Dunlop: I think that’s probably quite true. One note I made here was just how do you figure out who the stakeholders are and how are they representative? I was thinking about two examples again from Miami Beach, one of which was when Miami Beach set about to try to enact an ordinance that would protect single-family houses built before a certain time period which ended up being 1942. In the first hearings, there were rooms packed full of people who opposed it, who were basically your typical we’ve been bused in…although they weren’t bused in. They were people from the real estate industry and people from the development industry. Are they the stakeholders? Well, in a way they are because they make their living doing this. But are they the people who live in the neighborhoods? If the hearing is at three o’clock in the afternoon or two o’clock in the afternoon and you’ve got a neighborhood full of couples with young children and one or two working parents, how can those people be at that meeting? But then how do you have a meeting that brings those stakeholders in? It’s entirely problematic and governments do have a tendency to bow before at times, rightly or wrongly…and I can think of examples of both…the loudest voices or the most-oft expressed opinions. There recently was a tear down in my neighborhood where the people I think are the right side who opposed the tear down and opposed are the loudest voices, but we may end up not being the people who are heard the best. So it’s a predicament. How do you get to hear the right voices? How do you identify who those people are? How do you get to the people who will be the real, ultimate stakeholders?

Dr. Plater-Zyberk: The other issue is scale, and that was just brought out by the person in the audience. The municipality very often is about very local interests, and the investment of your home or businesses may be considered at stake or at least your immediate quality of life. At the county level, you really have to have a longer-term view and a larger view. That’s something else that the public process needs to deal with is time. What may seem like a critical issue for the city of Coral Gables or the city of Miami Beach right now, within the context of the county over a longer period of time may actually not be the wisest thing to do, you know the winning voices. So at the county level, we have three kind of big issues. Two of which we’ve encountered and one which we’ve not. The environment and transportation are things that we’ve already talked about. There are many groups engaged and attached to those to be advocates. We’re lucky to have funding now for transportation. The third issue, which is hard to get your hands on, is equity. It’s a social equity issue. It has to do with where in particular housing is, where what kind of housing is. This is one area in which in a municipality you can say yes we want transit, although Miami Beach isn’t so sure right now. Yes, we want something to be good for the whole environment. In Miami Beach, some of that is a social issue. When it comes to housing, nobody is saying, "Yes please, we want more affordable housing." That is an issue because it’s related to jobs, it’s related to whether people who need it can use transportation. We’re not gonna back into that one. If we want that to happen, we have to figure out how to do that countywide. Right now, we’re just leaving it up to the county, which is only fifty percent of the land because as we incorporate the county has less. The county, which has the big initiative, has less and less land over which to have that initiative because they can’t tell Coral Gables what to do.

Dunlop: I’m curious, George, to just jump in here…as you were talking about the meetings, I was curious as to when you were out with what one might call "the real people" as opposed to special interest groups. I don’t mean that in a negative way, but an environmental group or somebody you could identify with a particular cause, just regular old people who live in the neighborhoods. What did you hear most often as their expressed needs? My hunch is that what you heard, because you said the parks a lot, you heard a lot of requests for parks. The other thing you probably heard, and this cuts to what Liz was talking about, was a kind of plea for what might be called neighborhood conservation and neighborhood building and the kind of enhancement and protection of neighborhoods that have not been NIMB in them. It’s the opposite. It’s the "don’t come and build behemoth houses in my neighborhood" and "don’t let my neighborhood be overtaken by high rises" and "don’t let my neighborhood be overtaken by commercial intrusion." But that’s just a guess. Now I’ve thrown it all out on the table and you can say I’m completely wrong.

Burgess: No, but remember why we were out there. It was to ask people specifically to tell us what kinds of community infrastructure needs are out there and what is important to you. Its facilitated and we try to get a feel for what things are important to them. Nobody’s out there saying, "We really are concerned that you have adequate funds to maintain your jails properly." Regardless of whether the county’s unincorporated area is half of geographic Dade or not is frankly irrelevant. The county is responsible for regional services regardless of whether you live in a city or unincorporated Dade. So we have regional responsibilities regardless of municipal boundaries. What the neighborhoods told us a lot was, yes, we want greenspace. We want parks, we want sidewalks, and remember neighborhoods in this community are different from one part of town to the other. This gets to your point about equity. It’s a very good point. Some neighborhoods in this community don’t have water or sewer. Some areas don’t and don’t want it, but there are parts of town that really need a sewer for small business development, for economic development. There are older parts of town that need an economic jumpstart that infrastructure will help stimulate. It’s not gonna create it, but it will help move it in the right direction. So depending on the neighborhood, we heard different things. We didn’t hear people say keep the highrises out of our neighborhood, but only because that wasn’t the question we asked. The purpose of this wasn’t really a regional charette as much as it was tell us about the infrastructure needs that are important to you. We did hear a lot about greenspace and park, which is not a big surprise.

Dr. Bush: How would you factor in the public voice in terms of the stadium, for example? Did you hear a lot about it, and if you did not can that then be such a viable option to put money into a stadium?

Burgess: There was no ground-swell in the community that I heard, not that we asked the question, "Should we put a baseball stadium in a general obligation bond program?" That was not something that anyone was crying for, nor was it something that we would have intended to do anyway. So there’s no baseball stadium in a general obligation bond program that’s on the radar screen anywhere. No, that wasn’t something that the community was clamoring for. There are folks out there that will tell you, "Yes, we would like to see a professional baseball facility," just as much as other groups would say we’d like to see a performing arts center or a museum. There are different people that are passionate about different things. There may be folks in the crowd that are very passionate about the zoo master plan. So you’re gonna have folks that are very involved in many different special projects. The folks in these neighborhoods, these common folk…well, some of these common folk will be very interested in one of those things perhaps though not all of them. Some of them are saying I care about my neighborhood, I care about sewers, and I care about basic infrastructure. Yeah, I’d like to see some of these regional things improve but they don’t look beyond the immediacy of their neighborhood. A lot of those larger infrastructure investments really are not things that you’ll hear the folks that work, that raise a family, that come home…they don’t engage with their government necessarily screaming for things en masse. A lot of those things are driven by sectors of the community that are passionate about any one of them.

Dr. Bush: So literally, who makes the decision that goes to the county commissioners about what should be on that list? You do, but your staff is there as a specific group of people.

Burgess: We have a staff of folks that are working specifically on the general obligation bond program that have been involved in going out to all of these community groups so they have all of that input from the public. They work with our professionals in their respective departments that know best about some of the prioritization of some of the hard-core infrastructure like water and sewer. Based on the public input, they can cost it. They know what the costs are, they have a feel for what the needs are in different parts of town based on the input processes they have in place independent of what we would have heard in the last three months for example. All of this information from all of these different input sources, whether it be the public or the professionals, that will all get culled together based on criteria. It will be put together in a draft program, which we will ultimately share with the elected officials.

Dr. Bush: It comes down to you?

Anderson: It’s more participation, because you’ve asked municipalities.

Burgess: Yes, we’ve asked municipalities, thank you.

Anderson: I sit on the Miami-Dade Leading Citizens Board. We sat Friday to talk about all of this.

Burgess: We met with each of the cities. You know, Greg, you get the input from as many sources as you can. Neighborhoods just don’t exist in unincorporated Dade. Neighborhoods also exist in thirty-four cities. So you get all of that input from all of these different sources and at the end of the day who ultimately advances this to the county commission, well sure, the county manager does but not in a vacuum. It’s based on input from an immense array of sources. Then there’s a process of going out and educating and informing the electorate up to a vote in November. You know it’s a big undertaking, but it is certainly driven on citizen need and not on some kind of contrived set of projects that somebody whipped up in a back room, that’s for sure.

This includes all kinds of infrastructure, including cultural facilities, parks, arterial streets, synchronized traffic signal system…which frankly now are so far over capacity. That system was state of the art at the time it was designed thirty years ago. It could handle 2000 signals. Well, we’re at 4600 signals today. The growth in this community has far outstripped the infrastructure that’s been in place. It included waste disposal systems, libraries, an array of things, sewers. That’s kind of the array of infrastructure that we envision essentially in this extension of the decade of progress. What we’re doing is taking the debts and services that are in place today and trying to capture it and keep it in place, and then in a very simplistic way essentially refinancing the decade of progress mortgage for that debt that’s remaining and allowing us to leverage money for continuing to invest in ourselves.

Dr. Bush: I want to ask anybody who has questions to come up to that microphone if you would. State your name first and then your question. Let me ask, before you do that, one final question from anybody here…and that is about the growth management laws in the state of Florida. We have master plans, we have ears, we have all these kinds of activities relating to the growth management law. My general sense of it is that the public has almost no clue how any of this works. They are put off by words like "mitigation", "concurrency", and all of this talk just leaves people in a fog. I’m wondering from almost a larger perspective than just the county or the city or the university how that can be rectified? Can it simply be left to the statement that the people have to be more educated on their own about this very complex process?

Anderson: Let me give you an example. About three or four weeks ago or longer, we declared a moratorium area in the city of Coral Gables. A gentleman who is a property owner in that area came up and said, "I don’t understand what is going on?" He came up to the podium and he was very flustered. What I realized was that he didn’t understand the terminology. What you have to do is engage them. I’ve been on the other side. I’ve stood at the podium and said that I didn’t understand what was going on. It’s the function of government when you see that happening, I ask staff, make sure that when you speak to this gentleman and you have these public processes going on…speak to them in plain English as much as we can. People are engaged as they want to be. In this particular case, this gentleman has an economic interest and he’s there for sure. For many of our neighbors who live in the affected areas, it’s been a very interesting process. A dialogue is very positive when it has rebuilt trust in government, but government and people is a combination. Government has to try to speak to people in plain English, and also people have got to be engaged. In the Gables, I see a lot of people from the Gables here. They’ve taken the time to come in and express their views. It’s a combination of factors, but it definitely is something that government has to reach out and build trust by saying its not gobbledy-gook. Its not something were trying to use smoke and mirrors. This is what were trying to say. Speak to them in plain English they understand.

Dr. Bush: Any other statements? Oh, I know you.

Audience: My name is John DeLeon. I’m a resident of Miami and a member of the Urban Environment League. When Maria talks about trust, we’re currently going through a situation in the city of Miami with Watson Island. I came back from a meeting today where there’s a project by a group called the Flagstone Group, where they’re projecting to build buildings, which are upwards of fifty stories tall. There’s a referendum in the city of Miami which the city of Miami residents passed of a project where we talking about height limitations of maybe twenty to twenty-five stories. Now, we’re coming up with a project, which is contemplating double the square footage and double the height limit. Now, frankly I don’t know what to do when confronted with that sort of situation in terms of being a citizen or resident. We were sold one project to vote on. A year later, the money starts talking and we’re talking about a totally different project. What can I do or what can we do as residents of this city or community either interfacing with the county, on a project which is having impact on the county, or on the city at this late point in the game in order to force our city officials to allow a project which would be consistent with what the voters voted on and not a project which is gonna benefit these developers? I don’t know what to do, and I don’t know whether the charette project at this point whether it’s coming up with ideas or…

Anderson: Bombard your elected officials with e-mail. I hate saying that but I think the only thing is to rally the troops. I come from the civic activist model and even if you feel its hopeless sometimes, I mean I fought against a mall not too long ago somewhere a while back and that’s how I got my start. I think its really effective if you get in front of your elected officials and you rally the troops. There are other ways but that’s definitely one way and I think its very effective.

Mr. DeLeon: Do you all think there’s a possibility of stopping the project late in the game, which is totally different?

Burgess: I don’t really know the answer to that. I actually was gonna say something very similar to Maria. Understanding what you just said, you have a project that the city commission is gonna have to approve that you’re saying is twice the size of that which they have decided or determined can be developed?

Mr. DeLeon: No, it was very craftily done. The ordinance did not place the height restrictions, but at the time the ordinance was passed the project which was shown to the community was one with a twenty-story building and a certain amount of square footage. Then they the do the bait-and-switch two years later and then this.

Anderson: About how far along is it in the process?

Mr. DeLeon: Its still before the different planning boards and the city commission have not voted I think on some of the issues related to the project.

Anderson: I can’t know what the final outcome could be, but I think you still have a little window of opportunity at least to publicize it and to put it out there. Even if in the end you mitigate, that big nasty word meaning to lessen the impact. What I would say from my past days is you rally your troops and then you the folks do the educated data orienting and you get the people that yell and scream and do all the different faces. You gotta go to those different board meetings and show up and make your voice. It does make a difference. I managed to hold off that mall for about a year.

Burgess: Folks are elected. They’re your elected representatives and at the end of the day I believe, and they may not the first time but I’m pretty sure they will the second time. If they hear in no uncertain terms from huge majorities of their constituents where their constituents stand on an issue, they will listen. If they don’t hear, they are hearing from somebody I assure you. Where they’re gonna land on an issue is a function of who they’re hearing what from. So if there’s a large group of folks that I’m familiar with in this development, they’ll know the gory details of it but they need to hear from you. There was talk, you’re very familiar with this one, a couple of years ago or three years ago there was talk about baseball for a moment. There was a prior ownership group that wanted to see Pac Bell Stadium East. They wanted to see homeruns dropping into Biscayne Bay. So their vision was a stadium on Bicentennial Park, passionately wanted it. I believe that city commission listened to what they heard from folks that said we don’t want that there. If they didn’t hear anything from folks, my hunch is that would be the bull’s eye. That would be ground zero for a stadium.

Dr. Bush: I’ll tell you one thing, and I think John and Liz were involved in this too, there was an enormous amount of work by a number of people. There’s a burnout factor in the non-profit advocacy world where you can’t get people out time and time again to do the right thing, and that becomes a problem in and of itself it seems to me.

Anderson: You know what I found is turning the trick, a little bit in that the idealist that I am, is that when you show up. I went to a resident traffic meeting, and I left and I wrote the manager and dashed off an e-mail. I didn’t like the way we were being treated and I don’t think this project was good for the neighborhoods. I wrote it to him. A few weeks later when we were being engaged by the population, they said you all are gonna do this and you’re gonna ram it down our throats. I said no, and in fact here’s an e-mail. I agree with you. In fact I support you. I think its trust. I think you reach out to your elected officials, you hold them accountable, and here I am. You also talk to them. Where I find and where I’m greatly challenged is to keep doing what I do by showing that e-mail or going to a neighborhood home, despite the fact that you get called that you’re in the hands of a developer or that you’ve sold your soul to the devil. You still have to maintain some level of idealism and know that if you do the right thing and engage in it, it will happen.

Dunlop: I think that there’s a real confusion and I think back to what Greg asked me before you talked on about growth management. You think, "Wait a minute…this is a state that theoretically has these enlightened growth management laws and these layers of government, regional planning controls, even hurricane evacuation controls that should keep fifty-story buildings off a really small island. Yet where does all this go and what happens in the face of developers who come in and immediately are pleading hardships, saying, "We can’t make a go of it unless we build fifty stories." The bait-and-switch is an old trick. The Parrot Jungle that’s there now, that I call the Parrots of Concrete Jungle, is not the Parrot Jungle that voters approved. Would I have voted for it? No. What it is basically is a parrot attraction that is sort of ancillary to a great big party palace. That is certainly not what voters approved was a private, profit-making wedding reception and bar mitzvah wedding center. One presumes that voters didn’t approve Hong Kong on the Bay. This perplexes me everywhere I go. There’s a setback, the Dan Paul ordinance, that would keep those buildings way away from the bay. There wouldn’t be enough land from the channel, and the voters did approve that. That is a law that’s on the books. It’s like some of the old blue laws. They just sort of put it aside.

Dr. Plater-Zyberk: Just one more thing, John. If people start writing about this place, they should really include the whole city in writing about the fact that there’s a commercial zoning lands in almost every neighborhood in the city of Miami that has unlimited height. Until that changes, we’re gonna be dealing with this one over and over again.

Dr. Bush: Who’s next?

Audience: Kenneth Newman, I’m a resident of the city of Miami. I’d like to ask our county manager and our professor here what is gonna be the stopping point of development in terms of effecting things. How can the county work with the school board to properly manage development to schools don’t continue to be overcrowded?

Burgess: That’s a good question. I think…(long pause)…I think the key to development is that development is not gonna stop. There’s a net in-migration to this community.

Mr. Newman: Well, can you then raise the impact fees to say $1000 a square foot?

Burgess: That’s kind of where I’m headed is you’re gonna have the marketplace drive demand. You’re gonna have population growth in this community for some time to come. I think that’s a very hard thing to turn your back on. It’s a reality. I think the trick is to make sure that part of growth management was supposed to have infrastructure in place current with development. I think that the county and the school board, having observed the school board’s plight for a whopping nine months…but it was a nine months that was truly very eye-opening. K-12 education is probably the most important economic development issue I think this community faces. I really do believe that the county has to work more closely with the school board on intelligence strategies to ensure, not so much responsible development, but also strategies to make sure that schools are in place. There are ways to fund those schools. I think the school board’s impact fee program is fundamentally flawed. Personally, that’s my opinion. I think it needs to be reformed. I think that basically right now you have three districts, and the boundaries of those districts have very little to do with a nexus between the payments made for the development and the need for a school. They’re east benefit district basically goes up the Atlantic coast of the county, so you could have in theory impact fee monies collected in Aventura going to fund schools in Homestead or not. That makes no sense.

I think where the county or non-school entities can help the school system deal with non-education related activities. I’m really talking out there now…this isn’t gonna happen overnight. I think the better off the educational system is going to be so it can focus on its primary mission, which is education. I don’t know if that’s a very helpful answer but I do know that the impact fee program needs work. I think that the funding in general for K-12 education, which isn’t a county issue and it really isn’t a school board issue either, is a huge issue and that’s a state issue. The state of Florida’s budget is under immense pressure. Class size reduction…I remember having people come up and stick petitions in front of me. Sign this because don’t you want smaller classes? Well sure I do, but I asked the next question being difficult, "How is the state going to fund this?" Are we gonna raise the sales tax? Are we gonna lift exemptions on things that currently are exempted from the sales tax? Or are we gonna cut some other state program to fund this?

Of course, when you ask those difficult questions the eyes kind of glaze over. One of the things we really have to deal with is the state funding of K-12 education so the dollars are flowing in. I’ve read the stories about the irresponsible construction program of the school board. I’ve seen all of that, but I assure you the need for schools and classrooms far exceed the dollars that are in place in the school system today. It masks a reality, which there is an under-funding of the school system. Do they need to get those dollars out and working faster? Absolutely. Are those dollars if they worked at warp speed gonna address the overcrowding situation? Not even close. So there’s an issue of state funding, and there’s also an issue of how those state dollars are going down to fund education to the extent that they can go to private schools to the extent that they are smelling more like vouchers. That is going to directly impact the ability of the public school system to fund infrastructure for public education, getting back to the issue of equity.

Dr. Plater-Zyberk: There’s one very specific design parameter, which is the standards that are set for construction which are set for an ideal condition of maybe forty years ago when it was reasonable to think that ten acres for an elementary school in the very low-density suburbs makes sense. You needed some help from state regulations on how to build a decent school. I think that we really need to examine if this is a crisis situation, which it is, to say why we should be using empty big boxes. If we can’t have a track and field, maybe this school doesn’t need to have one. Maybe we’ll just do something else for it. There just needs to be a whole other approach. We’ve gotta let go of some of that old stuff related to regulating the building design.

Burgess: State regulations on building public schools as opposed to charters are very rigid. They are not easy. The fact of the matter is schools…they beg to be prototypes. They really are perfect candidates for cookie-cutter construction. An elementary school, you have X number of kids, you need X number of student stations which translates to this many classrooms, a common area room, some offices. You can basically on a computer pop out the design of that, depending on the geography and the footprint or the layout of the land you’re on. Perhaps you go vertical, your configuration is different, the area for recreational activities is different, and those prototypes with maybe a dozen architectural façades so that it’ll have a different look from one school to the next, they’re ripe for that kind of turn-key construction. You have tilt-up construction these days, which is basically a pre-fabricated construction. They did an expansion out of Irella [???] with tilt-up, and once they finally moved on the project after a long time debating tilt-up construction I believe something along the lines of 600 stations were constructed in six months once they finally moved.

Dr. Plater-Zyberk: You know, its so bad that it makes you wonder whether some very extreme situation shouldn’t be sought. Find a foundation that would just take over the construction.

Mr. Newman: We’re in an emergency situation. Children are more important than developers.

Dr. Plater-Zyberk: The bureaucracy of building the schools is clearly an incredible boggle. I’m not sure its fixable, but maybe you just need to start over with something drastic. In the meantime, we did give you a nice list of things that could be adjusted.

Audience: I’m Peggy Brodeur, Community Council Twelve…six years. Dade County resident…fifty years. I’m here to speak to Mr. Burgess, really, to ask him to help us in community councils, to have more of an input with the planning and the zoning department. In listening to our people, the McMansions are developing. People want parks, but you know what? We’re losing trees day-by-day, week-by-week by McMansions taking over so much of the lots. Everything we talk about, the gentleman preceding talked about schools, everything we do in this county is related to zoning. Zoning, zoning, zoning. We, who listen to the people in our communities, 92,000 residents I represent. 92,000 in the Kendall area. My immediate area is the Sunset area and down to Southwest 88^th and Red Road over to Southwest 48^th. So that’s my specific area.

What we find in our community councils, as we listen to this gentleman. We have another gentleman who will come from Kendall with the same problem. We find its all related to zoning. It’s how the department is doing things. It’s the system. The system is broken. The system doesn’t recognize the equity, as Professor Zyberk said. There is no equity. Community councils have no input. We have no input before the zoning is constructed. It is written. It is sent to the commission. We don’t get to see anything. We don’t get to have a say in anything that goes in, yet month in and month out the cases come before us that we have to look at. We meet one time a month for appeals. The other time we meet is for planning. We listen to problems just like the commissioners listen to problems in a community.

Dr. Bush: Peggy, do you have a question?

Ms. Brodeur: I want to know can you help us to get heard by the planning department? To get respected by the planning department? To get listened to by the planning and zoning department? To get site plans brought back to us, so that before we have to make decisions we have a site plan? Can you help us in Community Council Twelve?

Burgess: I can certainly try. I guess a good start, and I’m smiling but I’m not trying to be cute or clever, I talked earlier about needing to listen and understand. There’s more of that listening and understanding that would be needed from my vantage point. If you would, Sobrata and Diane O’Quinn are actually here with me tonight and they’re sitting in the back of the room. If you could, maybe we could chat a little bit or chat with them.

Ms. Brodeur: I’d like us to get together with the departments. I’d also like to say one other thing to Professor Zyberk. While you were on the charette on the downtown Kendall, which is part of my district, was done in a non-profit. The people who are in the non-profit are for profit builders. These builders go to the non-profit and ask them to make zoning changes for them and they circumvent us. This is something that I want all of you to hear. As Beth says, snake oil salesmen and smoke and mirrors. This is what’s happening over at Chamber South. The developers go into Chamber South, call up the planning department, they write the code. They make the suggestions, and yet we the elected representatives know nothing about what goes on and quite by accident we found of an incident that is very deleterious and harmful in that area. So this is something that I also want to mention to the city manager. I do not think that the planning department should be a member of any chamber of commerce. Government must belong to all the people. It must not be a member of a chamber of commerce. It must be independent, just like we are independent.

Dr. Plater-Zyberk: I’m sorry if I gave the impression that the planning staff was part of the chamber. They were not. They were at the meetings, but they are certainly not part of the chamber. You know to speak to that, I might risk a suggestion because I think that we’ve had one example, which speaks to your concerns, which has worked well for a period of time. I don’t know how well its working now. There was a period of time in Miami Beach where the neighborhood associations, which had various forms as some of them were CDC and some were half-elected and half-appointed. The South Point Association, the Miami Beach Development Corporation, the North Beach Development Corporation and so on.

There was a period that was very effective in that city where they were given a certain amount of initiative. I think they were even given a small budget, and Lincoln Road resulted from that. The development corporation actually used that money to bring in speakers to tell them about how things were being done in other parts of the country before they let it out for design and before they judged and eventually even modified the design as it was being done. On the community councils, I’ve been struck by the fact that you are kind of in the situation to be NIMBs. There’s not much you can do besides say no, or bring it back. Like you’re saying, you’re in a difficult position. It’s probably horrifying to the elected officials to think of giving you all any more initiative.

Ms. Brodeur: We have no authority on anything and no budgets. We make $100 a year and, Mr. Manager, we cannot get any funds for anything. None of the people in our district know what we’re doing. We have no outlet. We have no outlet to tell them, other than when we have a meeting they come to the meetings. We have no budget for anything. We make $100 a year.

Dr. Bush: Peggy, if we could let one other person have the chance to speak. I empathize with you too, because I was on the Kendall community council too and left it for part of that reason.

Audience: Hi, I’m Hugh Gladlin, a resident of El Fratello, a beautiful incorporated community that desperately needs sewers, Mr. Manager. In addition to being a neighborhood activist, I’m also a social scientist. I have a couple of quick comments. I realize its nine o’clock now and quick question about the methodology of charettes. I’ve only been to a few. The first one I was very lucky or spoiled I guess, because it seemed to have been organized with the sense that the charette really is a kind of representative body, a deliberative body almost of citizens that get together and look at broader issues than their own political or special interest group concerns. This charette started by first a lot of good publicity in the media, and then by forming groups to which people were randomly assigned. All the interest groups that came there expecting to sit together were all spread around. That had a huge advantage. The second comment is, as a social scientist, why aren’t random sample surveys used as an adjunct. I think it would be useful to present to the people at a charette what all the people out there think, including all the people that don’t have the time or couldn’t go. I know the county parks department makes extensive use of surveys like this, but I’ve never heard of it used in conjunction with a charette. That leads to the question…where did the methodology of charettes come from? When I went to the first one, I thought this was a wonderful methodology. Then the second one I participated in was really just a kind of interest meeting. There was none of this stuff, so I’m really curious to know…probably not tonight…but point me to find out where it came from. Is it the purvey of architects only or could it be changed?

Anderson: I just have a funny comment. Charettes with two Rs and two Ts, and when I was involved with the Coral Gables charette I added that to my Microsoft Word so I didn’t have to re-spell it.

Dr. Plater-Zyberk: I’m not sure that anyone’s done a direct genealogy of it to understand where it started or how far back it goes. In my experience, it really came from many different direction and different kinds of workshops that people were having. The AIA ran something called "ruda-ettes"…regional and urban design action teams, which were kind of volunteer workshops of architects working with particular neighborhoods many years ago. That’s an interesting history assignment.

Dunlop: Liz is being a little modest there, because in my lexicon she and her husband really invented the charette as we know it today. They turned it from something that they did to plan the few first small towns that they planned into something that it is now. It evolved out of other planning processes and certainly there are any number. The charette as think of it today, as it has been taken and molded and transformed, really evolved out of their early town planning work.

Dr. Plater-Zyberk: It evolved out of some private sector projects in which the developers wanted to trap us for a week to work on something.

Audience: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you all for inviting us here. I think this is a terrific opportunity to discuss what we came here for…charettes. First of all, I’d ask you not to throw the baby out with the wash water. It may be an imperfect process. It is a democratic process. Fifty percent of the people in this country don’t vote. How many people can we expect to come to a charette? I would also like to ask the city manager to consider perhaps rethinking his attitude about neighborhood associations. I believe in fact and I understand from your viewpoint that you have to look at the big picture. I firmly believe that neighborhood associations are the building blocks of communities that become cities that become a county.

I would ask you take a good look at St. Petersburg. I came from a national convention of Main Street U.S.A. I saw what St. Petersburg has done from a tour bus. They have 135 neighborhood associations. They help form them, they help them along the way, they help teach them how to do things, they encourage them in the process. At the end of the process, not only do they give them beautiful car signs like the county participates in that designate each different neighborhood…but then they say, "How would you like to have a couple hundred thousand dollars for your neighborhood to do the things that the people in your neighborhood want?" So I would ask you please to talk to Mr. Goliath is his name. He’s a gigantic African-American who used to be the police chief and he’s now one of the assistant mayors. Give him a call and see what he has to say. I think it’s a model that we can all learn a lot from. I’m a grass-roots kind of a guy. I’m working on a charette for my neighborhood and I believe firmly in the process as imperfect as it may be. Thank you all for inviting us.

Dr. Bush: I know Seattle has an office for neighborhood development like that too.

Burgess: I don’t know that I had a chance to share my attitude toward neighborhood associations tonight. Actually, I’ve been on the job for about eleven months. The county, in addition to looking at those regional issues, which is maybe what you were hearing, we’re also the municipal government for unincorporated Dade. I can talk for a long time on my views on that, the things I think we should do differently, the things I think we do well, how I think they unincorporated area should be resourced. I don’t disagree with you that for municipal-type services, the best delivery point is the one closest to the people. As a matter of fact we’re talking about, and right now its truly in the planning stages because I think it has to be resourced a little differently than we do today, the ways to take the unincorporated area and structure it differently so that the service delivery strategies are a little more decentralized than they are now. There’s an ability to recognize that in unincorporated Dade, it’s a large grouping of different communities, different neighborhoods, different neighborhood associations. Frankly, I don’t disagree with much of what you said as far as ways to uniquely designate, to define, to describe an area with signage or other things. Then to the extent we were able to allow those areas to do some things to invest in unique things for their neighborhood, because one area may have an interest that’s different than another. I really don’t disagree with any of that.

Same Audience Member: Well, thank you and let me say this. If I could ask, how many people from the city of Miami government are here tonight? I’m from the city of Miami, and we have one…no, two representatives…one I invited tonight. What I guess I really need to say is I have to thank you, because I get far more response from the county than I do from my city. I find have to go around the city of Miami to get things done. I’m working on a park project that I will speak with you about and maybe you can help us out. Thank you.

Dr. Bush: I think we’ve probably come to the end of our evening. I know there’s one more questioner.

Audience: My name is Phil Wood. I’m a Miami resident and for many years a University of Miami graduate. We started out talking about growth management and the problems that exist, such things as traffic, education, loss of agricultural land, open space, poverty in the city of Miami. Over the past thirty years, what we’ve done to try to address those problems, beginning back when lots of federal money started coming to the counties, that are required in their agreements maximum feasible participation of the public in those monies and how they’re to be allocated. In the 80s, we had the Growth Management Act of ’85, we have all the comprehensive development master plans all communities are mandated to have. Through the 90s, we had all the charettes. We had community councils to kind of get things closer to the people to better address their problems. We’ve had six or eight new cities being created. Yet the problems we’ve discussed at the beginning are the same problems that have tended to prevail over the past twenty or thirty years. I guess the question I have is where are we falling short and what do we need to do better address those problems?

Dr. Bush: I think that’s what we’ve been talking about. Any final thoughts from anybody?

Dr. Plater-Zyberk: It may be useful to compare ourselves to other places. Its easy enough to think that, and its obvious we are, falling short in these areas. Its not as if nothing has been done. This is a work in progress and I hope we’re learning how to do it better along the way. Certainly, I think forums like this and the fact that there are people around kind of urging you on in various ways and criticizing as well as encouraging is about that work in progress. Believe it or not, we are ahead of other metropolitan areas. Now, perhaps we’re not moving fast enough for the growth that we have but there are a number of things that we’ve done better than other areas. Here I have to call upon my husband who pointed this out to a group of us a while ago, things like the Urban Growth Boundary and our concern for the farmland as well as the city. The fact that we have a planning department that has been actively planning…people think there’s been no planning going on, but perhaps for a while the model was not quite the right one. Actually, its been well documented that some of the better planning has been circumvented by the political process.

The school district, being a unified school district, which makes it unwieldy, but at the same time one of the best bets for equity that there is. There are cities like Columbus, Ohio, in which no one with any money will live in the city, or Milwaukee until they started the voucher system because all the money for the schools was out in the suburbs. That’s a really hopeless situation, and when you can’t get people to live in the city because the schools are so bad. We probably have terrible inequity within the school system but at least its one piece. It can be worked on together. We instituted MetroRail and we’re now in our second generation of public transit development when some cities are really just getting a start on it. So I know we all wish that it was going faster, and some of wish that people listened to us more, but I think that George is correct in saying it so bad that it needs all of us to work on it. One of the reasons there are NIMB in public participation is because the problems are so big and you need to learn so fast that everybody’s gotta do as much as they can to help make it happen.

Anderson: Sometimes I’ve found sitting in public hearings for zoning issues and planning issues, sometimes if you stay open to that negative voice that has something negative to say you can definitely learn from it. If you stay open to listening, you can actually maybe fashion a better solution.

Burgess: Its hard to do, but Elizabeth really makes a very, very good point. Its refreshing to see people want their communities to improve, to get better, the region to get better. We all want that but I don’t say that from a position that I think the community is bad today. Its that I want to see it continuing to move where I believe the right direction to be. I really do believe if you look at a lot of other areas, and you can give me some examples of metropolitan areas and say look how they did it. Look at all of the dynamics and all of the facts, all of the reasons why different communities are as they are and you look at the challenges that this community has faced over the last twenty-five years. I challenge anybody to identify a community anywhere in this country that’s faced the very unique kinds of pressures and change and stress and strain without a lot of outside assistance that this community has, and its resiliency and its ability to absorb and change and adjust. I think its pretty impressive. Its pretty amazing actually, and there’s much we’ve done that’s very, very good. That doesn’t mean we can continue to do better. Yeah, there’s a lot of things that all of us look at, whether we’re inside or outside of government, we say, "Wait a minute! I surely don’t like the way this is going." I think then you’ve got to stop and say, and this isn’t an excuse, how radically different is this than the realities in other parts of the country. It probably isn’t. We’ve done a lot of things down here that really aren’t very enlightened in the sense of equity. I really do think you can’t understate that comment about the things that I think we’ve tried to do in this region that are really focused on trying to be very sensitive to the term of equity. There’s a lot we have to be proud of, there’s a lot we need to do to improve where we’re at. I do think that it requires the involvement of everybody from inside and outside and all around government. Those are really community issues, and they’re not gonna get better unless the whole community is very, very actively involved.

Dr. Bush: Thank you very much and thank the audience for lots of really good questions.