I should take this opportunity talk about it for those of you who don’t know about our Central Area District Council. The Mayor made some broad accusations about the Citywide Council membership implying that they are all white middle aged homeowners that are not adequately representing diverse community values. The Department of Neighborhoods report from last week is an indictment of their own department including their failure to make the grant process more accessible and failure to support the District Councils. The Mayor cited a few parts of a DON report from 2009. That report was not made available to District Council and in fact was not acted on by DON in anyway until it was just dusted off last month so the Mayor could pick a couple examples related to District Council. It was in fact another scathing indictment of DON.
Our Central Area Neighborhood District Council is comprised of all the Neighborhood Community Councils in the entire Central Area for which their combined regular monthly meetings are probably attended by over 200 individuals from throughout the area. At these meetings they usually work on hyper local issues like fixing a sidewalk in front of a blind person’s house, fixing a park bench, planning a barbeque for the neighborhood in a park, local PTA issues, etc. They also work with or against the City’s programs that are impacting their exact neighborhood, could be zoning, busstop locations, street repairs, opposing or proposing parklets, etc. These Community Councils choose a representative to attend our Central Area Neighborhood District Council meetings. These representatives are not all white and in fact not all homeowners. Our Central Area District Council also has voting representatives from organizations whose focus is broader than a specific neighborhood such as the NW African American Museum, Union Street Business Organization, African American Veterans, Central Area Cultural Arts, and Central District Chamber of Commerce. The different member organizations reach out to and meet with their individual members in whatever way works for their members. Squire Park meets on Saturday Mornings as example. Some have print newsletters that go to the entire neighborhood. Some have email, Facebook or webpages.
District Councils each have a city budget of about $40 a month and are not allowed to raise money, are not allowed to apply for grants, and have no access to City infrastructure. The $1.2mil that the city pays the 9 coordinators is for their entire full time salary…each of the 13 District Councils only get a coordinator for about 3 hours a month. You can imagine my dismay when the Mayor directed the City’s IT department to work with his yet-to-be named groups and that the fact that he lambasted the District Councils for not being able to do much with its $40 a month. Community Councils however have no official tie to the City and can raise money from their neighbors for whatever projects or events they want or outreach they want.
District Council does not give out grant money. About 3 times a year they just accept a pile of grant applications from the City that are from the Central Area and pare them down to the number or dollar value that the City wants to fund in the Area. The City then decides if they are going to fund the ones that we put forward. Usually the grants go to sidewalks or fixing some other SDOT or Parks Dept failure. We do get art related grants. We recently moved forward a grant proposal by a group that wanted to refurbish the People’s Wall at 20th and Spruce. We moved that grant in front of one that requested a crosswalk by a private school. The City rejected the People’s Wall grant and they continue to throw roadblocks at the group that subsequently raised separate funds to do it.
Whether or not you agree with the outreach or accessibility of the meetings, I think the above is a good representation of the way the system currently works. The outrage that you may have heard about isn’t from the City taking away the $40 a month budget or 3hrs a month of time from DON but it was the way he vilified all the member organizations of all the District Councils (approximately 200 organizations that also include foodbanks and public health orgs). Or people like from Madrona Community Council who spent TWO years getting the City to replace trees tearing up a sidewalk in front of a blind persons house.
Thank you for your time.
Dan Sanchez
Chair, Central Area Neighborhood District Council
