For those who remember participating in this process, as a community we created a vision for what we wanted in the neighborhood. It resulted in the first neighborhood specific plan in the City – The University Neighborhood Specific Plan 2008.
Now that we’re moving toward smart codes and 26 neighborhood strategies in 26 months, we have another crack at creating the City of Our Dreams.
One of the critical pieces of any collaboration is transparency. These initiatives are perfect opportunities for citizens to reclaim ownership of the process. The Friday Morning Club had this discussion recently.
(1) Consideration by Councilman Ward 3 and Riverside’s Mayor of moving PUBLIC COMMENTS, perhaps to the beginning of the Council meetings which would encourage citizens who have ideas, suggestions, comments to come and share those with Riverside’s council. Also noting that for PUBLIC COMMENTS to REALLY provide an opportunity for citizens to comment on topics OTHER than items on the agenda, that Riverside City Council NEEDS to make changes such that citizens may comment on CONSENT CALENDAR items of interest to them.
We should also bring back our right to pull any item from the agenda for public comment and more importantly, we should demand that agendas be publicly noticed no less than 10 business days or two calendar weeks.
The Council meets every other week during the Summer. There is no justifiable reason we can’t transition to greater public notice during this Summer. What do you think?