Dear City Council and Mayor Nash,
We were disappointed to receive an email today from the mayor outlining the plans for a pilot on Middle Ave to remove parking and redirect traffic as part of the Complete Streets Commission’s ongoing efforts. We were disappointed because, as residents of Middle Ave, we stand to be most affected by these changes and have been advocating to have our perspective involved in the design of the pilot. In fact, we have offered to help organize a meeting with residents of the street and representatives from the Commission and City Council ahead of the pilot’s design to take our needs into account, which would improve its chances of success. The idea has been supported by Councilmember Mueller, but we haven’t been contacted by anybody at City Hall or from the Commission to help make this meeting happen.
So it was an unpleasant surprise to see that the pilot’s design has simply been adopted without hearing from residents of the actual street it will take place on, particularly after more people have voiced their concerns following the Council’s decision in September to design the pilot and remove street parking (among other changes). We noticed that several more people wrote in and spoke up after that meeting that they had concerns about the decision. It seemed like a low effort / high reward proposal, i.e. to involve Middle Ave residents in the planning process, so we are interested to understand why this did not take place and how the decision was made to go ahead without hearing from this particular group. The “outreach” on the agenda is very vague and seems mostly to involve warning residents of impending parking removal, but we’re asking to be more involved and have been since the vote last month.
We would like to reiterate that we share the overall goals of calming traffic and making biking safer for everyone, while maintaining access to wonderful public resources like Nealon and Lyle parks and the tennis courts. However, the ongoing refusal to engage with this group of unique stakeholders is baffling. We urge Council and the mayor to adopt more robust communication practices with residents of this particular street. For example, this latest email has gone out to some listserv, but has not been clearly communicated to residents of the street in any other way. This may result in a falsely small response from Middle residents at the upcoming Tuesday meeting, simply because not enough of us know about it due to insufficient outreach. We would really like to work with everyone to ensure a successful pilot design, adequate engagement from key groups and, most importantly, safer streets.
Sincerely,
Maia and Neil
