Title:Road to Recovery: An APA Chat with Samantha Harkins
رئیس APA کورت کریستینسن، FAICP، با سامانتا هارکینز، معاون شهردار شهر لنسینگ، میشیگان، در مورد راه بهبود و نقش اساسی برنامه ریزان در بازسازی اقتصاد و بازسازی جوامع گفتگو می کند. کورت و سامانتا در مورد بهبودی با توجه به اعتراضات اخیر که خواستار برابری و عدالت پس از قتل جورج فلوید در مینیاپولیس هستند، گفتگو می کنند. چگونه برنامه ریزی می تواند به عادلانه شدن تلاش برای بازیابی کمک کند؟ اولین چت با جان پورکاری را تماشا کنید: https://youtu.be/9L8GpYqYrBw
چت دوم با نماینده ارل بلومناور را تماشا کنید: https://youtu.be/9vLho2REUYg
قسمتی از متن فیلم: Hello and welcome i’m kirk christiansen president american planning association and i’m so glad you joined us for this new installment of a series of conversations for having with thought leaders about the road to recovery and the essential role of planning and moving our country and our communities forward local governments are under
Tremendous pressure being the front line of response to the current crisis a pandemic and protests has brought significant and unexpected costs an economic shutdown has sunken revenues even the ability to raise funds on the municipal market has been challenging locals will also be responsible for directing equitable economic recovery we
Have an obligation to build back better we can rebuild our economy to begin addressing our past injustice and inequality to ensure that this is this recovery provides inclusive opportunity for all those to prosper rebuilding and transforming communities to create a society that ensures safety health and prosperity and our chant our challenges
APA local leaders and planners together must confront today we will get a first-hand perspective on what cities are doing to reopen the economy and advance equity and opportunity and recovery I am delighted to be joined by Samantha Harkins as deputy mayor of Lansing Michigan samantha is at the
Center of this work she has been charged by Lansing mayor Andy Shore with leading economic recovery efforts she is also responsible for overseeing planning in the Lansing city and ensuring good planning is at the heart of equitable recovery deputy mayor Harkins has also been a national leader on planning and
Economic strategies for legacy cities or former thriving industry industrial cities now confronting the challenge of creating prosperity with slower economic and population growth Samantha welcome to the program you what a lovely introduction that it’s one of the nicest introductions I’ve ever had we try so let’s start out with the first
Question I wouldn’t focus it focus today on planning and recovery though let me start with an aspect of recovery that is critical right now we’ve seen protests all over the country addressing racial injustice including protests in Lansing Michigan you’ve been leading the recovery and reopening in Lansing and
Also overseen planning what do you see as links between how we plan for equitable inclusive places and our economic recovery from the pandemic it’s a great question and it’s we did a protest here in Lansing on Sunday days Thursday right I’ve lost all track of time during the network um but um
Earlier this week we had a protest that it took a little bit of a turn on Sunday and then we’ve had some smaller protests throughout the week and it’s been a you know it’s kind of perfect storm of events that people have been home for several months and then there’s this
Horrific killing of George fluid in Minneapolis and all of those things just have come together and this perfect storm I really think there’s an inextricable link between equitable and inclusive places and recovery Boban 19 has disproportionately affects a minority communities from both the standpoint of direct infection and
Economic weight here in Michigan Lane teen has been not hit as a hardest on whether it means but Detroit and some of our other way hard by Cobain and I think it’s also important to note that we aren’t all having the same pandemic I’m sitting here in my home without fear of
Losing my job without fear of losing my income that’s so many people in Lansing and other communities are having so it’s really important that as civic leaders we acknowledge that and we acknowledge that need to work with those who are hit hardest by Kovac and community organizations who serve them to ensure
That we’re hearing really hard to listen it seems like a chicken people we need to listen to the experiences of everyone here in Lansing in order to create equitable and inclusive spaces and then focus on going to recovery for everyone you know I’ll be honest with you I don’t
Have when I and I saw this question I don’t have all the answers question but I do know but we aren’t going to come to solutions about equity inclusivity in either our public spaces or inchoate recovery without listening and that’s hard to do when tensions are high I think there’s a there’s a
Propensity to possibly be a little defensive and to be you know talking about the things that we’ve done but you know again we’ve we have to be having these hard conversations and understand in City Hall we don’t have all the answers so the future of endemic recovery and creating these spaces
Really requires us to just listen yeah I know I think as planners we want to take action we want to make things better we try to make things better but what we need to do right now I think is is listen like you said listening will will
Help us understand better what is going on for the communities that we’re serving so let’s talk more about recovery APA has been calling for more federal support for local governments on the front lines of recovery facing extraordinary economic circumstances there are cities that you know potentially could go bankrupt because of
The loss of revenue how is your city been affected economically and socially and give us some sense of the scope of the city’s needs and situation so before Kovan hit we started working on a budget right if it be getting into your budget has to be presented to them
A city council by the end of March we did present a council a budget to the council by the end of March but it was partly because we first of all we were in a in January we had to do a budget amendment so we actually had some national challenges and agitate some
Life balance in January so already having financial challenges and then having kovat hit we know we are facing a significant enjoined back from kovat right now we’re not quite sure exactly what that how much that is going to be also I didn’t say this thank you APA for
Calling for more federal support because that’s critical and we you know we don’t have the resources you never know so thank you for that but we as a city we levy an income tax our income tax Ilene deadline is generally April 30th it was pushed back to July 31st so that income
Usually getting in these few months we haven’t got you were able able to get a tax anticipation loan to help us smooth over those ensuing months but we really don’t know what the impact is going to be on our income tax currently we brought in less than half what we
Usually do again we have another couple of months but you have a lot of people who’ve been unemployed we’re getting unemployment payments and there that is not so just the income tax so as of right now we know we’re going to have some kind of impact we are weirdly in
This given the tax anticipation know in a was a holding pattern but we’re actually doing from a cash flow perspective okay but I I think as we go into the fall and we understand the impact of this we’re really going to we’re really going to need federal
Support and and it’s we’re not going to be able to we and a lot of communities are not going to be able to get how did this on our own yeah I I kind of I totally agree with that and you know coming from originally coming from California where the cities
Rely on property tax and people rely on sales tax and gas tax that you know where people are driving or people aren’t spending as much really impacts how a local government is going to be able to move forward so I think it’s interesting in perhaps telling the
Planning and recovery are both in your portfolio what is it a conscious decision to connect those things and how are planners in Lansing leading recovery what’s the unique value of planning in Lancias approach to comprehensive recovery so I will say in my job description and kind of the jack-of-all-trades I’m not officially a
Planner but I like to pretend to be one because I will take you yeah who would thank you I know I’ll I’ve loved planning but all the department directors report to me so we started talking about recovery it really made sense that you know planning is underway
And recovery made sense as well next time we started our recovery team the things we started talking about what what does Lansing look like post coab in nineteen I said I don’t want to talk about recovery I’m gonna tie my reinvention let’s not use the word recovery let’s use the word reinvention
So our web page we’re putting together is reinvent Lansing all of our meetings are reinventing sets really we have an opportunity here to do work differently into a better and the retention is a multi-faceted process of which planning is the cornerstone we’ve been focusing on several areas we have
Economic reinvention for businesses and this is a you know we have a large stakeholder group here a Chamber of Commerce’s that the health and safety reinvention which is Health Department and then our chief administrative officer with how we’re going to reopen city buildings and what that looks like in the future
With social services group that’s been put together we have a work group from a number of different community organizations and our human relations and community services director a network what we’re calling natural and cultural cultural reinvention focusing really specifically on parks and open space the bio Parks director housing
Which is a significant issue for communities all across the country and you know I know that addiction prohibitions been put in place rightfully so and how does housing look after this so we have a partner organization Capital Area Housing Partnership has been who’s been leading that piece of it and then infrastructure
Design so our public service director and all of those areas are interesting but you know before the call Kurt we are talking about bike lanes and some of these cool things that’s what I think is just really super and sexy and for our infrastructure design team we’ve been
Looking at some of those kinds of ideas and one of the things we’ve been doing is how do we accommodate social distancing restaurants lots of people are talking about that we have this really great alley downtown that has been known as dumpster Holly there’s some dumpsters back there it’s really
Wide alley and we met down there a few weeks ago you know it all down there with our masks and we said what if we put some lights across and painted it move the dumpsters somewhere else and it’s behind all these restaurants we created and basically an outdoor food
Court Michigan has really lid rigid liquor laws so you wouldn’t be able to have cocktails out there but there’s actually legislation moving that would change that so we’re trying to take advantage of those kinds of opportunities and think differently about you know how do we look our corridors our neighborhoods in there
There’s open spaces and create cool things that but honestly we probably should have done before but this has really pushed us into that space yeah it’s it’s a time for reimagining and reinvention and it’s not so much that that we that we need to do that but I
Think we we actually do need to do it it’s it’s you know we tried and true things over and over again it’s not going to work anymore maybe now the next question you partnering with a PA previously with a focus on planning for slower growth and legacy cities
How do you legacy cities tackle recovery i will planning for recovery look different in these places yeah that’s an excellent question you know I think planning definitely in general looks different in legacy cities right we don’t have if you want to you know move your business to downtown Lansing we
Don’t have green space right you have to rehab an existing building which is already more expensive so operate in an urban where community is already challenging from a planning perspective in general and you know as you all know legacy cities do have different challenges our infrastructure is older
We have larger pension and retiree health care obligations in Lansing we have the largest number we have of seven hundred million dollars in retiree health care and pension obligations to retirees which is an extraordinary number and it takes a significant amount of budget our tax base has shifted to
Serving communities just like everywhere else so so we have that as our base and then we get hit by a pandemic and what’s next and yeah I think Cohen 19 as challenging as these last few months and really presents us in office you know D take it off the legatus legacy cities to
Rethink and attract people it’s awesome being online that it was a you know parking lot in a mall and they were like oh you if you could have nothing against any chain store restaurants it was a chain restaurant and it was you can sit in the parking lot on the mall I’m like
Sudden the parking lot the mall I mean I really think that it’s an opportunity for were legacy communities that have you know smaller and more walkable streets and and denser places to to really expand what they’ve done taking over an alley and making that look cooler and changing the way the
Sidewalks look and it really it’s an opportunity to attract people back to see some of the cool things that are happening in cities and again urban parks and public spaces and this is the opportunity for them to shine this is an opportunity to think differently about our parks different about our public
Spaces because we are all for the foreseeable future should be practicing social distancing so how do we how we utilize those public spaces and it’s really exciting so I do think the financial impact would be more extreme for us that’s a pretty much always is but I also think that the opportunities
Are great – and so as we’re talking about reinvention that’s something that I continue to remind people someone sort of starkly said to me last week we’re on the suburbs we could just go to a field I’m like where’s the fun in that let’s you know talk about the fun things
We could do downtown sir yeah exactly you know when we started to look for a place to relocate from Los Angeles after retirement you know Richmond we stayed in downtown Richmond and we we visited two or three times over the course of the last few years before we finally made a living we
Saw transformation happening and it wasn’t just the city it was people working together we have a university in the downtown Virginia common u Commonwealth University which has played a huge part in in kind of changing the fabric of the downtown and make it more walkable so yeah there’s things to work
With things partners legacy cities have a different set of circumstances and and things that they have to deal with so planning is essential to equitable recovery one of the reasons that planning is such as vital part of recovery is planning is potential to pursue transformational ideas and can make recovery more equitable more
Resilient and more sustainable do you see opportunities for creating transformational change in recovery oh I see so many opportunities and I love this question you know one of the things we do in Lansing and I hope we’re not alone is you know we work in silos quite
A bit and so from a neighborhood perspective from the organizational perspective we all kind of focus on our own little thing people aren’t talking to each other and one thing the pandemic did for us was water our community together to focus on comprehensive reinvention strategy across organizations across the community our
Chief innovation officer spearheaded a mayor’s unique epic the partners for business and nonprofit community and social services community and from that emerged it’s really cool one Lansing campaign and that was led by Ria’s led by our Capital Area United Way really helped those who are struggling most
Erinc Ovid and Co it isn’t here right now we have this set up so we can continue to I’m really focus on resources for people and in our capital region Community Foundation created a fund to help struggling nonprofits here in covent so for me it’s been you know as again as
Hard as things have been there’s been some really heartwarming moments during this time crisis you came together to think about next steps all the community across the entire city and and I think that’s created a long-term relationship with the organizations that well we mean we worked together in the past and had
Relationships before but it’s more of a strategic partnership moving forward and a strategic look at know who needs services who needs resources how do we provide these across the spectrum in a different way and then one thing I realized during Cowen’s didn’t become really apparent is that we are not going
To recover or reinvent Lansing alone see City Hall is not gonna do it nor should we do it alone this is a community effort we have to be open to creative ideas new ways of partnering I mean you know this it’s hard for government to be
Open to new ways of doing things we’re not known for always being the most innovative or or by the box I actually like to joke that I have a swear jar in my office for anyone who says you do it that’s because that’s what you’ve always
Done that you had to put money in the jar and what do you guys really feel I’m gonna have a big happy hour I may or may not invite our cabinet but how do we we will encounter resistance internally and I’ve already had as we’re talking about changing open spaces downtown staff
Who’ve been there a while if we do this this is hard you know no let’s think differently also again listen to what the community wants to and don’t just try to dry it drive change based on what we think they want listen to our business owners our neighbors and even
Catalyst to help change the way things have always been done you know it’s it’s kind of interesting of all of these things going on and how we how we deal with things it the city of Richmond has been working on their Comprehensive Plan Update and it dropped this week and
There’s a whole series of webinars and town hall meetings on a variety of topics it’s going to be interesting to see how this community then feeds back to what has been worked on for the last couple of years and see the come input we’re going to get because I think we’re
Going to get different input that I think they would have would have gotten if if we wouldn’t have been going through a pandemic and we wouldn’t be going through the civil unrest that we’ve been going through so it’s gonna be interesting times well I think just
To jump on that really quickly we have a mayor creator when he started a department of neighborhoods and citizen engagement to really focus on neighborhood engagement and I think it’s hard to take in feedback and make this it sounds easy but you know you have an
Agenda and a way you want to do things not agenda but you have no priorities and said you know if the community says I don’t like this priority I don’t want it it’s really hard to shift just I think and we have to do better about
That and I think this pandemic is really forcing that mm-hm so you’ve been on the front lines of relief response and now recovery what do you what do you need state and federal policymakers to do to help your efforts and not and just as importantly how can
A PA and the entire planning community support your efforts and similar recovery strategies across the country oh this is so important so I’m a recovering lobbyist I lobbied for about 10 years so very familiar in particular state government here in Michigan and we need state and local policymakers to
Understand state and federal that local government cannot do this alone and the you know the service provision of local governments is you know we’re the ones are gonna pick up your trash that you know when you’re flush your toilet it’s gonna go somewhere I mean these are the
Actions that impact everyday lives and we need them to appreciate that I know our state government is really struggling financially right now as well they had the consensus revenue estimating now there’s a couple weeks ago and there basics have a billion dollars in cuts in eight years so this
Is going to be a multi governmental level strategy and cities like lanes Dayton particularly legacy cities are going to work really hard to come out of this crisis so we need partnership we need patience and we need to put political rhetoric aside because this isn’t about politics this is about
Helping communities and people and APA and other organizations I mean your website is just testing all the resources I’ve been going there just so wonderful so continue to do those things help communities know that aren’t alone foster this community in this place where we can find on the
Ground partners and allies and really learn from one another because even just knowing we’re not the only ones and in know I have a friend is a planner in Jackson Mississippi and you know another small capital city very different from Lansing but she will they released their
Recovery plan and it was fantastic I tested her and I’m like Lisa Mia worked oh it was so good I don’t you know I would have used some of this and she did because that’s what we should be doing right learning from each other no not reinventing the wheel someone else
Another community does something wow that’s that’s Sharon and yeah I love Jackson Mississippi and they’re doing some really wonderful things there so I’d be interested in seeing that that recovery plan as well it’s awesome your team is fantastic that would be great so I just I want to thank you for your
Insight Samantha and I appreciate you taking the time to be with us today and sharing some of what’s happening in Lansing I think that there are important lessons for communities all across the country planning is essential in creating the equitable recovery we all need and thanks to all of you for
Joining us in this conversation a Pho resource for navigating the road to recovery you can ask access our other conversations with thought leaders and relevant resources at planning org I hope you’ll join me for future conversations in this series and we will continue to explore how planning can
Drive a just and equitable recovery and the essential role of planning in rebuilding inclusive economic opportunity and prosperity I encourage you to get involved with APA as an applicant in our advocacy Network and leaders in creating great communities for all thanks again Samantha thank you for having me You
ID: fG1C-NyTxrA
Time: 1592934089
Date: 2020-06-23 22:11:29
Duration: 00:22:24
