The Agenda

Deller and the Road Ahead

Providence Tomorrow — a planning process designed to create a framework for growth and preservation of Providence neighborhoods — aims to involve community members through a series of Neighborhood Charrettes, scheduled from Spring 2006 until Fall 2008. The two-year plan kicked off at an Ice Cream Social, attended by almost 200 people, at Roger Williams Park Casino on July 26th. Thom Deller, the head of the Department of Planning and Development (DPD), asked community members to generate lists of the things that they liked and disliked about their neighborhoods. The DPD passed out disposable cameras, and encouraged participants to illustrate the lists with photos. Overall, the event was quite positive, and a refreshing change from the usual mystery that shrouds city planning decisions. Thom Deller sat down with us to talk about the new open and transparent initiative, and the future of Providence.

Can you talk a little bit about Providence Tomorrow, its initiatives and goals, and what specific development projects it will be addressing?

“We haven't seen development like this
for a hundred years.”

People have to get used to the fact that things change. We’re constantly battling the fact that our zoning ordinance is out of date because it’s not keeping up with green technology, or this change or the other. What we want to try to do with Providence Tomorrow is actually ingrain in people’s minds that planning is a continuum, and that things keep flowing by.
Under state law we are required to submit a Comprehensive Plan, on May 7, 2007, to the state for approval, in conformance with the Comprehensive Land Use Act. We had originally thought that we would just make minor modifications — and we probably still will — but we use that as an opportunity to start moving things forward. Our first section was the introduction. October 10-14 will be the citywide charrette: where we grow and how we grow. The city can’t stay stagnant. Growth is going to happen. If we don’t give direction, it’s going to happen without direction.
The [charrette] is a process to get ideas. We will use those ideas to modify the city’s Comprehensive Plan, and in January hold the traditional public hearing required by law, so that come May we have an Interim Comprehensive Plan. The Comprehensive Plan is very general, and people think of planning as very specific. I’ve told the staff that we have to try to get the most involvement. We should try our darnedest to get information out, discuss it, see if we can get agreement. We shoot for the maximum. The minimum is to just take what we have and resubmit it.
We’ve got a schedule that backs us up from submitting it to May 7 — all the legal steps we have to take. In the December public meeting on the draft we propose, a work session with the City Council and the City Planning Commission. January, we do the City Planning Commission public hearing. March, the City Council public hearing — early March, ’cause we need two passes, and if the City Council wants to make a change, by law it has to sit on the table 30 days so we can say yes or no. Everything’s lined up. Everything’s very legalistic.

So our goal is by the second Thursday in May to have the council approve the plan. If they can’t, given the schedule — I think the first Thursday in May is the 3rd — it can go to that first meeting in May to get council approval. Meanwhile, we’re also scheduling out the neighborhood charrettes. We’re going to group the neighborhoods together. I’ll be very honest, the first group of neighborhoods we picked are going to be an easy group, because you don’t start with your most controversial issue. You try to get the system down, so it’s smooth and you get the input. Our goal is to move the planning office to the neighborhood for that week and do a charrette. The first charrette will probably be in the third or fourth week of January. We have to line up every meeting that we know about from here until next summer and start plugging in when we can get enough dates available.

So the May interim plan that’s unveiled, that’s for all of Providence? And in the meantime starting January, you’re doing the separate [charrettes], and ideally you’re going to include that in the May [council meeting]?

That’s why we call it “interim.” We may get done with all the neighborhood plans — and we’re planning for a two-year period — and at the end of that two-year plan we’ll update the interim plan with the final plan. And it is possible that something comes out of the neighborhood process that changes — severely, in a major way — the Interim Comprehensive Plan. And it’s possible that through the process, nothing changes. We’re going to have the update, clean up the policies, clean up the land use map, go through all the neighborhood plans, and then come back to the Comprehensive Plan. That’s why I say it’s a continuum, we have to get into this cycle of thinking about the plan.
The last planning department that really planned ended in 1966. If you look at all the documents and plans from the ’20s when the City Planning Commission was created up to sometime in the ’60s, it’s unbelievable. The last big planning document is downtown Providence, 1970. I don’t necessarily agree with what came out of that, but there were a lot of good things in that plan. And from that point on we had Mayor Doorley. But they were all project-oriented, they didn’t think about if you did this, what happens? In many ways we stopped planning, and the Planning Department went into implementation.
[Mayor Cicilline] has actually said that we need to get back to planning, and think about where we’re going. What were the plans done during the ’70s and ’80s? They were redevelopment plans: “We’re going to take that piece of property and allow someone to build something different.” But they were all based on old plans that were done before. So the real thought process of planning — really, not much has been done. If you go back to the 1946 Comprehensive Plan, if you go all the way through the ’46 to the ’65 to the ’76 and the ’92 Comprehensive Plan, there’s very little change in the plans. The city has grown out, there’s more open space, more environmental protection, affordable housing, things like that, but the land use hasn’t changed, and I really don’t expect that it will change much in this planning process.

Is this one of the first times charrettes have been very much a part of the whole process?

The city has only used charrettes three times, and those were all with Andrés Duany, when we looked at Downtown and the Downtown-West Side connector. We’ve also looked around the country, and the more we’ve looked we have found people and cities that have used charrettes in a neighborhood planning process — not around here. We haven’t found anybody who’s actually used the charrette process for a Comprehensive Planning process. Charrettes really came about through the idea of trying to better design a building, or a traffic pattern. It’s more about things that you can see, that are tangible, rather than theory and opinion. We’re trying something very different.

“The city can’t stay stagnant. Growth is going to happen. If we don’t give it direction, it’s going to happen without direction.”

Charrettes are a process, a way of arriving at a decision for the collective next step forward. And they are best used for a project that aims for wholesale community change. One of the comments on the opening page of Providence Tomorrow is: “[The] renewed interest in Providence has brought the delicate balance of growth and preservation to the forefront of issues facing our city.”—What are some of the issues you see the charrettes addressing? For example: the housing crisis, tax revenue, affordability, historic stewardship?

Yep, all those. [laughter] I think one of the major crisis issues that we face right now is that in the period I was talking about, from 1960 to today, basically, Providence wasn’t growing. We were shrinking. And the last great planning was trying to [figure out] how to bring suburbia to the city, ’cause if you look at downtown Providence in 1970, it was like: level all those old things, make acres of parking for all the people from suburbia, and so the city was struggling with what to do.
I think the other thing that’s happened is that we’ve created a mindset of being used to no development, so if somebody wants to come in and tear a building down, “Eh, no; don’t tear it down, keep it.” And the market was so questionable, it was, “OK, we were going to take a risk anyway, so you can have this building.” Right now, the market is so different, even with the flat economy, that development pressures are substantially different. We haven’t seen development like this in a hundred years. I don’t mean to pick on the Preservation Society, but it was easy to be someone who liked preservation because you could say, “Don’t tear it down,” and people would say, “OK, I won’t tear it down.” Now people say, “I wanna tear it down,” you say, “No, don’t tear it down.” “Well, there’s no economic value to a one-story mill building, given this and that, and that I need to do this and…” There’s a lot more pressure.
The prime issue we face is that we are a city of about 18.1 square miles of land. We’re about 95-96% developed. If someone’s going to build something, they’re either going to have to build on open space, which is very limited in this city, or they’re going to have to tear something down. We have to figure out what we want in growth and we have to decide what we’re willing to give up in exchange for something else. Those are the big issues.
People say, “Well, why do you have to grow?” Well, schools are one of the reasons we have to grow. We can’t support our school system with the tax base we have. Somewhere around 40% of what they call “ratables” [Ed: Structures which may be rated, or set at a certain value, for the purpose of taxation.] are tax-exempt in the city. So that means only 60% of the property owners in the city are paying for government. And while we can get better at how we do things, the only way to really make the next step is to have the money to pay for it. So, if we don’t allow growth, if we decide that Providence is fine the way it is, there’s lots of things we’re not going to pay for. And our taxes are really going to get high. And that’s a decision you have to make.
If you don’t have growth, if you don’t have new taxes, you’re limited in what you can achieve. If we make the decision that we want our neighborhoods to stay the way they are, and try to be affordable for all income groups, and at all opportunities, and we’re saying we’re not changing the character of the neighborhoods, we’re not allowing greater density of development, then the question is: where are we going to allow development so we can increase tax dollars, so we can do the things we want to do — better schools, more art stuff, more green space?
Those are the tough land-use choices: I can have a one-family building or I can have a two-family building, or I can have a historic building or a high-rise, or I can have an old mill or an artist housing or I can have a renovated mill. It’s really not that simple: it’s an economic choice. And we have to try to balance the affordability issues against the economic issues and how we pay for government.
I’m working now to get the exact numbers. I don’t have them yet, but I use 110 Westminster as an example. Some people love it, some people hate it. We have one, two, three pieces of property that paid somewhere around $400,000 in taxes, I could be wrong, but let’s just say it’s $400,000. Based on a preliminary estimate of the taxes, when that building is done, it’s going to pay $6,000,000. Now, those numbers haven’t been checked by the tax associate, but there’s one development that had two buildings torn down with a new building that’s going to be very high-end housing, but it’s giving us the ability to do more for schools than we had on the other piece. So those are the types of value judgments we have to make.

“Rats. Schools. These are issues, we know that. Don’t talk about ’em.”

I like to show people a zoning map, and say: “Look at this yellow and orange, that’s residential — that’s our neighborhoods — and that’s 80% of the city. And everything that’s red and purple is commercial and industrial. If we’re saying we want to keep our neighborhoods, that’s the only place we can grow. How do we allow smart development to happen there that’s good for the city and allows us a variety of opportunities?” That’s got to be the focus of the discussion.

But is it keeping the neighborhoods? I mean 110 Westminster, that’s adding to another neighborhood, which is Downtown.

But the Downtown neighborhood has traditionally not had many people living in it. And there was a big attempt — when the Weybosset Hill redevelopment plan was done in the late ’60s, early ’70s — to make that residential. If you read that, it’s an unbelievably fantastic plan. The problem is, it was carried out in an economic time when no one could afford to build housing, so all the housing is elderly Section 8. It was based on the fact that people, middle class, are going to move there who have disposable income to spend the money. Didn’t happen. We have people who are poor, who won’t come out into the plaza, because they’re elderly and they’re terrified they’re going to be robbed. And so we didn’t create the environment that we talked about. What’s happening today is, we’re creating a very different environment.
But where I’m going with that is: Downtown neighborhood, until these new developments came along, had about 600, 700 people. Downtown is really what I call the taxing neighborhood. We think about the amount of dollars we’d have generated by this neighborhood versus the amount of services, they were paying a little over 1/5 of the property taxes in the city and getting about $100,000 worth of services. That’s what we spent snowplowing, basically.
This is a different neighborhood, this is an economic neighborhood, and so people are going to live in this economic neighborhood but it’s not the triple decker, it’s not the two-family, it’s not the single family home or it’s not the two six-family units side by side. This is a different kind of neighborhood. So we have to think about growth. Valley Street, where Struever is, and Rising Sun and all that — that’s a different kind of neighborhood. And I think that we haven’t figured out the right tools to ensure that we maintain the mix that we should keep in those neighborhoods. But that’s an area where growth is going to happen and those old mills are going to go. I’m concerned that we’re allowing too much housing to be built in that area. If we don’t have land for jobs, we’re going to be worse off than if we don’t have all this development. Housing pays more in taxes than business in most cases, but we need places for people to work.

In terms of getting out information about affordable housing or addressing it in the charrette, how does Providence Tomorrow address the issue?

It’s an issue we’ve addressed a variety of times and a variety of different ways. This was our three-part report that talks about housing policy. It talks about what has been achieved in the last three years and what our housing policies are. It’s online, we’ve advertised it, we’ve had notices about it, we’ve held meetings on it. Most of the housing advocates know about it. It’s just we do tons of reports and plans and unless someone asks the questions, people don’t know where to look or what it is, and that’s one of the reasons were redoing the website, to have this library of things so that people can look.
The planning process with Providence Tomorrow: in many ways, some people won’t be satisfied because it’s really going to be land use based, economics based — how does growth and development happen? Affordable housing is a very different policy-type issue. The only way for us really to address it is through taxing policy, through funding mechanisms, and through other types of limitations that we can impose. I think the intent when we did that last year was to try to understand the issues of affordability and what keeps houses affordable. How do we give people the opportunity to get into a home?
Bottom line, the biggest thing is money, we need money. I was flipping through some websites last night and there was one website criticizing the city for not putting any money into affordable housing, and I was thinking about responding and I said, “I can’t get into this.” But over the last ten years we’ve put $36 million of city money into affordable housing. People say we haven’t put anything in because they don’t understand what we do.
If someone brings up the issue of affordable housing through the charrette process, it will be discussed. But that’s going to be our basis for affordable housing and how we afford what we’re trying to achieve. It’s basically a very difficult thing to do without lots of money. It costs about $120,000 to build a single-family home that can be affordable. You add the price of the land in and all of a sudden the house is no longer affordable. So then we use our dollars to write down the price of the house so that someone can get in it. We’ve been averaging about 100 units a year the last three years, both rental and home ownership, for production of affordable housing. That’s nothing, but that hundred units is probably costing us about four million dollars a year of subsidy.
So, we’re going to continue to do that as much as we can, but the mayor’s going to be setting up a tax policy committee to look at all aspects of how we tax. We put someone in an affordable house [or] a home ownership community, and when the guy comes down from the tax assessors’ office to appraise the house, he doesn’t know about the deed restriction that says you can only sell the house to someone who makes this much income, so he looks at the house and says, “Oh, this is worth $300,000.” Taxes skyrocket. So, we need to create a clear and uniform policy so that there can be the potential to grow wealth, while protecting some of these owners, and that means I have to get the tax people to understand the issues. The mayor understands it but now we gotta get everyone in a room and say “OK, what do we do?”

“Duany gets up and calls them a bunch of troglodytes, because they don’t understand what’s good for the city and all they care about is their own purse.”

This year we got a law passed in the house and the senate that allows any community in the state to grant tax stabilizations for affordable housing. First time it’s been on the books. Now you can just say, “If you do affordable, we’ll give you tax breaks.” The number of meetings we had in preparing that document was really quite staggering. And now that it’s settled, that’s a very important piece. If people raise the issue of affordable housing during the charrette process we will discuss it and we will direct people, but it is not our intent to spend the whole time doing it. That’s why, we weren’t totally successful at this, but we tried to have — what did they call it? — a “Parking Lot,” at our July meeting. We said “Rats. Schools. These are issues, we know that. Don’t talk about ’em.” [laughter] Every time we have a meeting, we’re going to have our Parking Lot, and we’ll put things on it. We’ve got to be able to discuss where we’re going to grow. We spent time trying to revise zoning ordinances because of the amount of development that’s happening in the city and there were a certain group of people who were upset by that. But every time I go to neighborhood meetings people say, “That shouldn’t happen, it shouldn’t be allowed by the zoners.” Well, it’s in the new zoning ordinance, but…

From the Providence Tomorrow website: “Crucial to the success of this initiative is broad-based public involvement. Providence is a diverse city, and the vision for our future must be created with input from all.” Neighborhood organizations have become increasingly involved in the development process. How is Providence Tomorrow including these organizations?

I’m not going to answer this directly; I’m going to go around in circles. Several neighborhood groups have asked the mayor to appoint a steering committee for Providence Tomorrow. And the mayor has said no: the residents of Providence are the steering committee. We want you all to come. Part of the issue that we face is: what is a neighborhood group? You go to the neighborhood group and you look at the organization and they have a very particular point of view and interest and it’s a very small group of people. Our goal is really going to be to try to use as many groups that exist in the city to get the word out so we can get as many people as possible to come. We have our internal joke—and I’m probably going to regret saying this—about what we call the “Gang of Fifty,” the same people who show up all the time with the same issue. We know what they’re going to say before the meeting starts. We don’t want the gang.
We want to hear from the people we don’t hear from. I want to hear from the guy who owns a small company in Washington Park who is teaching English as a second language to his employees. Or he’s supplying daycare. I want to hear from the African immigrant who’s opened a business on Elmwood Avenue. I want to hear from a new homeowner in Olneyville. I want to hear from the young college professor who works for PC and lives over in Elmhurst or Mount Pleasant and is finding it tough, because they can’t afford to send their kids to a private school, because PC doesn’t pay that well, but they’re not real happy with how the schools are in Providence. I want to hear from those people—not the same people, because we know what they’re going to say. We’ve got to have the same type of turnout for all of our meetings that we had for July. That was the first time I’ve had a planning meeting in this city that I could actually say the skin tones looked like the city. We need everybody to come out. We need everyone to say their piece. It doesn’t do us any good if we’re just going to hear the same old things. I could do it myself; I don’t need to go to the meetings.

“I’m not going to answer
this directly; I’m going to go around in circles.”

In addition to boosting creativity, charrettes are an interactive alternative to the usual show-and-tell, and can overcome community resistance to new development. In many communities, traditional processes have not resulted in designs that reflect the public’s input. People tend to be on guard, anticipating a project that will make things worse rather than better. And without reason to feel enthusiastic or hopeful about affecting a project’s outcome, people often stop attending planning meetings or only show up to block crucial decisions. How will Providence Tomorrow attempt to encourage involvement in such a way that avoids this type of negative response?

I think it’s best to say what was a traditional planning meeting versus a charrette. A traditional planning meeting is relative to a particular issue. We schedule the meeting. We have maps. We make a presentation and take questions. That doesn’t have any involvement, doesn’t have any vibe, and you get the people who just show up. The important thing that I think charrettes do for us is it allows you to stop in. We move our office. We’re there. Our phones are there. Our computers are there. Our desks are there. We have staff there from 8:30 in the morning to 9:00 at night. We have to stagger our schedule so that people have the ability to stop in. Come have lunch with us. Come and talk about, show, draw on your map what you want, and then leave—you don’t have to stay. So you have people who actually have a stake in what’s happening give their view. There are lots of people who hate the thought of having to get up in front of an audience. It’s a chance for people to feel more comfortable.

How will the website conduct outreach so that people from different communities will be able to know when and where a meeting is taking place? Most people do not have access to the web, and the libraries, a source of this access, are threatened.

We got blamed about a year and a half ago because we weren’t putting everything on the web. “We have our internal joke—and I'm probably going to regret saying this…”Only a third of Providence people have access to the web, if you believe the numbers that are out there, so two thirds of the people don’t get that information. We need to make our information as available as possible. Our roots have always been flyers, churches, libraries—we tend not to do posters too often. We have put them up in some stores and I think that when we’re in a particular neighborhood we’ll flyer the neighborhood and put posters all over the place.

Posters are a very viable form of communication. A lot of people read them. It’d be a really great way to let people know that there’s a meeting happening.

We have tended in the past not to do that. We’ve had neighborhood groups and church groups to flyer and announce. By law we’re required to do notices in any language that’s spoken by 10% or more of the population. But the last time we did notice we did it in Cambodian and — something else — Thai, maybe. We did it in three, four languages. English, Spanish, Cambodian, and Thai. So, we make an effort. Nothing is perfect. We depend really on groups to get the word out. And, what we’re doing with the webpage now is, people can sign up for RSS. It’ll automatically sign you up to get notices whenever we change that page. So we’ve limited it to public notices, Providence Tomorrow, and I forget what the other program was. But we have it set up on our webpage.

Could The Agenda help by publishing the meeting times or dates or stuff like that?

Anyone who is willing to publish anything, it’s fine with me. You did publish the meeting on ALCO.

Yes, we did. I appreciated a lot of what you said about ALCO at the Bridgham School on Westminster. Everyone was realizing how much we put into a new street — running drainage and lights and all that — and appreciating what was going to be involved in carving up that area.

Suburban communities are much better at this. They see development happen a lot more and they understand the process. This type of development is very new and different for Providence. People don’t understand the kinds of things that have to happen. I think they also don’t understand the limitations that we face as a staff, what’s spelled out by law. And there’s only so much that we can do. We’ll wiggle and move as much as we can. But as I like to say, the planning department’s the department people like to hate, because we have to say no to everybody.

Charrettes can be used to create a wide range of plans, including master plans within a city’s Comprehensive Plan, town center plans, transit-oriented development plans, affordable housing development plans, wide-scale redevelopment projects, and plans for new developments in a community – from constructing an individual building to redesigning an entire neighborhood.
There is a difference between stockholder and stakeholder. More often than not, the “stakeholder” does not have the monetary backing. It is either a small business or individuals who invest in their community by other means than generating money. Communication between these two groups, in the case of development, is vital. Other than by being in the same room, how will the charrettes bring the stockholders and the stakeholders together?

Whoa. [long pause] I think it depends on the stockholders.

In terms of development in Providence, if you think about specific locations you can see neighborhoods whose development plans are run or generated by specific companies, and oftentimes very few. Maybe it’s one or two development companies in the neighborhood. Those are the stockholders. Are they involved in the process of the charrette?

I think it depends on the different developers. I have tended to enjoy working with out-of-state developers more than local developers just because they understand the give-and-take of a public process more. I find that local developers tend to have a set of expectations that they think they should be able to meet. The local developers also tend to look at their property as only their property, and they know what’s best for their property, instead of the city or neighborhood. If the charrette process is successful in getting the stockholders to come to the meetings, if they are involved and listen and participate, then maybe what we can come up with is a plan that benefits them and the city based on their wishes. And I think it really depends on how you handle things.
Andrés Duany, when he came to town — he likes to make awfully long, challenging comments to try to elicit a response. So we’re having a discussion on trying to get a lot over there next to the Holiday Inn which Joe Paolino owns. There’s Joe Paolino, Sr. and Joe Paolino, Jr. sitting there, and Duany gets up and calls them a bunch of troglodytes, because they don’t understand what’s good for the city and all they care about is their own purse. [laughter] That wasn’t the best way to solicit participation.
The neighborhood charrettes will be easier in some ways because we’re not going to see the same types of developers. We’re going to see somebody who wants to come in and build a Cumberland Farms set way back. And we don’t want a Cumberland Farms set back. We want them up on the street; we want houses abutting it. It’s gotta be easy, because people are going to know what’s good for the neighborhood. They’re going to understand what they like about walking down the street. I live over there on Chalkstone Avenue, and one of the things that drives me nuts is, in the early ’90s they were tearing buildings down so they could build these things set way back. It’s just so uncomfortable as a city person walking down the sidewalk, and to have that ugly parking lot and Cumberland Farms set back there. And it’s so much more personal and person-scale to have it right next to you. And so I think the people in the neighborhoods are going to be able to talk about that.
The biggest issues we’re going to face in trying to understand the complexity of the developer vs. a neighborhood group is what I call “fringe areas,” where a commercial-industrial corridor bleeds into a neighborhood. The best way to describe that is go down Eddy St. as it backs up along Washington Park in South Providence, or go along the highway and the service road that backs up to Federal Hill and West Broadway. Or North Main St. as it backs up to the Mount Hope and Summit neighborhoods, and Silver Lake along parts of Plainfield St., or Charles neighborhood as you go up Silver Spring St., where we’re building what we want. [Ed: A Wal-Mart will replace the former Ames Plaza.] So those are the areas where people have to be more cognizant and we have to figure out how to work with the developers. And Valley all the way through Promenade — all the way into Olneyville. How the old industrial uses and the neighborhood groups’ uses start working together. Those transitional areas are where we’re going to have the difficulty and where we’re going to have to work to pull things together.

Right. And this charrette is a really amazing process for that, and I think it is an opportunity for stockholders and stakeholders to come together in the same room and understand each other’s perspective. The stockholders tend to think in terms of economic value, and stakeholders have a different set of values that aren’t really equivalent. But the important thing is that they both get into a room and that they talk to each other.

Hold on, you see that woman who just walked in? Let me take care of this one quick.

[A woman walks in and briefly discusses a contract with Thom.]

This is my other job. I’m the chairman of RIPTA. We just had the union agree to a contract so I have to sign it.

[Thom signs. Brief conversation. Guest leaves.]

The union voted to approve the contract unanimously on Thursday, and we wanted to get the contract signed so we could process their raises.

Back to the Interim Comprehensive Plan in May: A lot of these things are already set in motion. You’ve got to catch up with all this stuff that has momentum already—

Yes, we have to catch up. And that’s one of the things that scares me, is the fact that people so fought the changes in zoning which would have protected a lot of what we’re trying to do.

What level of involvement do other departments in the City have with Providence Tomorrow?

The mayor’s internal steering committee has Public Works, Parks and Recreation — who else? — they’re all involved in the steering committee. “I won’t tell you the debate we got into about ice cream.”I’ve said from the beginning that when we have the events they have to be fun. I’ve said to the staff, “I need something that’s going to be fun. Bring in dancing troupes. Bring in Big Nazo. Figure out something,” and they said “Let’s do an ice cream social.” And then I won’t tell you the debate we got into about ice cream. [laughter] “I know this guy,” “Ben & Jerry’s,” blah blah blah, and then it starts, “We have to have Italian ice,” “We have to do this.” Whatever! I don’t care. We need to make the events fun and that’s why I look at trying to get the parks more involved. We did not expect the amount of people that came to the July meeting. We decided we’d probably have two tables of kids — that’s why we had crayons and everything — and then we had kids all over the place.
We’re designing a Providence Tomorrow logo so we can start branding everything. We’re going to have everyone on the team wearing the same color shirt. We’re going to buy shirts that have the logo on it, so you know that that’s a Providence Tomorrow person at the charrette.
We talked about trying to actually get high school kids to do a planning session. Volunteers In Providence Schools did a whole planning session this year which was really quite interesting. We’re actually trying to put together a nomination for them to get a New England Planning Award for Student Participation. If we get our act together in the next week, we’ll get it done.

Because it is September.

Right! But we’re planners. We’ve got plenty of time.

And the next meeting is October 10, right? Where is that going take place?

In the first floor of this building. [400 Westminster Street] We’re still trying to figure out where we’re going to go for the big sessions. We were trying to get the Pell-Chaffee—they wouldn’t let us use it. We have permission to use Shepard’s building. But we’re actually thinking about trying to see if we can get space in the Convention Center, because the one thing we don’t want is to have the problem we had in the casino, and not have enough space.

That’s the four-day charrette, right?

On the 10th there’ll be an opening presentation, which is sort of like the talking heads type of thing. We’re still trying to frame it out, do some preliminary break-out, possibly.

What neighborhoods is it focusing on?

This is the whole darn town. This is where we try to frame the Comprehensive Plan. “Where do we grow? What is growth? Why do we grow?”

So anybody from any neighborhood is involved?

Right. We started looking at trying to move everything out since it got harder thinking about the computer connections, the phone connections, the copiers—

The parking.

We have free parking. We’ve got Buff Chace willing to let us use his lot for the week. But one of the reasons we were getting criticized by the City Council, one of the biggest things that came out of the July meeting was, “make sure you pick a site on a bus route.” And that was one of the biggest issues people had.

The Roger Williams Park Casino wasn’t on a bus route?

The complaint was, “I had to come downtown, and then go this way.” Since this is a city-wide charrette, we said, if people are complaining about how they have to go, let’s have it downtown, so they can take a bus down here, and then they may have to walk a block.

Great. Well, I really appreciate it. Thank you for talking to us.

I didn’t feel like working today anyway. [laughter]

Providence Tomorrow’s Citywide Charrette will be held October 10-14 at 400 Westminster Street. It starts at 8:30 a.m. and runs until 9:00 p.m. each day.