PrintFeb. 28--Charlottesville officials are considering hiring a neighborhood advocate to bolster neighborhoods' influence on city policy, but opinions on the position are mixed even from the neighborhoods themselves.
"I think it would make it easier to connect with the city," said Candace Carey, president of the Johnson Village Neighborhood Association. "The city seems to be kind of, I guess, aiming for something that I've felt needed to be done. I think neighborhoods need to kind of go back to the way they were, they need to be more of a community where everybody can kind of depend on each other."
A solicitation of opinions about the idea drew eight responses from the 26 neighborhood association presidents, with some saying they agreed the idea was a step in the right direction but more saying they thought it would be a waste of money. Contact information for one association could not be obtained and another was without a president.
"It's a bad use of city funds and there are too many other programs and efforts that I think the city should be involved in," said Adena Imlay, president of the Meadowbrook Hills/Rugby Neighborhood Association. Imlay said creating another layer of bureaucracy in local government to work with neighborhoods is not the answer.
"It's like a cancer. It just grows and grows and grows and grows," she said.
City officials say they are just beginning the process to decide whether they would hire such a person, whose main tasks would be to energize dormant neighborhood associations, serve as a liaison between city officials and residents, manage the Neighborhood Leadership Institute and encourage volunteers to work with neighborhoods.
The city would spend between $50,000 and $70,000 annually on the advocate, but a new staff position would not be added onto the city's payroll. An existing building inspector position that is now vacant could instead be used.
The neighborhood association heads who responded to questions from The Daily Progress were those for North Downtown, Greenbrier, Martha Jefferson, Fry's Spring, Woolen Mills, Meadowbrook Hills/Rugby, Johnson Village and Starr Hill. Most had not had the chance to discuss the advocate position with their boards so the opinions were their own.
"While it might be beneficial to have one individual helping to jumpstart things, I have difficulty imagining why it should be a full-time, ongoing job," wrote Greenbrier Neighborhood Association President Grant Brownrigg.
The idea was first brought forth when Mayor Dave Norris and Councilor Kristin Szakos were campaigning for the City Council.
"All of the ideas that Kristin and I unveiled in our campaign last year came from neighborhood residents. We want to continue in that spirit," Norris said.
Szakos said they received the general feeling from residents that neighborhoods are not involved in city government decisions, and that the city's power structure does not always seem to represent the common person.
"And that's not just in some neighborhoods," Szakos said.
Victoria Dunham, president of the Woolen Mills Neighborhood Association and a supporter of the idea, said the city is often not as responsive as it should be.
"The level of cooperation varies greatly from department to department," Dunham wrote. "It runs the spectrum from complete cooperation and continual searching for common goals to mid-level apathy with staff lacking the tools, oversight, or training to be more responsive, to outright animosity and suspicion in some instances."
This is not the first time Charlottesville has tried to create a position that had at least some responsibility to improve residents' experiences with City Hall.
The city considered hiring a "customer care" director, whose main task would have been ensuring residents have better and more efficient interactions with the government, but the idea was scrapped in 2007. At that time, much like now, the city was looking for ways to improve staff's responsiveness to the public's concerns.
Norris said that position was a different animal, in role and cost -- the director was expected to cost about $100,000 annually. But because the city had been hearing similar concerns from residents about being involved in decisions, neighborhood engagement was folded into part of the job role of the assistant city manager when Maurice Jones was hired in January 2008.
City staff has most recently recommended that the neighborhood advocate be located in the Office of the City Manager and work under the direction of the assistant city manager. Neighborhood engagement is one of Jones' job responsibilities, but city officials say his time has been increasingly occupied with other projects.
They include overseeing the city's efficiency study that was completed last year, and being the organizer of the city's Dialogue on Race, which is ongoing.
"That's a huge effort," Norris said. "It's taken a whole lot of staff time ... to pull that all together."
Jones added, "It's by far the largest community engagement process we've been apart of, upwards of a decade probably. But it does go above and beyond neighborhoods."
For now, Jones said, the city is getting feedback from neighborhood associations on the proposal and a report will be brought back to the council in about three months.
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