Improving Public Participation in OKC
January 14th, 2009
Following yesterday’s post, I thought it would be best to give some examples of places that citizens get tied in and expand a bit on what the city can do to help. First place I went to get information was the OKC Planning Department’s website. I had the privilege of working as an intern at the planning department prior to starting my graduate program and hold the people there in very high regard. Checking out their website, I noticed that they do a good job of making the agendas for upcoming meeting readily available on the right side of the page, which I have made available for you below:
- Board of Adjustment
- Bricktown Urban Design Committee
- Downtown Design Review Committee
- Historic Preservation and Landmark Commission
- Planning Commission
- Stockyards Urban Design Committee
- Urban Design Commission
Having the agendas easy to find is great, but there are still some things that need to be addressed. Here are some of my suggestions, and I encourage you to go through the motions and see if you have any suggestions of your own. With a few small improvements we can make it much easier for the average citizen to get and stay meaningfully involved.
FIX THE LINKS
Not all of the agenda links are working correctly. The links for the Board of Adjustements and Planning Commission take you to a page with meeting times, but no agenda. And the Stockyard Urban Design Committee link hasn’t been updated since October. This is basic and should be fixed quickly!
RELEASE AGENDA ITEMS EARLIER
State law requires that the agenda be made available at least 24 hours prior to the meeting, not including weekends or holidays. But most of the time the agenda are already complete before this, with copies available to board members, and the individual items that are likely to appear on the agenda are known well in advance of the meeting as they often require that neighbors on adjacent properties be contacted. The problem is, if you are simply an active citizen that cares about what is happening in an area in which you don’t own property and do not legally have to be contacted, you will usually only have around 24 hours to download the agenda, read the entire thing (goodluck – the most recent planning commission agenda was over 500 pages) and decide which items if any deserve your attention. You probably don’t have enough time to contact anyone and certainly not enough time to fire off a formal letter, so you have to decide if you want to go to the meeting. But even then, the item descriptions provided in the agenda are usually only detailed enough to arouse your interest or anger, but do not give you all of the information needed to keep you from looking like a completely uninformed idiot in front of the committee. Making the agenda items available at least one week prior to the meeting would allow time to ask questions, hold discussions, organize, compromise, etc.
ADD THE DATE AND TIME TO FRONTPAGE
People should not have to download a .pdf agenda or scour google to find out the date and time of the next meeting; this information should be easy to find. Along these lines, though requiring more effort, if we really want people to become involved then we shouldn’t require them to sit through an entire half-day long meeting only to speak to one item. Either the agenda should be broken up to give shorter time slots in which people could attend and speak to the item of interest, or some other solution – such as allowing comments to be submitted via email and read at the meeting – should be sought out.
GOOGLE MAP THE AGENDA ITEMS
It is incredibly difficult to look through multiple agendas in search of things that may be of interest to you. As mentioned, this weeks Planning Commission agenda is over 500 pages long, and over 100mb in download size. As you scan through the agendas, you have to look for the address on each item and then figure out exactly where this is located relative to the areas with which you are concerned. This is overly cumbersome and I doubt anyone does this on a regular basis.
Agenda items mapped by location allow users to quickly find the information that is most important to them.
It is not too much to ask to have the agendas for all meeting provided in the form of a google map. It is very simple to input a spreadsheet of addresses and be left with a map that could include the agenda item name, type, and a link to the rest of the relevant information (like in the example shown above). That is the basics and is very simple to do. In fact, with a little tweaking it could be dynamically setup to update automatically as the individual agenda items are cleared for the agenda.
Allowing users to define their areas of interests would allow people to stay connected with what is going on in the areas they care about.
Eventually, if we are really going to strive for excellence and not just for what is required. Then the system should allow citizens to create boundaries of interest. So say for instance that that I am interested in all of the planning and development taking place in and around Bricktown and also up on Western Avenue between 36th and 50th. The system would allow you indicate this through a map interface and then send you a feed straight to your email inbox or feed service of your choice with the agenda items that fall within your specified boundaries. You wouldn’t even have to navigate to a webpage to view the map, it would happen instantly, as soon as the agenda items are uploaded into the system. AND, you wouldn’t have to scour multiple agenda from different branches of the planning department – or of the city for that matter – but would be notified of ALL agenda items from EVERY department that fall within the parameters you set forth. Of course, even without the feed and with just the map, the information becomes much simpler to navigate:
With the Agenda Map, you just click on the item of interest and it gives a brief description with links to more information.
This can all be done today by every city department for relatively little in cost and just a small amount of know-how. With such a system, I really think we would see tremendous breakthroughs in the level of civic participation and contribution by the citizens of the city.
What do you think? Do you already attend these meetings on a regular basis? Would you be more likely to if these changes were implemented? Has anyone ever read an entire planning commission agenda…?
January 15th, 2009 at 12:43 am
Blair, absolutely brilliant idea about having city departments use Google Maps and allowing citizens to create “boundaries of interest.” (btw, If the city isn’t up for doing this on their own, I wonder if you could start a side business that would offer this service as a third party? Seems like it might not be that hard to write the code, and the documents you are pulling from are all public documents. Just a thought…)
January 15th, 2009 at 12:46 am
[...] would you know until it was too late? I have some thoughts that I discussed in a recent post: imagiNATIVEamerica Improving Public Participation in OKC …but I know where to come when I want to get a lively [...]
January 15th, 2009 at 12:51 am
OUTSTANDING suggestions, Blair! Absolutely outstanding.
January 15th, 2009 at 12:55 am
I appreciate it Doug!
I figure if we make it easy for people to be good citizens, then the people of OKC will step up and we will have a lot of good citizens.
January 15th, 2009 at 1:08 am
Whoa, sorry George didn’t see your comment at first. Glad you are on board with the idea.
I am going to cross my fingers and hope that the city can get excited about it. They would have the ability to make the information update automatically. Ultimately, whether they write the code themselves or some third-party does, it is going to take some commitment from the city. I guess I could give it a shot; I am sure some city would want this functionality.
I will definitely pledge to make a Google map of every agenda from this point forward in 2009 if the city will give me the information in a spreadsheet format I can use. That would at least be a start – though the personalized system is so much better!
January 15th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
blair, i think FEEDS might be an interesting idea. I acknowledge that right now feed readers are still amazingly on the vanguard of web surfing…but it won’t be long for them to become popular with the masses…
in case someone doesn’t know what i’m talking about, this is the one i use (options are plentiful…)
http://www.netvibes.com
cheers.v.
January 15th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Yeah, GoogleMapping the locations is really awesome. Do you know of any cities that currently do this? I wouldn’t be surprised if Google liked the idea and created a new interface specifically for these tasks.
I rarely attend meetings in person but I frequently check the agendas and minutes of the Council, the Planning Committee, and all of the the urban design boards for items of interest. There are a lot of tricks that you have to remember to navigate all of the agendas. For instance, they have the recently added system for some of the major departments, but that doesn’t include all of the committees, so you have to go back to home and then click the link that says “If you can’t find your committee under the meetings tab, click here” or something like that, and it brings you to a separate list of everything else. Easier navigation of all the meetings would be helpful.
That said, it’s really great that every document is available online for us to look at. The system just isn’t streamlined and hasn’t reached its maximum potential.
What if city officials had blogs? That would be really great.
January 15th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
Blair, somewhat on-topic, I have to give credit to Jack Crockett and his team in the Oklahoma City Plan Review Department for their new system, just deployed last year. They have really been diligent in modernizing their permitting, plan review, and inspection system. I met with Jack just yesterday with a few humble requests and both of them were actually already in place, just not publicized.
My office uses this system daily to monitor inspection requests and results, and now can monitor progress of permit applications as they make their way through the various stages of review. We can review correction-request notes made by an inspector on site before he’s even out of the area, thanks to instant-updating of their inspection notes.
Not many cities can say that…the big ones are sometimes too big to get under a comprehensive system, and the smaller cities often don’t have the means to even try.
January 15th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
Shane – I don’t know of any cities doing it now, but I haven’t really looked into it. Glad to here someone is reading the agendas – impressive dedication.
Jeff – that is great news about the cities automated permit and review system. I believe they have installed an Accela government software package across most of the city hall computer network (someone from the city can jump in and correct me if I am wrong). It is great that they are pushing the automated web technologies and I know it is a huge blessing to the home builder and developer communities.
I really do think the city is doing a great job at a lot of things; but citizen participation and information access could use some more resources and attention. Hopefully we can take a few steps in the right direction this year!
January 16th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Very good points. I really like the mapping approach. I also suggest that people just show up at any and all of these meetings to find out how the commissions work, the kinds of issues they deal with etc.
January 18th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Yes, it’s Accela. It was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t think of the name at the time I posted.
Jack indicated that the legacy system was still in place and available to access. Accela offers a far greater spectrum of features, but the legacy system was designed in-house and as a result, has many specific features unique to OKC that Accela doesn’t have. (One of those features that we use, for instance, was that the old system reports when inspections were originally requested by a contractor. Accela only shows that it *was* requested, and when it was passed/failed. It’s important for us to know when they were called in to be able to hold contractors accountable to schedules.)
Jack said they’re working with the Accela developers to implement the “OKC flavors” that are currently lacking in their first implementation here.
February 22nd, 2009 at 9:01 pm
Duly noted. ensuring a better web site is a high priority of mine, and a lot of your suggestions coincide with my own ideas for improvement. But, as you would appreciate, spare staff time to manage this is at an extreme premium. I’m trying to rectify this with the addition of an outreach position, something I’ve included in my last 3 years budget requests. I consider an effective citizen communications program an essential for any planning department and hopefully, I can make that happen soon. I apologize for the deficiencies in the interim. Thanks for everyone’s input