Today BGR releases Connecting Neighborhoods to City Hall. In this report, BGR examines the New Orleans draft master plan's proposal for citizen participation. It concludes that the proposed program does not fulfill the city charter’s directives with regard to neighborhood participation. Indeed, it risks diminishing, rather than enhancing, the neighborhood-level participation in planning and land use decisions envisioned in the city charter. The proposed structure would insert an extra layer of bureaucracy between the neighborhood and the City Planning Commission; it could give disproportionate weight to the views of certain institutions and undefined stakeholders; and, unless the planning district decided to devolve decision making on neighborhood-specific matters to the neighborhood level, it would give entities unaffected by a land use proposal a larger voice than that of the affected neighborhood.
