THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 12, 1995 TAG: 9502110036
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TONI WHITT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 257 lines
What if government worked well? If taxes went down instead of up, if old neighborhoods steadily improved rather than fell into decay, if communities welcomed business and your neighbors watched out for your children.
Sound impossible?
That's what Roanoke officials thought 15 years ago, before they stopped fighting with angry citizens and challenged them to do something about government inefficiencies.
The city has since realized a 25 percent drop in real estate taxes. Yuppies have moved back from the suburbs. Historic neighborhoods have rebounded.
Roanoke's government is responsible for the success only because it was willing to surrender power to the citizens who had long complained about the city's problems.
The council and city administrators decided to rely on more citizen participation and community consensus - now known as its neighborhood partnership program.
``Young people are moving back here,'' said Florine Thornhill, 73, who helped turn around her neighborhood. ``We have a teacher who moved in right up the street. It really makes me happy to see young people who care about the neighborhood.''
Roanoke was a decade ahead of many cities, which now realize that they can't ``do it all'' and are calling for more citizen participation.
According to those studying the movement nationwide, Roanoke is the most successful city in Virginia when it comes to empowering its citizens, but other communities across the country are using a variety of systems to get the same results.
America's democracy was created in an era of small towns and rural villages. As the country grew, citizens became more anonymous, losing touch with their representatives and their government.
Now, academics, mayors and other government officials are trying to rescue government by getting individuals involved again and letting communities agree on how to help themselves.
When poorly done, the process can leave citizens frustrated, angry and more distrusting of bureaucracy.
But when it works, the effort helps rid citizens of their disenchantment with government and invites them to help it run better.
In Birmingham, Ala., neighborhood associations are part of the city planning process. They work with officials to determine priorities and find solutions. Though they don't get everything they want, residents there feel that government is responsive.
In Portland, Ore., citizen committees help draw the city budget. They meet with department heads to grapple with budget problems and often bring a fresh perspective to the process.
In St. Paul, Minn., citizens rid their community of pornography dealers by proposing zoning changes, buying out properties, picketing and holding prayer vigils.
After reading about successes in other cities, Virginia Beach officials asked the director of Roanoke's neighborhood partnership to talk about what has worked there.
The Beach has since asked its citizens to help solve its graffiti problems and prioritize its day-to-day budget.
The city of Hampton created a Department of Neighborhood Services, similar to Roanoke's, in hopes of establishing partnerships with its communities.
Other Hampton Roads cities have begun looking into the phenomenon, and some have tried to incorporate aspects into part of their traditional, daily business.
In Portsmouth, the city's cultural diversity committee brought in consultants to help start living-room study groups of citizens who want to improve race relations.
``Few of us have had serious, face-to-face talks about fears, cultural values and family values,'' said Zelma G. Rivin, who participated in one of the discussions. On Wednesday, she was named First Citizen of Portsmouth, in part for her decades of working to bridge cultural conflicts.
``Being able to come together in a dialogue is something that we should experience,'' Rivin said. ``We have a lot of fears because it doesn't happen.''
The push to involve citizens doesn't have to start with government.
A group of people concerned about pollution in the Elizabeth River have gotten together to find ways to improve the waterway. The Elizabeth River Project includes people from diverse backgrounds, who hope to find solutions, rather than fault.
``I don't think you get very far, especially in Virginia, standing at the edges and screaming blame,'' said Marjorie Mayfield. A freelance writer living on Scotts Creek in Portsmouth, she was one of the original group. ``If we had started out screaming about a problem, we'd have disappeared already. You get further by taking into account everyone's interests.''
On a neighborhood level, some Hampton Roads residents are policing their own communities, walking side streets, looking for signs of break-ins and making sure businesses are locked. Some cities have begun community policing programs, assigning police officers to particular neighborhoods so citizens in each community can get to know the officer and help him or her on the job.
Private, nonprofit corporations also are being formed to shore up troubled neighborhoods.
The Portsmouth Community Development Group is one. It has helped Prentis Place, a small, predominantly black neighborhood once overrun with drug-dealing and decaying houses, turn itself around.
Residents in Prentis Place have worked to rehabilitate many of the decaying homes. They have seen crime go down and new people move in. The community is now working to turn an abandoned factory into a recreation center for the neighborhood.
Across the nation, community-based development corporations have stimulated the economies of some of the poorest areas. According to a report by the National Congress for Community Development, not only have the corporations helped build and provide low-income housing, they also have helped create 17.4 million square feet of commercial and industrial space;, provided 3,512 business loans; and helped retain or provide 90,000 permanent jobs.
As government changes its attitude toward people, citizens often begin taking more responsibility for their communities.
``When they're organized, their neighborhoods become healthier,'' David Blackburn, director of Hampton's Department of Neighborhood Services, said. ``They get to know each other. And in that improved environment, you can focus your energy.''
Neighborhood turn-arounds often come in tiny increments from seemingly small efforts.
The catalyst can be as simple as getting a grocery store to remove an outdoor pay phone that drew drug dealers and troublemakers to a corner, as one neighborhood did in Roanoke.
In East Oakland, Calif., a volunteer minister led her congregation into the street to hold prayer meetings and to shine flashlights on drug deals. They bought a drug-infested apartment building and started a youth program in it.
In Chattanooga, Tenn., one man, disturbed by racial stereotypes and tension, invited hundreds of black and white citizens to Sunday brunch at a restaurant - just to talk. The brunch became a monthly event and improved relations between the city's black and white communities.
``Successful neighborhoods are the ones who get up on their feet and know what's available, but they do the work,'' said Donald C. Harwood, a resident of Roanoke who has helped pull civic leagues together to strengthen the design codes in historic neighborhoods.
``We get things done, not by having the city coming in and doing things for us. The attitudes are that the city won't give us anything. We have to do it ourselves.''
The National League of Cities met in Washington last fall to explore this new era of community participation. At a roundtable discussion, members concluded that bureaucracy is broken largely because it can't afford to provide the range of services government has attempted to shoulder. In addition, officials admitted that they don't know how to listen and have often lost sight of their purpose.
``The city realized it had a problem communicating with the neighborhoods,'' said Ora Belle McColman, a Roanoke resident who began asking for changes in the 1970s. ``The citizens had a problem conveying their wants and needs.''
W. Robert Herbert, Roanoke's city manager, said bureaucrats often are afraid of what can happen if citizens get involved.
``In city government,'' Herbert said, ``there are a lot of highly structured people - like the police chief or the fire chief - that fear that citizens might mess it up if you let them participate.
``These things can spin out of control. You're not going to get a little bit of participation. People have a pent-up desire to participate. You'll never get the genie back in the bottle. We couldn't if we wanted to.''
City officials who embrace the concept are discovering that citizens often make the best decisions - solutions are based not only on logic and reasoning, but also on what their communities really need.
And the citizens are then willing to work tirelessly to get it done.
When Roanoke was considering razing its historic Hotel Roanoke, citizens rebelled. In seven weeks, the community raised $7 million to save the hotel. Now the city is canvassing the neighborhood, looking for people who want to work there and offering them job-training opportunities.
While community consensus is possible through citizen participation, it is not perfect.
Where the programs have succeeded, government has offered its support, encouraging and nurturing the groundswell. When government erects roadblocks, public involvement almost always collapses, creating more citizen apathy and dissatisfaction.
In a Brookings Institution study that began in 1985, Ken Thomson, Jeffrey M. Berry and Kent E. Portney examined more than 70 cities, including Roanoke, that had been involved in changing their governments over the past two decades.
The most successful cities, such as San Antonio, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, have earmarked money and staff for building citizen participation. Some successful cities establish a small staff at city hall, others allow each neighborhood or district to hire and fire its own staff.
At the least, governments must ensure the groups it relies on are representative and that not just the educated and outspoken are involved.
Even in places where citizen partnerships are operating, and succeeding, there can be unpleasant surprises.
Roanoke officials were caught off guard several years ago when they discovered that they had not included all segments of their city in the process. Everything seemed fine: crime had declined, taxes had gone down, people were moving into the city, and property values were rising.
But in 1990, the city had to deal with a near-riot over the lack of minorities on the police force after an incident in which officers were accused of using too much force.
Of 225 city police officers, only nine were African American.
Black citizens were infuriated and frustrated. Many black citizens had not felt included in the processes to change Roanoke. They also felt that racial problems citywide had been ignored in favor of solving individual neighborhood problems.
In a city devoted to hearing voices, theirs had been left out until a crisis hit the city.
``The black community said that the police department didn't understand because there were no black officers on the force,'' city manager Herbert said.
He immediately got citizens together to talk about the problem, and appointed a racial relations task force.
``We brought the most diverse people in,'' Herbert said. ``There was no city staff. It was totally a citizens group. There were some really tough people there.''
Between 1991 and 1994, Roanoke hired 26 white officers, 18 black officers, one Hispanic and one Asian American.
``They've gone with us to recruit minorities to Roanoke,'' Herbert said of the citizens group, which stayed together beyond the police problem. ``We're not always smart enough to see this far ahead - now this group is doing upstream thinking.''
``We still have problems,'' Herbert added. ``As hard as we work and as sensitive as we are, we still have to ask on each project, `Who are the stakeholders, what is participation? What is needed?' What you see depends on where you stand. I have to keep reminding myself of what I don't see.''
Allowing citizens to take charge of their communities is not easy.
Those who have done so report that it can take longer to make decisions. Because of the need to get public participation and agreement. But, they said, it is usually a more effective process over time because efforts are focused on the real problems.
Since it relies on face-to-face interaction, the concept seems to work better on community issues rather than citywide ones.
And if people don't care about their community, they can't be convinced to help improve it, researchers have realized.
However, those who open the process have discovered that most citizens do care - on some level - and are willing to participate where they have concerns. Sometimes, it's just about what happens on their block.
Citizens also have begun to realize that if they want things to improve, they can't just point fingers at City Hall. They must take responsibility for their own community.
Chattanooga, a city about Norfolk's size, is a leader in citizen-training programs and partnership building for civic associations. Its 4-year-old program, called Neighborhood Network, is operated as a nonprofit organization.
The network teaches civic groups that they can make a difference, often by starting with small projects that ``focus on the positive and doable so they feel like they're making progress,'' said Geri Spring, who coordinates the effort.
Effective neighborhood groups, she said, can be ``a huge resource for the local government.''
``If a city government helps a neighborhood a little bit,'' she said, ``you have at least a 10-fold return in savings in city services and improvements in quality of life.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
VICTOR W. VAUGHAN/Landmark News Service
Florine Thonrhill borrowed a lawn mower and changed Roanoke.
JIM WALKER/Staff
Ray Moses and Marjorie Mayfield watch over the Elizabeth River.
LAWRENCE JACKSON/Staff
Harold ``Butch'' Schupska is one of about 20 in a Norfolk patrol.
Photo
VICTOR W. VAUGHAN/Landmark News Service
``There is no such thing as a little bit of community involvement,''
Roanoke City Manager W. Robert Herbert says.
by CNB