The city makes a grab
Steve Brandt's Oct. 19 story about funding for the Neighborhood Revitalization Program in Minneapolis misses the deeper story. NRP does not have to go away, as the article seems to imply. It does need to find another funding source, and it could stand a governance overhaul, but the work it does with regard to community engagement and neighborhood redevelopment is a model for other cities around the world. Simply stated, NRP has worked and still works.
Given the happenings in the City Council meeting on Oct. 18, the future of NRP is now in the hands of the mayor and the council, and for some unstated reasons, they are not backing the continuation of NRP (Cam Gordon and Gary Schiff are the exceptions). City officials seem to want to take the funds used for NRP, now out of their control, and use them to create a new community engagement office within the city structure. The city will then decide what types of redevelopment projects are appropriate, not the neighborhood organizations and city residents who put much time and effort into making their neighborhoods strong. The people who live in an area know best what it needs.
If all this comes to pass, neighborhood groups will be decimated, partly because there will no longer be dollars for staffing and overhead, and partly because citizen volunteers in these groups will be left with very little decisionmaking power over the types of projects in their neighborhood.
Is the city really going to destroy this model program because it wants more control over the money for neighborhood redevelopment? If it happens, it will be a sad day.
Minneapolis residents can visit www.neighbors4nrp.com for more information.
JAY KELLY, MINNEAPOLIS; BOARD MEMBER,
LONGFELLOW COMMUNITY COUNCIL