GMMC Final Funding Meeting

The GMMC met for the final time in this fund­ing round last night at the Cleve­land Foun­da­tion. We had deli­cious East­ern Euro­pean food from North Coast, rec­om­mend­ed by Sokolowski’s. I par­tic­u­lar­ly liked the stuffed cab­bage. And I hate cab­bage. Bob Brown from the Cleve­land Plan­ner’s office spoke to us about the update to the city plan and gave an overview of the types of activites that the office focus­es on. It seems that they have input in a lot of dif­fer­ent areas like safe­ty and per­mit­ting, but not as much pow­er, except in their own lit­tle fief­dom. A rep­re­sen­ta­tive from Voic­es and Choic­es also spoke for a bit about their plan.

This was a tough crowd for her to speak to. Twen­ty com­mu­ni­ty activists who’ve spent the last six weeks sniff­ing out the prob­lems in grant pro­pos­als were quick to ques­tion the effi­ca­cy of the pro­gram. The V&C process appears to engage this work­flow: Gath­er peo­ple to voice their con­cerns -> Have com­mu­ni­ties deter­mine pri­ma­ry con­cerns -> Have com­mu­ni­ties deter­mine pos­si­ble solu­tions for those con­cerns. The key ques­tions cen­tered on what is going to be done with this data? Who is going to imple­ment the solu­tions? Appar­ent­ly V&C is going to give the results to three dif­fer­ent col­leges, which was­n’t very sat­is­fac­to­ry to most of us, since col­leges aren’t pol­i­cy mak­ers. When we final­ly got to the bare bones of the sit­u­a­tion we dis­cov­ered that V&C wants peo­ple from the com­mu­ni­ty to take the final step on enforc­ing imple­men­ta­tion.

While I think it is fine that they want com­mu­ni­ty folks to do the work to improve their com­mu­ni­ties, it does leave a sour taste in my mouth that all V&C, with all its mon­ey, only focus­es on get­ting peo­ple togeth­er to talk and not in pro­vid­ing tech­ni­cal assis­tance to facil­i­tate the solu­tions they want us to give them.

Then we had a frank dis­cus­sion about the Con­flict of Inter­est pol­i­cy since some of the com­mit­tee mem­bers were won­der­ing what con­sti­tut­ed an “indi­rect ben­e­fit.” The argu­ment could eas­i­ly be made that any fund­ing that ben­e­fits a neigh­bor­hood can con­sti­tute an indi­rect ben­e­fit. The upshot of this dis­cus­sion was that Joel is going to revise the pol­i­cy to make it a bit more spe­cif­ic.

We fund­ed near­ly 50% of the grant pro­pos­als we received.