How Not To Assess Neighbor Reaction To A Project

Park Pride and South Fork Conservancy Sell A Vision

When Park Pride and South Fork Conservancy announced the meetings comprising their “visioning” process, many neighbors attended with the understanding that Park Pride intended to deal objectively with neighborhood input on the SFC connected trail proposal.  Several hundred hours of neighbor time was invested in this process based on these assurances.  We should have realized that the made up verb “visioning” meant sharing and selling the vision, not vetting it.

As a result of disappointment with the visioning process, we have established Protecting Morningside Greenspaces and this website to provide a forum for points of view that do not buy into the SFC vision for a connected trail.  We do not vilify SFC or Park Pride for sticking to their beliefs, but we do object to their holding themselves out as speaking for the community.  In our view, they have not been unbiased, objective or fact-based in their proposition.  Here are some of our criticisms of the visioning process.

Divide and confuse.  Starting with the first meeting, Park Pride split those attending into several groups to collect views.  They said the meeting would conclude with the groups coming together to share those views with everyone.  The final sharing phase was cancelled, possibly because there was unanticipated strong opposition to the connected trail proposal.  Most of the moderators of the groups seemed to be strongly in favor of the trail plan, but their inconsistent understanding of the proposal was sometimes confusing.  For example, one moderator said a benefit of the lengthy connected trails would be that kids could bike between neighborhood areas, while another moderator assured her group that the trails would not be for biking.  Not surprisingly, participants found that writing on a map marking did not provide a reasonable vehicle for making a logical position statement.

Force opponents to choose between two unacceptable alternatives.  In employing this annoying tactic, moderators or an SFC field agent would confront a person expressing opposition with a question such as: “Which would you rather have, parking along your street or a new parking lot across from the entrance to your cul-de-sac?”  This approach insulted our intelligence.

Selective response to non-central issues. SFC and Park Pride have modified their proposal in aspects that avoid dealing with major objections, to make a show of responding to neighbor input.  Sometimes these modifications actually increase the intrusion of the recreational trail, such as by building parking lots or promising to shore up creek banks where the trail would promote erosion.

Public criticism of opponents as a group.  At the public meetings, SFC personnel characterized opponents as not representative of the community, as “intimidating” others into opposition, and as taking an anti-community “not in my back yard” position.”  These comments are not true of the opposition as a whole, as is reflected in this Protect Mornside Greenspaces web site.

Ignoring and Selective Editing of Opposing Views.  Park Pride undertook to summarize the results of the public meetings on its website, and in doing so left out most detailed opposition viewpoints.  Comments hand-written on maps were often unintelligible on the published map images. Emails sent to Park Pride by opponents containing reasoned opposition were not published.  A request to post a research paper on the impact of trails on wildlife was denied by Park Pride.  Not until after the final meeting did Park Pride list verbatim the comments that people wrote on posters that evening.  We note that the contents of the site favorable to the plan were much better organized.

Burying web site comments.  Park Pride did not provide a readily visible place at their web site for comments on the SFC proposal.  Park Pride provided only one area for the public to post comments.  One had to find the section devoted to individual maps that were marked up at the public meetings, and make a comment on a particular map.  This effectively buried important comments and made them inaccessible to all except those willing to open virtually every page on the web site.  We wonder if SFC is counting on their target funding sources not digging down to the individual map level to discover the level of opposition to their plans?