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In attendance: bht, Jason, Asa, Emily, Amelia, Lupin, Neil, Ross, David, Caleb, Justin

bht summarizes the intentions of this first meeting:

• revisit the Albina Plan
• Albina Plan is basically law vs. Boise Plan which is less official, more like a neighborhood aspiration
• There are also Historic codes to take into consideration

Group go-around about what we all expect from this meeting:

• meeting with Mississippi Lofts was not productive
• having a common vision about the neighborhood can give us the opportunity for influence on new developments
• maybe come up with a new/updated Boise Plan to present to prospective developers
• this group can bring more power to the neighborhood
• a committee can better serve the neighborhood requests about development
• address issues of gentrification in Boise
• talk about triple bottomline approach to development: economic – environmental – social
• we can’t get everything we want from developers, but we can get some things.
• come up with a holistic list of neighborhood desires and proposals for how to get the things we want
• more cultural/economic diversity represented in businesses
• outreach to neighborhood about development
• make available the tools that let us know what is within our power (ie: ONI resources, NECN contacts, City Planning office)
• facilitate bridges between developers / business community / residents
• empower as many voices in the community as possible
• add some input from the formal aspects of urban design
• personal involvement in creating the future of our neighborhood
• form a database of developments for public access
• research the Albina Plan – individuals take on small bits of it and bring it back to the group at large

Agenda items:

• survey to pass out to residents bordering new development in the neighborhood
• mission statement / statement of purpose
• public database of all current and prospective developments

Discussion points for the future:

• field trip to the planning office in order to gather materials/information
• multilingual resources
• Albina Plan study group – maybe once a month use meeting for study group and once a month use meeting for general discussion
• issue about lots being split into 25x100
• development of Williams & Vancouver
• Mississippi Lofts

Mission Statement:

• maybe it should be more of a statement of purpose?
• could we use the online forums to discuss this?
• no, they’re broken
• Jason has a friend who might be able to fix them
• are we a committee that will be discussing all things related to the land (including greenspaces?) no.. we’ve talked about setting up a separate greenspace committee
• maybe we can do a go around, throwing out words that we would like to see included in a purpose statement:
• education, outreach, facilitation, jobs, equity, sustainability, sense of community, livability, economic diversity, inclusiveness, affordability, vision, Boise, fun, dynamic, realistic, pragmatic, consensus, empowerment, accountable, participatory, neighborhood values
• we could use some words from this list to form a survey – pass out a list of words to residents and ask them to build statements off of them…
• that sounds like too much work?
• maybe use the ‘word surveys’ for the greater BNA
• for now we will just email the words to everyone in this group and then folks can work on statements individually

Mississippi Lofts survey:

• purpose would be to gather an idea of what neighbors want in regards to the Miss Lofts development
• responsibility of BNA to reach out to the residents
• residents want to feel part of a process
• there is a stigma attached to the BNA for some people, so maybe we shouldn’t rep that group
• instead of abandoning the BNA, let’s just try to build a better rep
• can we write a survey that could be used for any development and word it in a way that allows people to be specific?
• let’s be careful about the wording – we don’t want to mislead people into thinking we can make huge change
• maybe if we all raise our voices we can make change?
• we need to find out a timeline for the Miss Lofts
• we are the goals for the survey? – just to have people’s voices down on paper
• neighborhoods can do their own master planning (?)
• we should have developers involved in drafting the questions
• we could do a survey for the “Mississippi Ave corridor” as a whole
• developers might feel defensive unless they are involved in some way – we should ask Ben Kaiser, Kurisu’s and Miss Lofts for input
• we shouldn’t focus on just one development
• maybe take note of demographics of those who respond to survey
• ask people to rate a series of “values” in order to guage what types of people are responding
• could we redo the survey asking what types of businesses people want to see on the street?
• how should we distribute? door-to-door asking question, or paper handouts
• possibly better responses from minority/low-income folks if it is done in person vs. white, middle-class written responses --- we could use both methods?
• involve youth in future surveys
• Amelia can look around at PSU for dot surveys

For the next meeting:

• individuals will work on survey questions and purpose statements
• Asa will begin to work on database of developments
• Amelia is a good resource to call on when we need more hands