Folks,
I think Brian is on to something here. The NID is a hard thing to
implement, because it supposed to be funded by a base annual income taken
from the citizens in is geography, ie the surcharge that the city government
would collect from us each year and give to the UCD. If the UCD needed more
money above and beyond the surcharge monies then they could float a bond
and collect extra donations to make up the difference of the operating
costs. This is in fact what Lewis Wendell and the UCD steering committee
have proposed. Argumentatively, it isn't just Lewis Wendell that's failng
here, it's the very idea of a NID in general amongst many of the citizens in
UC.
We want more transparent accountability on the part of the UCD staff
and steering committee. We want UC residents partly in control of the UCD to
make sure that it's doing the people's bidding, not just the high rollers'
(UPenn, Drexel, the Cira Center, Campus Apartments, etc.) bidding. Ideally
this is actually what happens with NIDs and they are in fact a good thing.
But because UPenn and its partners came at the idea backwards by creating
the organization first without legally creating it as a NID by getting
community approval, they have doomed themselves and us to this constant
bickering about how to use this useful organization and how to fund it. This
should have been clearly defined before the UCD was created.
But here we are. We must take the UCD for what is is. We may never
truly come together under a generalissimo UCD director, but that's hardly a
problem. If UCD stayed as it is now getting funded by local businesses and
citizens by choice rather than by surcharge, it could still survive on more
meager means, it would simply provide less service. The question we need to
ask is, is this a better idea than sucking it and giving some percentage of
our real estate tax to UCD each year so that it can do every and anything we
want it to do? Do we still want to take the recommendation of Wendell and
the UCD steering committee to only take 12% of the annual RE tax from those
with 4 or more bedroom units on the property? Do we want every landowner to
maybe pay 6% of their annual RE tax instead so that everyone has skin in the
game and can vote to restrain or enbolden specific UCD practices or works.
Brian's right. This will only work if we will it to work. Lewis Wendell
will do all that he can to keep UCD afloat and hopefully efficient and
productive, but he and th rest of the UCD can't do it without our support.
Eventually we as a community will have to make a deliberate attempt to
uphold UCD or destroy it. Whatever democratic dialogue has been exchanged on
this list for the past 2 years about what to do with UCD will become purely
academic unless we the citizens of UC either shit or get off the pot. We
need to reconsider the UCD NID plan. If changes need to be made, then we
need to tell UCD what those specific legal and/or financial changes are and
come to a compromise.
If Lewis Wendell and his staff are out there and reading this post,
please believe that you will have to give the local community the control it
wants over everyday practices of UCD, if not day-to-day decisions. A charter
that contains language from community member input will need to be
discussed. While there are standard legal guidelines for NIDs in most every
state, there is also the ability for each individual NID to create special
stipulations and agreements that are specific to the community or
neighborhood it serves and represents. I'm sure there is some compromise
solution that can be worked out that will satisfy the majority of the UC
landowning population as well as the current major UCD benefactors on the
steering committee. I suggest that UC residents on this list post the one
major concession or stipulation that you want UCD to honor, if we allow it
to become a NID representing our neighborhood. One item of compromise above
all others that you personally would require of the UCD. Send it to the
listserv and after enough of the items are posted, then we can how rational
and doable they really are from both our perspective and UCD's perspective.
Mario Giorno
36 S. 48th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19139
On 6/26/07, Brian Siano <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> In a message dated 6/25/2007 3:57:18 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes (to Sali):
>
> Currently, the folks on the Board are footing the majority of the
> bill for clean and safe efforts in wide areas of University City.
> Do you think they'll keep doing that
>
> Wouldn't it depend on the extent to which the various parties are
> being honest about their intentions and agendas, and the corresponding
> goals for what a Special Services District (SSD) might be constituted
> to achieve, whether there's a real "partnership" between Penn (and the
> other institutions) and the community, the degree to which a NID might
> get back on the table after an appropriate SSD proved itself competent
> to be the NIDMA, and factors like that.
>
> Personally, I'd like to see an SSD emerge that got back to the basics
> of "clean and safe" and dropped the marketing, development, and social
> engineering roles that made the UCD so popular with the few anointed
> and unpopular with the many benighted, and also operated in a
> transparent manner -- both functionally and fiscally -- so that people
> either had confidence that the organization knew what people really
> wanted and understood the value of a dollar that most people have to
> work to earn, or their deficiencies in this area were obvious enough
> that they be shown the door.
>
> The above at the policy level, perhaps subject to open deliberations
> and stakeholder input (and not at the dog-and-pony forums with agendas
> framed by Harris-squared), long before the selection of a new
> Executive Director. This way, a person could be recruited -- perhaps
> locally, perhaps globally -- with a track record in implementing the
> newly redefined policies and in adapting to rather than trying to
> reshape the situation on the ground.
I generally agree with Al here, because he does understand what an SSD
and an NID would have to accomplish-- even _before_ it got started. The
big issue is simply getting money. A community can organize an SSD or
NID with the best of intentions and community support. But if it can't
_show_ that it can deliver on the services, it's not going to get any
money from any big donors, which are needed to "prime the pump," so to
speak. Which means it's not going to attract a lot of community-derived
financial support, either.
Al and I would probably disagree on what constitutes 'the basics' and
"social engineering.' Many of the basics _are_ social engineering:
picking up trash on a regular basis has social effects. We keep Clark
Park as clean and well-maintained as we can because, when the park turns
shitty, it affects the quality of life of the rest of the neighborhood.
NIDs aren't created merely to compensate for declining city services;
part of their reason for being is to strategize the way communities will
grow and change in the foreseeable future. It may be something simple
and prosaic (more streetside trees because the ones we have are dying),
or it may be something more business-like (we want to attract certain
kinds of businesses, like artists' shops or software companies or
child-oriented stores). And marketing is an essential part of this. At
the very least, it can offer local businesses a sort of advertising
co-op, where economies of scale operate (advertise many businesses at
once).
The Executive Director described above is kind of a paradox. On the one
hand, we want community-based direction. But we're asking for a great
Executive Director to implement it. It's sort of like saying that we
want a democracy, so we must find a Great Man to rule it. It's
_possible_-- I've got a soft spot for FDR as an example-- but even _he_
had to put up with a lot of yelping cranks who saw no good in what he
accomplished.
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