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What if Dr. Blakley were Right?
by Lovell Beaulieu
Delay on Master Plan vote was a good move
by Lovell Beaulieu
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Month in Review
George Curry
Blackonomics
Delay on Master Plan vote was a good move
There were some pretty big political guns firing at last month’s meeting of the City Planning Commission.
There was former New Orleans Mayor Sidney Barthelemy. There was longtime political operative and lawyer Ron Nabonne. There was Councilwoman-at-Large Jacqueline Brechtel Clarkson, this time on the other side of the railing that separates the New Orleans City Council members from the audience.
Each of these three political heavyweights, along with the majority of those in the audience who spoke, urged the CPC to delay its vote on the New Orleans Master Plan that would have the full impact of law when enacted.
Their pleas did not fall on deaf ears. The commissioners got the message and voted to delay any action.
Also in the audience were several highly-connected individuals who have a vested stake in both the Master Plan and the process that determines when and whether it becomes final. Chief among them was Janet Howard, president and CEO of the Bureau of Governmental Research. BGR, arguably the most influential acronym in metro New Orleans, came out against any additional layers of citizen participation in the process. In their eyes, the meeting was merely a time-consuming affair delaying their own plans.
BGR’s reasoning: Such citizen input would hamper the entire process by adding another form of bureaucracy.
The last time I checked a bureaucracy is a governmental entity, comprised of mostly appointed officials and civil service employees who make sure all of the I’s are dotted and all of the T’s are crossed—a thankless job, often equated with pencil pushers and rubber stampers who never look up from their desks. They simply do what has to be done. Their role is not to be activists. It is to do a job.
To be sure, I have never seen the citizen activist concerned about his or her neighborhood equated with a bureaucrat; and I’ve never seen a true bureaucrat mistaken for a citizen exercising his or her rights.
The BGR has long intrigued me, if not for the noble sounding nature of its name, for at least the enormous social, economic and political influence it wields.
Ever since Hurricane Katrina, the BGR has played the role of judge, jury and executioner when it comes to urban planning in a post-Katrina New Orleans. It has often appeared determined – whether it was to embrace the call for a smaller footprint or to have a say on who should be allowed to return – to wield as much influence as it can.
The fundamental flaw in the BGR’s approach to rebuilding and representation, something that has mysteriously escaped the eyes of the local media and most ordinary citizens, is that it cuts at the very core of citizen participation. One would think that those who live and breathe the First Amendment would be up in arms when anything that seeks to stifle and thwart free speech is suggested.
The next several months and years will be the most crucial in the history of the city of New Orleans. They will mark the time where the city either embraces the opportunities it has been presented by engaging in full civic participation, or blow it amidst the temptation to push petty political agendas and self-serving economic development projects among a cabal of the well connected, economically endowed or institutionally entrenched. It is a recipe for rebuttal and rejection.
The truth is that if citizens were a bureaucracy, government would probably run better than it does.
Indeed, many of the city’s problems stem from a historical tendency of a few to try to dictate the course of events for the many. There was a time when that was much easier accomplished. But no longer is that so. People are more sophisticated, and when blended with a rightfully acquired mistrust, such shenanigans become harder to pull off.
It would behoove those individuals who harbor such sentiments to retreat and recognize that community engagement does not translate into community “bureaucracy” or a blockade to progress.
It only means that people who pay taxes deserve to be heard, no matter how long it takes or how many meetings it entails.
If those who seek to put the kibosh on citizen voices through cleverly concocted schemes continue their efforts to diminish citizen involvement, they risk the danger of a more suspicious citizenry, a citizenry that will in no uncertain terms reject their formula for the future on the basis it poses a striking similarity to a not-so-pleasant past, a past where their voices also went unheard, their political influence diminished and their humanity ignored.Lovell Beaulieu is an award-winning journalist who has captured the top editorial and column writing awards He now lives in New Orleans.
