Jackson calls for halt to PLAN Dudley

Participants work on a planning exercise during a March PLAN: Dudley Square meeting.

Last week, City Councilor Tito Jackson challenged the validity of the Boston Redevelopment Authority’s Dudley Square planning process. Demanding greater community inclusion, Jackson fired off a letter to the BRA insisting it put immediate pause to its PLAN Dudley.

Jackson, who launched his own planning initiative, Reclaim Roxbury, last November, called for a three-month moratorium on the PLAN Dudley while he restarts the Roxbury Neighborhood Council to weigh in on the decision-making process. In his strongly-worded letter, he presented a moratorium as critical to ensuring Dudley Square develop according to residents’ wants, not designs rushed through by the BRA.

“We will not allow the BRA to impose its decision on us,” he wrote, lambasting the BRA’s project as “an affront to Roxbury’s residents” that “bulldozes through the community’s authority and willfully ignores the purpose of the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan.”

He asserted that a deeper, longer community process especially is needed because the BRA includes in its study area parcels that were not covered in the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan. As such, there are no previous examinations and guidance for how those properties should be developed, he said.

Jackson and the BRA both seek to establish a coordinated vision to control rising developer interest in the area. BRA officials previously told the Banner that they launched an accelerated planning process in Dudley in order to get ahead of those interests. A three-month halt would be a significant change of schedule: PLAN Dudley is expected to submit a final plan to the BRA board in August.

In a statement sent to the Banner, Nick Martin, BRA director of communications, presented PLAN Dudley as representative of community wants and said the moratorium would be obstructive to this.

“We launched PLAN Dudley in response to the community’s clearly expressed desire to reassess the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan,” Martin wrote. “To suspend this inclusive process would be counterproductive to our shared goal of unlocking the potential of key parcels in the neighborhood.”

Who’s PLANning Dudley?

Jackson contested the idea that PLAN Dudley genuinely responds to community demand, charging that the process occurred backward, with the BRA seeking to get approval for the initiative only after launching it.

“If there was actually a desire to solicit community voice, wouldn’t you have solicited voice prior to making a decision to create a special planning area?” Jackson told to the Banner. He previously said he was taken by surprise by the BRA’s initiative for Dudley Square, only learning of it during Mayor Martin Walsh’s January State of the City address — two months after Jackson kicked off his own planning meetings.

Currently, PLAN Dudley is in the midst of seven public workshops scheduled before the final plan presentation. The BRA’s Nick Martin said that residents’ voices are reflected.

“PLAN Dudley meetings have been well-attended, and the voices of residents are shaping the future of the community,” Martin wrote.

But Jackson and several other community members expressed doubts that these meetings have captured the neighborhood voice adequately.

Rodney Singleton, Roxbury resident and member of the Bartlett Yard Project Review Committee, told the Banner he attended several PLAN Dudley meetings and felt that the BRA had not brought out enough neighborhood residents.

“As a rule, the city is notoriously bad at getting information out to abutting communities that would be impacted by the development,” Singleton said. “If you haven’t figured out how to pull all those abutters in to talk about what’s coming, and what’s planned and haven’t engaged them to say, ‘What do you want?’ then you have a problem.“

Louis Elisa, president of the Garrison Trotter Neighborhood Association, attended two BRA meetings, one on Roxbury and one more widely on Boston.

“I don’t think they reached out to the community in general to let them know these things are taking place,” Elisa told the Banner. “The timing is not good. For most of the people in the community, especially in Roxbury, they work one to two jobs.”

According to the BRA website, the majority of PLAN Dudley meetings ran from 6 to 8 p.m. Elisa said 6 p.m. start times are difficult for many people, who return from work at 6:30 or 7 p.m. and who may have other commitments at home or in the community. Weekend times need to be offered, he said.

Too many

Several community members noted that both in Roxbury and across the city, there are many groups trying to achieve the same mission.

“Roxbury now has five events a night and they conflict,” Elisa said. He has not been able to attend Reclaim Roxbury meetings, which also have been scheduled for 6 to 8 p.m. “Everybody wants to do something for Roxbury now, because it’s the hot item. But the folks [in the community] who make the decisions, they only have so many activists and people who can attend.”

Often, people have to choose between attending meetings about visioning, public safety, public health, education and parcel developments, Elisa said. The multi-hour engagements can be difficult to manage for those who are not paid to attend, have work in the morning and have commitments at home, he added.

Jorge Martinez, co-chair of the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan Oversight Committee said that citywide, many organizations are holding their own planning meetings and that greater collaboration could produce faster results.

“We have some great organizations across the city, but what we need is more coordination and more resources so we can pull our act together,” Martinez told the Banner, “There’s a lot of meetings with a lot of the same people and we need to be better focused. … we need to not waste time.”

Singleton noted as well that many project review committees have been working in the communities on a smaller level for years and could be tapped for their accrued expertise and outreach abilities.

Reclaiming Roxbury?

Elisa said Reclaim Roxbury still has distance to go in regards to raising awareness of its meetings and make them easier to attend. He recommended included placing flyers around the community and at churches, and again, holding meetings at different times.

Still, Singleton said that Jackson’s Reclaim Roxbury meetings have more successfully engaged the community.

“The Tito [Jackson] meetings that I’ve gone to give some substance to what we’re going to do. Those meetings have generated a lot of good work,” he said.

Neighborhood Council

Jackson aims to reinstate an 18-member Roxbury Neighborhood Council. According to Alexandra Kahveci, Jackson’s policy director, temporary RNC members likely will be elected at the next Reclaim Roxbury meeting, scheduled for 6 p.m. on April 28 at Roxbury Community College. Jackson told the Banner that an election of longer-term members will happen in the fall.

“It is critical that there is a body that looks at all of Roxbury, the planning and zoning in that area,” Jackson said, “and that that body be made up of individuals specifically who are from the 12 sub-districts who are in Roxbury.”

Martinez agreed with the need for Roxbury to have a council. “Every neighborhood needs a council,” he said.