Lakefront Consultants Stage 'Community Input Theater' at Smith

Last Tuesday’s public meeting on Downtown Geneva and the Lakefront, held at the Smith Opera House, was billed as “A discussion about downtown, the lakefront, how to connect the two, and more! Your input is needed!” But what the 150 people who attended got was a staged production, with severely curtailed community input. For those paying attention, there was also a foreshadowing of what the outcome of the planning process was likely to be.

Members of the audience heard a great deal about the commitment of planners to public participation. They also heard an announcement that “there would be 20 minutes” for questions. When approached afterward about the limited opportunity for audience participation at the meeting, Bergmann Associates told Capraro, “It wasn’t our meeting.” When asked why they ended the meeting abruptly, with a member of the public still standing at a microphone ready to speak, they said, “You’d have to talk to our clients about that [i.e., the Quality Communities Committee].”

On the whole, it was a tightly controlled affair. The public was allowed to speak, but, despite the steady steam of lively and engaged questions, comments and concerns from members of the audience, the meeting ended abruptly. One community member who was politely approaching the microphone to speak was told, sorry, the meeting was over, just over an hour after it began.

Too bad, because the planners missed a great opportunity to hear from the people. Too bad, because the project timetable says there will not be another meeting of this sort until April, 2008-- well down the road in the planning process. Just days before the plan is supposed to be delivered to City Council. The public was told that they could attend steering committee meetings, held on weekday mornings.

Meetings allow for public input, but they also allow for direct communication of information, and an opportunity for clarification about critical issues. For example, there was a great deal of confusion about the forever green designation for some sections of the lakefront site. Presenters discussed this existing designation, but there was no slide with forever green spaces clearly delineated. It would have been easy to show a map with the forever green area clearly designated so that everyone knew exactly what areas were being discussed.

Planners also expressed the idea that Geneva ought to become a lakefront city and not merely a city with a lakefront. Essentially, a lakefront city has its downtown integrated with its lakefront, while a city with a lakefront has a downtown and a lakefront that are disconnected. Fair enough.

That’s a nice concept, one that most people can agree on, but the real question is ‘how do we get there?’ Their answer was for private developers to start building. That’s not such a nice concept. It is disconnected from Geneva’s reality. New construction, even if it were something people wanted, is financially questionable given building conditions on the lakefront. There was no way a private developer could have built the Ramada and turned a profit on it without substantial public assistance. Remember all those pilings that had to be driven before they could construct the hotel? The private sector is not likely to sign on to that kind of development in the immediate future, and so they’ll be asking for more tax payer contributions.

Are there other factors that the public is unaware of? The meeting seemed like an effort to ‘prime the pump’ for some kind of development. But what development is in the offing and where is it going to go? This is the public discussion that we think people were looking for that night. There must be ideas for using our existing resources to make Geneva a lakefront city. We bet a lot of people had some great insights to share at the Smith. But, alas, the conversation is back with the steering committee to have amongst its members.

When the Quality Communities Committee was first formed, we expressed concern that the public wouldn’t be fully involved, asking “Can We Expect Different Results from the Same Old Efforts?" The Mayor himself posted a response, indicating that there would be “many, many public forums where our residents can make their voices heard.” He made the following pledge: “Every voice that wants to be heard, will be heard.” Well, tell that to the guy turned away at the mic, and other members of the audience, on Tuesday night. That’s when the comment and question window was closed for the season.