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Results of the meetings at the Listening to the City website
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Will Disability Input Make Any Difference in the Reconstruction Planning for the World Trade Center Area? by Jim Davis
An innovative coalition of over 80 civic groups formed the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York to unofficially gather public input. Months later, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. (LMDC), the quasi-public agency handling reconstruction outside of the 16-acre World Trade Center site, which is owned by the Port Authority, started supporting the process, clearly implying that they were listening to the advice the public was giving. I went to the Civic Alliance's first public input meeting on February 7th at Pier 17, a very organized and high-tech affair. We received information on the site and options via printed materials and giant television screens for projecting questions and results. Each person was given a wireless keypad for voting, plus each round table of ten people with a facilitator for discussions, had a wirelessly networked laptop computer for sending in sentences of input. The meeting began with using the keypads to survey the room of 650 people for 8 kinds of diversity. But they did not ask how many people with disabilities were in the room. I walked across the whole room during a break to pass out DIA's position on transit accessibility, and saw only one person with a visible disability -- Marvin, a familiar face from the 504 Democratic Club. They promised more outreach efforts to any groups under-represented. Later I spoke with one of the organizers and reminded him that this should include people with disabilities, and that we should be included in the polling too. He seemed to "get it". At the second, bigger, July 20th public input meeting of over 4,000 people, where I served as a volunteer facilitating a table of ten, I could only informally survey about a quarter of the room, but I saw only five people with visible disabilities. I had invited most of them. Bearing in mind that a little more than half of all disabilities are invisible, this was still far from proportional representation. At a smaller similar input meeting two days later on July 22nd for people unable to attend on Saturday, participants with disabilities spoke up and demanded inclusion in the diversity polling. The result was that 6 percent of the 150 participants responded that they had a disability. So we had a presence, but still a substantial degree of apparent under-representation compared with the 2000 Census, which says that in the geographic region the meeting was attempting to equitably draw from, people with disabilities make up about 17 percent of the population. At the February meeting, accessibility comments sent in via at least one table's laptop (my table) did not reach a level of visibility at the meeting -- that is, not enough to be announced and re-voted as one of the most popular "themes" expressed. By deleting the words "people with disabilities," the input was reduced to one word: "accessibility," which was easily confused with calls for more transit links. But these lines of input from all the laptops were documented, and later the official twelve "principles" given by the LMDC to the urban planners who developed the six Conceptual Plans discussed at the July meeting, mentioned "access for people with disabilities. The 16-page booklet for participants at the second mass meeting notes this, and also mentions accessibility in describing the option of the transit concourse as including "better access for people with disabilities." On July 20, our input was communicated to all at one moment in the meeting, when the Transit Connector/ Concourse was discussed. Laptop input was crunched in minutes by the "theme team" into four popular options to vote on. The second most popular option, which included "ADA" compliance, got 26 percent of the votes. The most popular option, which got 38 percent of the vote, didn't mention the ADA, but generally seemed to be a call for the same things as the second most popular option, plus it called for added transit lines. Between February's and July's meetings I represented DIA on one of the Civic Alliance's eight advisory committees. Though our page and a half of input seems to have shrunk to a half of a sentence in the Social, Economic & Environmental Justice Committee's chapter, I am told now that our full input will be included in an appendix to the online version of the report, soon to be published.
The July meetings had printed information in several languages, large print and Braille. Assistive listening devices had live translations in four languages. "Whisper translators" in several languages were available to assist the discussions at each table of ten. A two-week process of similarly structured on-line discussions were also held for those unable to attend. After July's meetings, I volunteered to help compress the lines of verbal input from the over 400 laptops at the individual tables -- hundreds of pages of input that must be codified and condensed to help the writers of the final report. Doing this work, I learned how constituencies like environmentalists became as effective as they did. I learned other things, too: while, for example, there was no "theme code" number provided to us for people expressing a desire for stronger building safety standards (only a code for compliance with existing standards) I persuaded them to add a code for recording that stronger kind of input -- but they failed to understand that beyond access code compliance, there was a need for a code for those demanding truly equal and unsegregated accessibility and usability of the rebuilt area. "But, of the over 500 lines of verbal input I happened to see, none called for anything more specific than a few vaguely mentioning "accessibility for people with disabilities." Due to widespread dissatisfaction with several parts of the six Concept Plans for the World Trade Center area presented at July's meeting, the LMDC announced at meeting's end that that it might extend its planning timetable, and instead of arriving at a final Draft Site Plan by December, it might wait for input on some improved Concept Plans at a possible third Civic Alliance meeting in very early 2003. If there is a third meeting -- and we should advocate for it! -- I hope to be accepted as one of the volunteer trainers to make sure facilitators and "theme team" members understand the vocabulary of equal accessibility. If this third huge public input meeting occurs, we'll have to be present in greater numbers, and more educated on how to give input that doesn't fall between the cracks in the process, if we want to get across any advice stronger than "don't forget the accessibility codes." Jim Davis received his architectural training from Brooklyn's Pratt Institute. He co-chairs a committee on public facilities accessibility for Disabled in Action of Metropolitan New York and teaches universal design at the university level. Posted Aug. 15, 2002
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