North 4th Street Corridor Negotiations in Albuquerque

Issue
In June 2006, the City of Albuquerque released a draft plan for redeveloping a four-mile stretch of the North 4th Street transit corridor. A contentious public debate immediately ensued as residents and merchants responded with conflicting concerns about the plan and the City’s planning process. Two public meetings with the City’s Land Use Facilitation Program revealed important differences in the groups’ visions for the area. Further, the City Director of Redevelopment had additional concerns about downzoning and various stakeholders’ opportunities to participate in the planning process. Following the City’s unsuccessful attempt to facilitate an agreement, the City Director of Redevelopment invited a consultant team from Consensus Builder to work with merchants and residents to assess and resolve the conflict.

History/Background
The product of a long history of haphazard development and redevelopment, the North 4th Street Corridor stretches from a dense, mixed-use community to a four-lane traffic corridor characterized by strip development, fast food restaurants, and automotive shops. Most of the corridor is lined with chain-link fences, driveways, and parking lots that provide security and easy access for merchants’ customers.

With hopes to create a more integrated transit corridor for businesses and residents, the City hired a reputable land use consultant to draft a new sector plan. An advisory committee of 12-15 city-appointed stakeholders provided initial advice through monthly meetings and two workshops on urban design. The consultants and city planners integrated these efforts into a draft revitalization plan. Although the planning process had included some stakeholder input, the plan’s release triggered strong reactions from additional stakeholders who felt they had been excluded from opportunities to participate or voice their concerns—whether through oversight, miscommunication, or ineffective public notice. A particularly contentious response came from the local Merchant Association, whose membership grew dramatically following the plan’s release.

Moreover, the planning process was not the only matter of controversy. Residents and merchants clashed over a basic vision for the corridor, and both groups had concerns over maintaining their lifestyles, businesses, and property values. In addition, the City’s Environmental Planning Commission (EPC) was concerned about the acrimonious disagreement; deficiencies with outreach and citizen participation in the drafting process; and potential litigation over down-zoning allegations.

In response to the growing divisiveness, the City’s Metropolitan Redevelopment Agency (MRA) sent the matter to the City’s Land Use Facilitation Program, which was charged with facilitating communication between project proponents and affected residents. An outside facilitator conducted two meetings, including a workshop session where participants cycled through groups discussing land use, transportation, character design, and traffic management. The meetings resulted in four areas of “near agreement,” but public feedback revealed mixed feelings about whether the process had moved the group forward or further entrenched existing views.

As a result of conflicting public testimony, the EPC was unwilling to move forward with approving the plan without further community consultation and agreement. When the Commission directed the MRA to work with the residents and merchants to resolve the disagreements, the MRA hired Consensus Builder, a planning and mediation firm with expertise in land use disputes, to conduct a conflict assessment and design a process for resolution.

Designing the Process
The Consensus Builder team began with a detailed assessment of stakeholders’ interests, concerns, and specific hopes for any future negotiations. The team met with merchants in small groups as well as conducted meetings and phone interviews with individual residents and an ad hoc resident committee. The team also met with the City’s MRA staff, as well as with planning consultants who had previously been involved in the project. After speaking with about 70 individuals, the mediation team prepared a conflict assessment summarizing the participants’ perspectives on the existing plan and proposing a framework for future negotiations, including participants’ input on potential ground rules, agendas, and issues for discussion. One of the clearest outcomes of the assessment was the parties’ strong interest in moving forward with negotiating a mutually agreeable plan.

The next phase of the process involved 16 intense mediation sessions: nine devoted to educating the participants and seven longer sessions devoted to reaching consensus on recommendations for the redevelopment plan. First, the residents and merchants each selected six representatives to sit at the negotiating table. They also selected six alternates who would attend each meeting to be prepared participate in the negotiations if necessary. Two members of the MRA staff, the director of the agency and the staff planner in charge of the project participated in the negotiations as well. All meetings were open to the public, and participating negotiators were charged with ensuring their constituencies understood and could contribute to the process. Additional ground rules for communication and collaboration were established during the group’s initial meetings.

The negotiations were structured as nine two-hour evening meetings and seven three-to-five-hour Saturday sessions. The evening meetings, often featuring expert presenters, focused on education and establishing a common understanding of issues such as new urbanism, design principles, and form-based zoning codes. The Saturday meetings were negotiation sessions during which the group discussed the planning and design issues identified during the initial conflict assessment.

Innovations and progress
A number of innovative strategies were critical to moving the negotiations from conflict to resolution. First, the group realized that an overlay zoning plan would allow them to consider new visions for the future of the corridor without forcing current property owners to immediately adopt new rules that could harm their businesses or property values. This strategy eased tensions as merchants saw that residents had no intention of harming their businesses.

A second challenge for the group was to achieve a shared understanding of the lengthy corridor’s current character. With the help of consulting firm Community By Design, the group used Google Earth technology to “fly over” the entire corridor. The visual image and the concurrent discussion of the corridor’s characteristics helped the group reach consensus on the corridor’s boundaries.

A third breakthrough occurred when the group shifted their conversation from disagreement over working design concepts to the participants’ main areas of interest—what the plan would look like and when it would happen. The lead negotiator for the residents suggested that the residents draft their ideal vision for the form-based code in the overlay plan and that the merchants draft the “trigger mechanisms” that would determine when a property owner needed to comply with the new code. Before the respective teams drafted the ideas, each side listened to the other side communicate their concerns and identify “sore spots” and “deal breakers” for the section they were about to draft. The two groups then drafted their respective proposals, which were then presented and discussed.

Reaching agreement
After months of negotiations, the residents and merchants reached agreement on the majority of their recommendations for the City’s plan. They created documents outlining guiding principles for the process and design, a plan for an overlay zone, trigger mechanisms, and recommendations for a 30% engineering design of the full corridor. One area of disagreement was a working design concept for the public right-of-way. In the end, each group drafted a separate, but very similar, concept for making public improvements for infrastructure and transit investments in the corridor.

The negotiating group’s work was compiled into a White Paper for presentation to the Environmental Planning Commission. Representatives of the merchants and residents worked with the mediation team to draft the paper, which the entire group enthusiastically approved. The White Paper described the group process, explained their recommendations for the plan, and suggested that the paper—and continued community engagement—guide the City’s implementation of their final plan.

Results
The EPC asked the City staff to redraft the plan to reflect the White Paper. The City created an initial redraft of the plan. Then a small group (composed of a lead negotiator from the residents and the merchants, the project manager from the MRA, the mediator, and two technical and design consultants from Community by Design) met weekly to make further revisions in the plan; afterwards, the lead negotiators reviewed the redrafted plan with their respective constituents. The public had an opportunity to review and comment on the plan before it was resubmitted to the EPC.

Following the resubmission, public testimony from merchants and residents strongly supported the plan’s technical approach and its shared vision. The EPC then made extensive editing suggestions to clarify the plan, and the team of consultants and negotiators finalized the work. The revisions were approved by the EPC in February of 2009, and the plan will be submitted to the City Council for approval in August 2009.

Lessons learned

• Building on overlapping interests rather than positions produced a process that let the merchants and residents each provide leadership on the issues they cared about most. The residents drafted their vision of what the corridor would look like, and the merchants drafted the “trigger mechanisms” for when the residents’ vision would be implemented.
• Developing a common language for complex land use issues and technical terms prevented conflict based on assumptions or misinformation. The educational evening meetings provided consistent opportunities for shared learning about topics the group identified as especially important or challenging.
• Using Google Earth visualization technology allowed the negotiators to build shared and holistic understanding of a large-scale space.
• Forming the negotiating teams using constituency-based representation recognized that neither of the conflicting groups was monolithic. Each group was composed of people with different geographic and historic relationships to the corridor, as well as different understandings and experiences of redevelopment.

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