Over many months throughout the planning process, we had asked the committee and the DPR to broadly advertise the presentation of the plan, as they had done for the input sessions back in the summer and fall of 2007. Although several of us had signed up to receive future email alerts at those planning sessions, we had never received any emails from DPR about the future of the Park. We brought this to the attention of the PCAC at the February meeting, and the Committee extracted a promise from DPR to send an email blast to their list before the next PCAC meeting. That email did eventually make its way to some of our email boxes --less than 24 hours before the meeting.
By its actions, DPR has made clear that public participation in the redesign of Fort Washington & Upper Riverside Parks is not a priority. How else to explain that the public scoping session for the plan, for which we had been waiting for notice since the beginning of the fall, was held on short notice in the Park on one of the coldest days of the year, 3 days before Christmas?
At the March 3rd PCAC meeting, we were stunned when the Stantec presentation revealed that the DPR's "compromise position" was to reduce the width of hardscaping in one small area of the Park by a single foot. We ended the meeting by requesting that DPR make the Stantec March 3rd plan public by posting it on the web as they had done with the November plan . They said that they would "look into it."
We predicted that the DPR would not post the plan on the web, so we were forced to take what little we had of it to the public ourselves. We showed you a piece of the plan in the Park and on the streets of our neighborhoods, and we learned that the plan was as unpopular with you as it was with us. Over 1,200 of you signed our petition to Community Board 12 to send the plan back to the DPR. On March 24th, CB12 did send the plan back to the PCAC on a technicality, but our message was heard.
And we were right. DPR never made the March 3rd Stantec plan public. In fact, we learned at the March 24th meeting that a copy of the plan was not even available to CB12 members, who were supposed to have voted on it that night. It is shocking that the Community Board members would allow an issue on their agenda to vote on a plan that was unavailable to them. We tried to get a copy of the plan from Stantec, but they referred us back to DPR. DPR told us that all information had to be released by the borough office. So we sent an email to Steve Simon, the Manhattan Chief of Staff for DPR. Here is the text of the letter:
March 25, 2009
In order to answer several questions posed to me by CB12 members after the presentation of our petition last night, I would like to refer to the Stantec Powerpoint Presentation made at the last Parks Committee meeting. We have politely asked at the last two monthly Parks Committee meetings that the current proposal be made public online, as was the initial proposal. I was stunned last night to be told that no copy was even available to Board members.
I called [the Stantec guy], who had previously told me to call him if I needed any information, at Stantec today, and he referred me to [the guy] at the Parks Department. [Parks Department guy] told me that any release of information had to come from the borough office, and he referred me to you.
Not to be rude, but I truly don't understand why a presentation that was already made to the public in an open forum and which can be emailed with the click of a button is still unavailable weeks after our polite request and after the Community Board had already been scheduled to vote on a resolution approving it.
Could you please facilitate my receipt of a copy of this presentation? Thank you in advance."
While neither Mr. Simon nor anyone at DPR has gotten back to us, we did hear from a Board member who we cc'd on the email. Here is an edited excerpt:
"Apparently, Steve just got the full thing in e-mailable format yesterday afternoon [the day of the CB12 meeting]. He tried to send it, but it is so large it bounced back from the server. The CB 12 has part of it on a flash drive, but the whole thing wouldn't fit."
Indeed, PowerPoint presentations are very large. And besides, not everyone has Powerpoint. And it's expensive. You'd think that people who were on a design team would consider the features most important to the loyal users of their product. Well, Microsoft did. At least by my old 2004 version. So if any of you encounter this problem in the future, here is a tutorial of 3 simple ways to get your MS PowerPoint presentation onto someone else's display. All three methods here have the advantage of being platform neutral, which Powerpoint sometimes isn't. If you are not interested in the tutorial, skip to the end:
1. POST IT ON THE WEB
Under the "FILE" menu, select "Save as Web Page". PowerPoint will generate a folder/directory with all of the necessary files and a ".htm" file. Upload both onto the public space of your web server, and send the filepath for the .htm file to anyone you want.
2. CONVERT EACH PAGE TO A JPEG
Under the "FILE" menu, select "Save as..". In the new window, use the pull-down "Format" menu to select "JPEG". PowerPoint will generate a JPEG file for each slide in your presentation. JPEGs are generally small enough to send via email, and you can send each page individually if you need to.
3. CONVERT THE PRESENTATION TO A PDF FILE
This little utility lives in different places on different versions of PowerPoint. On some, it's under the "Print" menu. Under the "FILE" menu, select "Print". In the new window, Click the "PDF" button and select "Save as PDF". Almost everyone has Adobe Reader, and it's free! PDFs can be emailed and uploaded to the web.
So, we still haven't been able to get a copy of a presentation that was made public back on March 3rd, and we aren't holding our breath. We hope that the DPR will make a new presentation at the April 13th PCAC meeting that addresses the issues highlighted in our petition and our presentation. Some Community Board 12 members have told us that is their hope, too. We will ask for a copy of any new presentation in advance, but we won't hold our breath for that, either. We hope to see some of you there. Details will follow.
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