The Urban Land Institute sure has kept us waiting. Initially expected to release its detailed written recommendations 90 days after a panel’s late September visit—which would put it right at the holidays—the ULI pushed the release back to early February. Now the report is anticipated to be released in a phased manner starting around March 5.
The city has moved forward regardless with several of the panel’s recommendations, but the written report is expected to provide greater detail and insight.
During ULI week, a series of press briefings took place almost daily, giving panel chair Maureen McAvey (pictured above) an opportunity to speak directly (both audio) with reporters, and giving reporters a chance to ask questions ranging from the blunt to the metaphysical. The availability of city officials and business leaders to the press, to discuss the process and learnings (audio) on the fly, seemed somewhat unprecedented.
On the morning of day three, Wednesday, September 27, 2006, the city’s Chief Development Officer David Panagore and Western Massachusetts Economic Development Council president and CEO Allan Blair gave such a press briefing.
At this point during the week, a city tour had taken place on Monday; about 140 stakeholder interviews had been completed Tuesday; much paperwork had been collected and sifted through; and the panelists were retreating into conference rooms to begin a process of making sense of it all. Blair commented (audio) that morning that he was "impressed with how [the panelists are] gathering data in order to synthesize and make recommendations."
The panelists had before them a list of questions to address. "Essentially, one of the questions was, how do we get the biggest bang for our buck?" Panagore said. "Which things should we be doing next, so they can spur more things, so they can act as a catalyst?" The full list of questions, as provided to the ULI panel:
1. Identify Springfield’s development assets and opportunities. What are the specific measures that will capitalize on the city’s assets to take advantage of emerging opportunities and address existing liabilities? Is Springfield well-positioned for the development we want, or are there interim steps? How then should the city prioritize its short-term, mid-term and long-term planning and development efforts?
2. What is the most appropriate brand for Springfield? What steps should be taken to enhance its destination potential? What role (and markets) is it best positioned to serve at a regional, state and national level?
3. How do we incorporate our economic development needs into a neighborhood revitalization strategy? What measures would improve community, economic and physical linkages within the downtown, between the downtown, the riverfront and neighborhoods?
4. Which public projects have the greatest potential for short-term economic return, and which investments, if not undertaken, will significantly retard economic growth? Which public projects will restore civic pride and confidence?
5. What measures should the community implement to encourage workforce development, job growth and the expansion of the existing industry clusters, such as health, precision machining, financial services, education and tourism/arts? Identify economic development efforts that will retain, attract and grow businesses in these clusters.
6. What are the most effective organizational structures and processes to carry out the strategies identified by ULI, and the appropriate roles for each level of government, community entities and businesses to play? How should the city best leverage available resources to encourage economic development? What is the most effective and appropriate delivery system for addressing the economic development needs of businesses?
7. Identify changes in Springfield’s current economic and community development programs, process and approach to spur more private investment, increase home ownership, reduce crime and improve the overall quality of life.
After the press briefing, I asked Panagore how the stakeholder interview list had come together. "I want to know more about who made all these calls," I said.
"Herculean effort," he told me.
"Is that one of your employees?" I asked.
"Yeah," he replied, "H.E. I wish we had an employee named Herculean Effort. And Magnanimous Soul. Those are the two I’d want to have."
He went on to tell me that outreach to business stakeholders was covered by Russell Denver (pictured at left) and Lynn Johnson at the Chamber of Commerce, with Katie Stebbins and Scott Hanson covering neighborhood associations and other ties to the city. Panagore said that the organizing talents of Mayor Charles Ryan‘s chief of staff, Michele Webber, helped in putting the list together and keeping everyone on schedule.
"It really was an excellent team effort," he said. "When you’re on a committee, and people actually start deferring to somebody else on the committee, and they don’t try and take control of a decision—when they say, oh no, that’s your job, and you know how to do it, and you just check it off and move on—you know a committee is working. We got to that point, where everybody clearly had a role, and was comfortable with who was making decisions."
I commented to Panagore that when you are able to succeed at bringing this variety of stakeholders to the table, even if it is simply a starting point for them to work with the city and its development plans, it is a huge accomplishment. The wide-ranging diversity of the stakeholders makes the task challenging for the organizers.
Panagore nodded but replied, "We need to keep them at the table. Once you’ve invited them in, you’ve gotta work hard to keep them at the table, and you do that by making sure that their advice, their thoughts, their input, has been respected."
He continued, "The results of the study may not be anything that I proposed, it may not be anything that Allan [Blair] proposed, it may be something that somebody we don’t even know about proposed. But to keep everybody at the table so they feel they’re a part of this—that’s part of the herding of cats."
Blair, listening to this exchange, added a comment as well. "I think it’s fair to say that people have different interests in the plan, once it’s presented," he said. "And I would suspect that this plan isn’t going to be full of magic bullet, silver bullet projects. It’s going to be a lot of grind-it-out stuff. How do you rebuild the housing stock in certain neighborhoods?" he asked. "How do you increase home ownership opportunities? [These are] things that take a long time, and aren’t necessarily sexy things to work on."
"Getting, [and] keeping people’s interest around those things is much often harder than around a big project that you’re going to see in the ground in six months, and built in a year, that kind of thing," Blair continued. "People like to be around that because it has a finite end to it. Things that are a little bit longer in term, and diffused in their ultimate effect, you need people more involved there, really, than you do in the other ones, and it’s harder to get their attention sometimes. So it’ll be interesting to see what they propose, and then how we organize around it, and who wants to be at the table."
WFCR reporter Tina Antolini invited Panagore to sit down for some extra interview time, since her list of questions, she said, was rather long. First she asked how the list of stakeholder interviewees was generated.
"Part of the process began back before June 28," Panagore explained, referring to the date when the Boston ULI District Council visited the city and took a tour along with ULI senior fellow McAvey. "We had a public meeting [at Central High School] where we invited over 200 people and published notice of it. Folks at the public meeting [told us], you don’t have the religious community here at the table, and you need them. That’s an example of the outreach, based on public comment, that we did in the weeks following, to make sure that the Council of Churches, the synagogues, had representation in the interview list."
"We spoke with various community leaders about lists of potential names of people they thought should be involved," Panagore continued. "We also reached out through the Chamber to a large list of businesses who all uniformly said that they wanted to be involved. And we worked through the civic associations, certainly the mayor’s office, and the folks the mayor—being in the city for 80 years, I don’t think there’s anybody he doesn’t know. And so a variety of sources—working through the X Main Street [for example], to outreach to the Vietnamese community, to have representatives from the Vietnamese community. So we tried like heck."
Antolini commented that it sounded like the outreach went "beyond the usual suspects that advise."
"A goal of this process has to go beyond the usual suspects, as folks say," Panagore agreed. "It’s important that stakeholders are at the table; it’s also important that folks you don’t hear from are at the table. We tried to do a mix. With a city of 152,000 people, and you’re only doing about 150 interviews," he said, "sometimes we’re only able to have one or two people representing an entire large body of the population, but we made every effort to at least have one or two people at the table."
Becoming more philosophical, Antolini asked, "Why will this succeed? What has been tried in the past, and why is that so significantly different from what’s being tried now?"
"I’m only anecdotally familiar with what’s been tried in the past in Springfield," Panagore answered. "I’ve read the reports, I’ve read the studies, I’ve spoken to a lot of people. Our assessment of the situation was that only a community process would work in Springfield right now, given its current state of affairs."
"As well," he went on, "the process needed to be pragmatic and short. A two-year planning process to help Springfield get out of a rut wasn’t going to be what it needed today, given its current situation. An inclusive community process, we thought, was going to be a good way of doing this."
"What makes it different is the buy-in of the business community," Panagore said. "With the control board, they can act quickly, and make tough decisions with the attention of the state, with the focus of the community."
"Springfield is, and has been, in a crisis moment," he continued, "but it’s in crisis moments that you can make the most change. It’s in crisis moments that you have the opportunity to actually institute significant change, and decide that we don’t like the way it went before. We want a rebirth. We want to be different. I participated in the Chelsea receivership. That community took a right-hand turn, a sharp right-hand turn toward success, and it’s continued doing it to the day, so I think there are many ways to achieve it. We hope the ULI is one aspect."
Antolini wanted to know how Panagore envisions maintaining inclusiveness throughout the process as it unfolds, for instance once the written report is in hand.
"With any good grassroots campaign, you start with the believers, and you grow from there," Panagore replied. "You start with the folks who want to actively participate; you reach out to folks who have been disaffected, who have been cynical. There isn’t anybody we’ve talked to in the community who doesn’t agree that there’s a large cynicism, and a large burned-out feeling, we’ve tried this before. All I can offer as the city’s development officer is continued persistence and hard work, and knowing that we will fall down, and admitting, we will fall down, we’ll make mistakes, things won’t work. But you get up the next day, and you stick to it. You don’t decide, well, it didn’t work, so we’re abandoning it, and going in some other direction. You gotta create a plan, and then work it every day."
"With all of this enthusiasm—the atmosphere on Monday, [and] yesterday, the momentum’s been gaining," Antolini commented. "Do you think that, in itself, is possibly a liability, if after the report comes out, people are looking at this as the savior of the city—and what if it’s not?"
Panagore did not pause. "Given the fact that this city has needed hope, and needed a future, I think it can only be a positive thing at this time," he said. "Our goal, though, is to be able to work with the community to make sure that we’re able to modulate, so that it doesn’t turn out the way you’re suggesting, where the expectations reach beyond. If we stay pragmatic, if we stay doable, if we stay real, if we face our problems, we can start cleaning them up."
But what if the recommendations are expensive, Antolini asked. "Does the Finance Control Board have to okay anything that the city does next?"
"When we met with [the ULI] several months ago," Panagore said, "the first thing they laid on the table was that they wouldn’t propose anything that wasn’t financeable, that wasn’t pragmatic. So, a realistic plan, with very specific recommendations, has been their goal. We fully expect that that will be what the report looks like, and we fully expect to be able to have to make hard choices, and be able to work as a community together, to come around the plan. With all the time that we’ve invested in this, we certainly are committed to putting it in place."
I asked Panagore more about the role the city must play in seeing through the ULI panel’s recommendations, reflecting on the notion that perhaps the business community’s view is that the city hasn’t really sat down at the table to implement plans in the past.
"This is not going to succeed if this is the city’s agenda," he replied. "It’s gotta be the business community’s agenda, it’s gotta be the residents’ agenda. The city’s a major stakeholder. But, frankly, it’s generally a neutral stakeholder. The city’s interests are the city’s, not any particular player, and hopefully the city can help play a role, as a neutral broker, through the process."
"And its job is to help bring different elements together?" I asked. "Is that your vision of how the city can be neutral? Reaching out to the residents is the city’s job?"
"Yes," Panagore said. "Cities have all sorts of roles that they have to play. Sometimes they’re caretakers. Sometimes they’re leaders. Sometimes they lead from behind. Sometimes they help people have a step up in life, where they wouldn’t have otherwise."
"In this process," he continued, "I think that one of the most important roles the city can play is to be able to bring everybody to the table, to help convene it, and then help empower them. Because this is not going to work if it’s just the city pushing things up. We have to let the creative energies go, let projects happen. As long as we have a common agenda and a common plan, looking for opportunities—if people say, no, I’ll take that, no, that one’s mine, oh, I’ll do that, and [the city can] let it go."
Antolini asked, "Do you think that [the ULI] really can have a completely apolitical opinion, what with the huge involvement of the city in preparing them?"
"Oh, yes," Panagore answered. "The ULI panelists pride themselves on their independence. They are cognizant that they need to present plans that communities can implement. And so they recognize it can’t just be their wish list."
"They do as many interviews as they do so that they base their opinions on a broad spectrum," he added. "They’re not just listening to any one individual. In fact, I’m just one voice at the table that they hear. We have given them every document that we know of, but they’ve asked for more, and we haven’t limited the sources that they’ve gotten information from. In fact, if we did, I think we’d be doing ourselves a disservice. This only works if you let go. If you hold too tight, it’s not going to be an effective project."
