Citizens' voices finding an ear

For a long time, Philadelphia was a place where the role of the citizen got reduced to shouting "No!" - after the inside players emerged from their confabs and decreed what would be.

If residents had some money, they could hire a lawyer. If not, they were free to lie down in front of a bulldozer. Asked recently what his neighborhood group was good at, a civic leader replied: "We stop stuff."

But what about the notion of asking citizens what they think before decisions get made? What about inviting them to ask "What if?" or "Why not try this?"

The thinking on high used to be: No way. Why bother?

While this attitude has hardly been banished (see: casinos, Foxwoods), things, they are a-changin'.

Consider:

After botching the job the backroom way, then-Mayor John F. Street in 2006 initiated a bold process of civic input to craft a new plan for the central Delaware riverfront. Thousands attended forums to help the PennPraxis team design a riverfront vision, which was rolled out last fall to loud ovations. Andrew Altman, the city's new planning/development czar, said he decided to take the job after being wowed by that PennPraxis revival meeting last fall.

The City Planning Commission has undertaken two energetic efforts to gather citizen input to shape two proposals: a GreenPlan Philadelphia for the city's parks and open spaces, and Imagine Philadelphia forums on the city's long-overdue rewrite of its comprehensive plan.

What was the first thing new Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey did? He held a set of town meetings in neighborhoods.

Mayor Nutter has embraced the citizen-driven Great Expectations, a project of The Inquirer and the University of Pennsylvania. He asked us to monitor and grade his first year in office. Great Expectations is now in the middle of a set of neighborhood forums at which City Council members are responding to the project's Citizens Agenda for Philadelphia's Future. Next forum is tomorrow at 6:30 p.m. at the Perzel Community Center in Mayfair. To sign up for a forum, go to www.greatexpectations07.com.

Finally, last week, new city schools CEO Arlene Ackerman's first pledge to the people of Philadelphia was this: She would aggressively solicit input from parents and taxpayers. She would, in other words, try to avoid the mistakes of defensiveness and secrecy she made in previous jobs - ones also made by Paul Vallas and the School Reform Commission here.

Citizen activism and deliberation are nothing new. There's always a buzz at the grassroots in Philly. But it often has been reduced to wishful thinking, to vision statements lobbed over the moat toward an indifferent City Hall.

What seems different now is that city government actually seems eager to receive the signals the citizenry is sending.

This makes me happy. With The Inquirer's Citizen Voices program, and now the Great Expectations project, I've toiled in the vineyards of citizen dialogue for a dozen years now. Working with dialogue expert Harris Sokoloff of the Penn Project for Civic Engagement, Citizen Voices has convened hundreds of forums, all with this aim: helping citizens find a more informed, effective voice.

We've tried to supplant the bad theater of pretend civic engagement - you know, leaders on a stage casting furtive looks at their watches as advocates parade to a microphone for disconnected bits of bluster. We try for techniques of true citizen-to-citizen engagement that produce useful input to leaders.

Doing this in a hardball political town, we've heard plenty of snickers, seen lots of eyes rolling. What's kept us going has been the public's reaction. After one PennPraxis event last winter, a middle-aged gentleman in a windbreaker came up to Sokoloff, who'd led the forum.

"I've lived in this city all my life," he said with emotion, "and this is the first time anybody ever asked me what I thought. Thank you."

He speaks for many.

Civic dialogue is not an automatic win. If leaders invite dialogue only as a tactic to get the public "to let off steam," with no intention of altering their predetermined grand plan, that sham can be worse than no dialogue. Leaders should vow to listen only if they mean it.

On the other side, citizens also must be willing to listen and learn. Citizens are experts on what it's like to live with problems at ground level, but not on the hard choices leaders face or innovative policy ideas. Often, citizens' first reaction to a new idea is fear. Smart leaders use dialogue to learn how to frame their proposals in language that speaks to citizen values, rather than flying 30,000 feet above.

Leaders usually shun civic dialogue because it seems slow, risky and a ceding of the power they fought so hard to get.

But what's slower? Taking a little time to shape a plan than earns civic trust and lasting buy-in, or just ramming it through - only to be met by chanting protesters and lawyers with their meters running?