ANCs and civic engagement

Civic engagement is as good as those engaged. In my opinion, we have a weak civic engagement culture in the city of Washington. Even if you disagree with me, you can't disagree with my belief that the extant training structures to support and strengthen deliberative civic engagement are practically nonexistent. And the various government agencies don't do much to build citizen involvement in their activities and planning processes--we're consulted, some, but we're not really involved.

That goes for ANCs too. Advisory Neighborhood Commissions are a great concept: local grassroots leadership at the neighborhood level, weighing in on matters that come before the various city governmetn agencies. But there is little infrastructure, training, and support for ANCs. So neighborhoods have to hope that there are good people willing to get and stay involved. It's a crap shoot unfortunately.

ANC6A is one of the exceptions that proves the rule. Here is one of their latest actions (from e-mail):

Re: Initiatives for Councilmember Tommy Wells

Councilmember Wells,

At our regularly scheduled, public meeting on February 8, 2007 our Commission unanimously approved three initiatives for your office to focus on as you requested at our January 11, 2007 meeting.

The initiatives are as follows:

1. Improve recreation center management and facilities: building grounds, programs, identification checks, partnerships and volunteer groups.
2. Approve funding for the light rail cars for H Street NE in the Fiscal Year 2008 budget.
3. Implement a Ward 6 singles moratorium.

The other initiatives that were discussed at our meeting:

4. Improve nuisance property policies.
5. Eliminate publicly owned, abandoned housing.
6. Facilitate traffic calming requests and guide systematic implementation.
7. Implement public space improvements - locate and provide for: dog parks, recreation areas, play equipment and passive pedestrian green space.
8. Improve enforcement of illegal construction.
9. Improve transparency of Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs and District Columbia Department of Transportation public records and decision making process.
10. Consider expanding Capitol Hill Historic District.
11. Improve transportation demand management strategies for new development.
12. Ensure even distribution of social services across the city.

In close, we appreciate the opportunity to work with your office on these issues. On behalf of the Commission,

Joseph Fengler
Chair,
Advisory Neighborhood Commission 6A

This kind of activity keeps me hopeful that quality is possible and that mediocrity can be vanquished!

The January issue of the mid-city community newspaper Intowner has an op-ed by an ANC Commissioner about how ANCs are worthless and should be abolished. I haven't gotten around to writing a response--that the issue is the lack of support and training and working with ANCs to get other community members involved.

Most ANCs do not have non-elected community members involved in committees. ANC6A (and ANC6C) does.

Most ANCs do not allow non-elected community members to be chairs of ANC committees. ANC6A does allow this. And in fact, currently, most of the committees are chaired by community members, not elected Commissioners.

This increases capacity, and allows ANC Commissioners to address constituent service issues and other day-to-day stuff, without allowing broader issues to fall by the wayside.