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March 19, 2007
The Motion carries, but what does it say?
A closer examination of what went on after the presentation of the Department of Transportation's plan to convert 6th & 7th Avenues in Park Slope to one-way thoroughfares
By Kevin Burget
Filmmaker, WideIris.net
Park Slope, Brooklyn
BrooklynPapers.com posted a nice upbeat video of the Community Board 6 Traffic and Transportation Committee meeting, but having more footage from that meeting might be useful. There were many good speeches with politicians going emphatically on the record. However, more importantly, none of the triumphalism of the Brooklyn Paper's piece made its way into the single most important consequence of the meeting — the written Motion that becomes the salient part of the record.
It turns out this Motion didn't, as The Brooklyn Paper reports, "vote the proposal down." It said the proposal requires "further study."
HOW THE PRESS GOT IT WRONG
This wasn't the impression given to those in attendance. The proposer of the Motion did actually say "we ask that the DOT [Department of Transportation] withdraw this proposal at this time; there are many questions, we want to get a lot of data." But when the meaning of the Motion was unclear to some who spoke up in the house, the Meeting Chair recapped by saying the Motion "is basically, to withdraw this proposal for 6th and 7th." This clarification met with huge applause in the end, as people did take it to be an unequivocal rejection, or statement of an intention to reject the DOT proposal at the next meeting.
The text of the motion that came out of the meeting, it turns out, makes no such intention clear, and may be reflecting the idiosyncratic bias of the motion's writer, which was neither in accord with unanimous opinion in the room, nor indeed with the definition given by the Meeting Chair. This is not a subtle distinction, as sending it back to the DOT for more study implies that people had lingering questions that were unanswered, and therefore could not decide, up or down, on the proposal.
The very purpose of this meeting was for the DOT to make a proposal and for people to ask questions. The proposal was made, all the local politicians asked questions and then gave their impressions, uniformly negative. No one asked questions about the proposal that the DOT said it could not answer at the time. There simply were no more questions, no lingering doubts.
While clearly people had much to say further against the plan and were forestalled by this precipitous calling of a Motion, all were eventually satisfied by the explanation that the Motion meant CB6's rejection of the plan to convert 6th and 7th to one-way avenues in Park Slope.
It is inaccurate and spurious of the author of that Motion to have written something less definitive. It misrepresents the community, the "ayes" of the Board Members present, and it now misleads the community at large.
I'd go so far as to say it's even a loophole for the DOT, which can go back and "study the issue" some more and come back with the very same recommendation, only now they can say they listened to the community. I do hope I'm over thinking this, but the wording of this Motion in no way says CB6 will reject this Plan, and I hope it can be corrected and a New Motion raised at the next meeting that reflects the truly universal opposition to this plan by the Park Slope community.
Footage of the meeting excerpt in question:
Wide Iris (QuickTime)
YouTube (Shockwave Flash)
Posted by lumi at March 19, 2007 8:07 AM