Ideas offered for boundary, structure changes for Frederick neighborhood advisory councils
Frederick's neighborhood advisory council system could see significant changes designed to generate more community engagement and improve communication with city officials.
One proposed change is volunteer liaisons to communicate with the city about neighborhood issues. Changes to the number of neighborhood councils and boundaries for them could also be considered.
A committee formed in 2023 to revamp Frederick's neighborhood advisory council system outlined its recommendations in a public meeting Feb. 27.
Currently, there are 12 neighborhood advisory councils. Each is supposed to provide a forum for people to communicate with the city about their neighborhood, according to the city website.
Each council represents a different part of the city.
The NACs were originally created in 2002 and were supposed to hold monthly meetings.
However, the councils each have differing levels of participation and engagement, City Council President Katie Nash said in an interview on Wednesday.
Some meet quarterly, some meet more often, and some hardly ever meet, she said.
'Just yesterday at a NAC 7 meeting, we had a gentleman — he's been a resident in the city for 40 some years — ask what the NAC program even is,' NAC 7 Coordinator David Firman said in an interview on Wednesday.
NAC coordinators are in charge of helping to organize each individual NAC.
The reason for the meeting Feb. 27 was to gather input on potential changes to the number of and boundaries for the NACs.
However, the meeting was the first time many NAC leaders heard the Ad Hoc Neighborhood Engagement and NAC Committee's proposals to improve engagement and communication efforts, NAC 7 Coordinator Missy Conner said.
Conner said she has participated in her local NAC for around nine years.
'I was very impressed by the amount of work the committee had put into it,' she said in an interview on Wednesday.
One of the things that used to help drive participation at NAC meetings was the Frederick Planning Department's community outreach meetings, Conner said.
The outreach meetings used to be presented before each NAC to hear feedback from the community on new building developments that affect an area, Conner said.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, individual outreach meetings with each NAC stopped in favor of a single monthly outreach meeting for new developments across the city, she said.
One of the proposals outlined by the ad hoc committee was to bring back the community outreach meetings at a local level and allow liaisons of the NACs to attend planning meetings earlier in the development process.
The proposals also called for:
• Each NAC to appoint a volunteer liaison dedicated to communicating with the city
• A board of the volunteer liaisons to meet regularly, discuss NAC engagement and relay relevant information from the city to the NACs
• Each NAC to maintain pages and share local information on social media
• The city to provide funding to advertise for NAC meetings via signs, newspaper ads and more
• A city official to post agendas and minutes for NAC meetings on the city website
• A city official to disseminate the concerns of the NACS to the city
Overall, the proposed ideas are meant to update a system instituted when the city was much smaller, ad hoc committee member Gayle Petersen said.
'It's currently not an organized system, and it's not representative of a city [approaching] 100,000 people,' Petersen said.
The liaisons added by the proposed system are meant to improve communication between the city and the NACs, Petersen said.
However, ad hoc committee member Lance English said the proposed changes added a layer of unnecessary bureaucracy.
The NACs should instead be consolidated and streamlined, and volunteers should not have more work added to their plates, he said.
The then-Board of Aldermen approved a charter change in September that mandated the body have five district representatives and two at-large representatives, a change from its previous five at-large members.
The new districts for council members to represent were approved by the City Council in February.
English said the number of NACs should be reduced and their boundaries should align with the City Council districts.
Currently, the city has one employee dedicated to communicating with all 12 NACs — Chowan Brightful, the city's community engagement specialist.
'The whole idea of reducing the number of NACs was to relieve pressure on the city liaison,' English said.
City Council Members Donna Kuzemchak and Nash both said they are not currently in favor of further expansions to the city's communications department to account for communication difficulties with the NACs.
The communications department has grown in recent years, and the city still has not solved some of its communications issues, Kuzemchak said.
Nash, who attended the Feb. 27 meeting, said the purpose of the ad hoc committee was not to draw up boundaries for the NACs to align with the districts, but to find ways to improve the NAC system in general.
That could mean changing the boundaries of the NACs, but not necessarily, Nash said.
All of the proposals are just ideas, Petersen said, and she welcomes feedback.
Nash said she would like to have a change to the NAC system finished by the end of the current City Council term in November.
The City Council Government Operations Committee will have a discussion of NAC boundaries under the new legislative districts in a 2 p.m. meeting on Thursday at Frederick City Hall, according to its agenda.
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