Freeway Fighters:Reconnecting the City

all right i'm gonna go ahead and get started uh welcome everyone to on the park bench a public square conversation brought to you by the congress for the new urbanism on the park bench presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in new urbanism and allied industries providing an opportunity for the audience to engage in real time this webinar series is a platform for senior members to engage debate and collaborate on pressing issues of the day if you have thoughts or ideas you can share your thoughts on on the park bench at www.tinyurl.com otpb feedback and join us for our upcoming webinars uh next week will be our second webinar in our freeway fighter series uh freeway fighters pushing back against freeway expansions is on july 12th at 12 pm eastern and features freeway fighters from shreveport louisiana milwaukee wisconsin and southern indiana opposing freeway expansions that damage their cities and towns and regions they will discuss strategies and what campaigns can learn from one another when a planned freeway threatens to tear community apart and you can register for that at cnu.org resources slash on the park bench and now for today's webinar so first we have scott townsend he is an architect and planner that has a passion for invigorating neglected and underserved communities neighborhoods and building through collaborative design planning processes he and his team have created mixed-use adaptive reuse at affordable housing environments and neighborhoods and have won awards for them at the local regional and national levels scott is the founder of the albany riverfront collaborative which formed a little over a year ago he is married to his lovely wife sarah and together they have five children who are now wonderful young adults we also have sean haney he is the director of communications for rethink 35 originally from new jersey he moved to austin texas five years ago and joined rethink 35 originally as a volunteer in 2021 and we have scott banjukian he is an urban designer by day and community activist by night with degrees in planning and architecture he is a passion he is passionate about adapting our cities for the challenges of climate change housing affordability and social justice as part of that he studied living i-5 for his graduate thesis at the university of washington and today is a it is a real project with growing momentum and i'm lauren mayer communications manager at cnu and i wanted to give a little background on the campaigns that are going to be featured today the albany riverfront collaborative engages the complete community in the creation of an equitable sustainable beautiful forever vision and the initial iterative steps towards this vision the arc will forge the robust civic partnerships necessary to nurture a river connected and sustaining community with a vibrant and interdependent economy culture and landscape rethink 35 is an all-volunteer grassroots campaign aimed at stopping the texas department of transportation's plan to expand i-35 up to 20 lanes through austin they are recruiting community support to convince local leaders to demand exploring alternate community proposals their proposals include rerouting the interstate around the city using existing highway facilities and redeveloping the current i-35 right-of-way as an urban boulevard through the city lid i-5 with a skirt with scarce land and a booming population downtown seattle has few options for creating new public spaces besides living i-5 and building off the success of freeway park that park opened on july 4th 1976. the current grassroots effort began in 2015 and achieved a milestone in 2020 with a feasibility study that provide that proves living more of the concrete canyon is possible the lid i5 group is working with government officials and a local coalition to chart the next steps so we will start off with a brief presentation from all three presenters followed by moderator questions we will then do an audience q a so be sure to use the q a function to ask your questions as they occur to you and with scott can you please start us off with telling us a little bit more about the albany riverfront collaborative first of all um welcome to everybody and uh thank you for inviting uh me and the albany riverfront collaborative to this great discussion um i just want to start off by saying i'm really looking forward to hearing from scott and the seattle movement and sean in austin so it's a it's really nice to be uh part of this what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna start off with a video that we uh put together that's just a few minutes and uh i want to give credit to darren branski and dan conley who uh put this together with uh the help of a lot of people involved uh and a fun piece of trivia that started off as we were honored to be selected to be uh at the urban cinema in poland uh for the un world urban forum it was it was featured there and it was a the longer video not this one so i encourage anybody to go and take a look at if you want on our on our website but with that what i'm going to do is i'm going to share a screen and i'm going to show you our video if i can find it oops and just want to make sure we're all set up like so many cities across the united states albany new york built massive highways in the heart of downtown over 7 000 people were removed for the construction of the highway and the state government office complex the empire state plaza since then albany's population has shrunk by almost 25 percent and it has become evident that albany's highways are overbuilt cities are interesting places because they have vibes and albany's vibe is an odd mix of these huge towering bridges that if you're on the street are overwhelmingly belittling currently 787 cuts albany off from the hudson river and severs downtown from inner city neighborhoods the albany riverfront collaborative has taken the first serious consideration of the future of this highway and has helped our community visualize what 787 could look like if it were transformed into a boulevard and as someone who's an architect a designer you know we always reflect and look back at work of other designers architects city planners and we learn what works and what has not worked and and i think those planners who laid out 787 if they had the opportunity of 2020 they may say hey we could have done this differently the albany riverfront collaborative now joins over 60 other movements across the country to transform inner city highways to boulevards there's a lot to this project obviously it's a big complex project we pulled together a group of urban designers and concerned citizens and business people and people in the community and leaders what we created was something that says it certainly can be this and we got we're trying to help people to get beyond looking at what's there and looking at what the future could hold and we all need to start getting on that bandwagon that what is there is not a matter of if it will be gone this matter when it will be gone the best thing about design is when you design for the people you're designing for we've been speaking with neighborhood associations we're doing community meetings coming up and the focus of those meetings is not to say here's what we're planning for you but to say here's an opportunity to have an impact on reconnecting your community to other communities and to the riverfront and what would you like to see that be there's no way to do that without involving the communities albany is not alone when you look at a city they're complex they're but the first ingredient to any city is people well hopefully that three-minute video gives you a good overview of what we're doing and obviously a lot of people that are on this call and looking in have probably not been to albany albany is a the capital of new york obviously it's about to give you a little bearings is about two and a half hours north of new york city we're about three hours west of boston uh it's a central area but as video shows that we we have we have shrunk over time and when this was done this was done during the robert moses uh time and it was it was it was way overbuilt as we know and i'm talking to the preachers of the choir right now and so what we decided to do is the tough part about our challenge every every place is really challenging is that um we needed to um get everybody on board because the city of albany has a state capital on it and the state capital tends to hover over everything so we wanted to make sure that we got a lot of momentum what we did is we've been together for about a little over a year now and we worked behind the scenes and got everybody together and created a big collaboration all of these people that were thought leaders and community leaders and people that were really concerned and we made sure we didn't launch before we were ready we wanted to get everything in order between the renderings between all the data collection that we had to do and then we came out ahead of it because the one thing that we've learned and seen is that and it's it's local but it's probably true universally is that what ends up happening at times is that you uh you come out and say that you're gonna do something and it's easy to shoot it down if you don't have anything backing it up so um that's what we really did for about six months we stayed behind the scenes and then we came out launched everything fully visualized and fully thought out data wise and we had at that time we had a little bit over 30 members and collaborators now we're over 60 but we have hundreds of people supporting us and working with us and thousands of people working behind the scenes and we're blessed because upstate new york rochester and syracuse are are progressive and so the the ethos of the politics of new york is to get these done so we're we're blessed by that so like i said earlier i'm looking forward to hearing from scott and sean on the other cities and i'll leave it at that i know there will be some q and a's and i'm looking forward to that so thank you thank you scott all right uh sean if you want to talk a bit about rethink 35 please yeah thanks lauren um thank you everyone for being here um i'm shawn haney i am the director of communications for rethink 35 we're based in austin texas i'm going to go ahead and share my screen and share with you a little bit of history about i-35 in austin a little bit of information about the i-35 expansion project that we're opposing and a little bit about the rethink 35 vision that we want to bring to our city [Music] all right this is us we are rethink 35 we're an all volunteer grassroots organization based in austin texas that just started about two years ago we did not start as this big robust organization at first um it started with a vision we're just a bunch of local neighbors who you know didn't like what we were seeing going on with a highway expansion and we all have a common vision for um wanting a better city for ourselves and it just started there and took off um so at the end our proposal we'd love to see i-35 turn into a boulevard which is not exactly a radical proposal for austin because back in the 20th century where a noisy interstate is was a boulevard it was called east avenue it was this wide tree-lined street that had open lawn areas the community would gather there local colleges and high schools would have their graduation ceremonies in the middle and it was just a big asset to the city it wasn't made for cars it was designed for people now unfortunately east avenue did have a part in some of austin's uglier part of its history back in 1928 austin introduced their city plan which redlined people of color onto the east side of the city using east avenue as the dividing line even though it was divisive on paper in person east avenue was still a welcoming place where both sides of the city could come together however in the 1950s the texas freeway commission which is now known as txdot started construction of a highway that later became known as i-35 down the wide right-of-way of the boulevard which is now today a divisive interstate highway that is impossible to cross and it just further dug into that scar the racial scar that divided the city now over almost 70 years later traffic is terrible um austin has grown way bigger than it ever was in the 1950s so instead of reworking that txdot has unveiled a plan which they claim will alleviate traffic by expanding the interstate lanes and frontage roads to this 20 lane behemoth that you see here right smack dab in the center of the city we know that simply adding lanes is not going to work time and time again we've seen highway expansions including i-10 in houston which they expanded to over 26 lanes in 2011 and traffic has increased not decreased basically this is a 20th century plan for a 21st century city the expansion would increase the existing footprint of the highway and require eminent domain to demolish over 200 businesses and housing units including affordable housing and this is in the midst of a city's housing crisis and of course a climate crisis what is the rethink 35 proposal well first the plan that txdot is proposing doesn't have to stand there are already existingly built highways that run around the city not through it as it is in already 14 other cities in texas our plan is to take it up a notch and explain this bleak polluting highway with a human-centered tree-lined urban boulevard like you see here instead of having 20 lanes of cars that are impossible to cross we could have maybe two or four lanes of cars in addition to rapid bus lanes bike lanes wide sidewalks and tree-lined boulevard space so as an organization it's going to take a lot to get to that point however in the two years we've grown a ton and we've already been seeing a couple wins on our side um you know in the beginning we weren't a formal organization you know this is just a neighborhood grassroots effort so the first step was to just educate the public show them you know what could be where i-35 is now our biggest thing right now is canvassing door-to-door we're finding that a lot of austinites are still unaware that the highway is going to be expanded even close as two blocks away from them and almost everybody we speak to overwhelmingly supports our proposal even if they don't know much about traffic or roadways or even if they like driving everywhere they still like what we're proposing much better than a highway expansion step two we have to really get local leaders on board 2022 is a very important year for this the mayor's office is up for election this year several city council members are up for re-election um there's local state races so this year we're really trying to push this because i-35 is going to be on the ballot our first step is creating a pledge in which candidates can promise to sponsor a resolution to oppose the expansion and demand a study into alternatives like rethink 35. and we've already gotten a couple signatures already so it's another way to show local residents which candidates they're voting for support this and which ones don't and then number three we're just taking on txdot directly um just last week it was announced that we have joined a lawsuit um against txdot we are suing them based on their highway plans um instead of doing a proper study into the entire project which is take being divided into three separate projects um they're splitting them up because that allows them to do fewer environmental studies fewer community engagement studies with residents so we're kind of holding their feet to the fire if this is successful they would be forced to merge all three projects into one which would require them to do a proper environmental study and also a proper community engagement session in which we can demand that they study all alternative proposals not just highway widenings but any other proposal whether it's rerouting the highway or turning it into a boulevard this allows them to finally show us what other alternatives can be successful yeah that is just a little bit about rethink 35 we're still a very new organization but still very quickly growing and all these little things that we're doing is getting our name in the media and it's also getting the expansion in the media because as we've said you know so many austinites are still unaware that the highway they live beside is going to be doubled in size thank you so much sean and scott if you would like to tell us a bit about lid i5 all right let me know when i'm good to go all good all right thank you uh thanks scott t and sean for your inspiring presentations and to lauren and rob for hosting us to this event as lauren mentioned my name is scott i'm co-chair for lit i5 in seattle we're an all volunteer uh uh community group seeking to repair the damage at i-5 inflicted on our downtown and surrounding neighborhoods starting in the 1960s this is what i-5 currently looks like where it runs through downtown it splits the entire length of our city in half where but where it runs through here in the central area is where it encounters everything from apartments to theaters and music venues offices hotels and other important features of our city it devised areas that were redlined and it displaced about 40 000 residents when it was built it runs through about 20 miles of seattle you might know seattle from one of our recent freeway fighting victories with the alaska way viaduct that was finally demolished in 2019 after the earthquake in 2001 damaged it the vioject was six lanes and was replaced with four lanes in a tunnel and it's given us energy um and it's also showing the power what can happen when you rethink our highway infrastructure i5 runs uh through downtown parallel to where the viaduct was about six blocks away to the east so our mission as a community group since 2015 has been to simply build the case and constituency for doing something with i5 we started as a pretty scrappy grassroots group in seven years later we're really still that way and we're really just trying to start conversations and look at how to build a more connected and sustainable and an equitable city the project area specifically we're looking at is in our if anyone's familiar with downtown it's between madison street anyway which is a corridor length of about three quarters of a mile um so that's where the most energy is right now just because it has some population density and businesses and whatnot uh but the map on the right shows some other potential areas where living could be done just based on topography with some of the more recent interests happening in the university district just a quick snapshot of our progress to date we've kind of i'll mention a couple of these things as i go along i think in 2020 was probably our most important milestone when we completed a a technical feasibility study we were able to get funding for the city of seattle to do that and hire consultant team and work with washdot who manages the freeway and basically the study found that the project is possible and it should be done because of the enormous benefits it could have which was not necessarily a guaranteed outcome of the study but definitely gave us a lot of energy and just you know prove it answers a lot of the big questions we're getting along the way like we'll watch that let you do it how much will it cost how long would it take to build all those basic things were answered and more and some of the latest news um in march of this year just a couple of months ago the state legislature partly as a result of our advocacy dedicated funding to looking at the future of the i5 corridor statewide since it's a it's an old and crumbling freeway it was not built up the current earthquake standards which is one of our uh one of the big drivers of our project is our seismic risk here um so we'll be looking forward to working with washtot uh i'm kind of setting the scope of work for that uh just last week a state legislator joined one of our walking tours where we walked through the study area and the existing lid park and uh over to i-5 which is a great kind of sign of our credibility and we're doing some ongoing work this with the city of seattle to embed the project into the ongoing comprehensive planning and transportation planning the city is doing as part of their republic engagement processes so i'll list four tools that i think are effective for freeway fighting at least from from our experience here in seattle and hopefully they uh translate well to other cities and other types of advocacy in the urban design world first uh building a broad coalition is important um so start doing that early on there's a lot of organizations that aren't listed here but um you know talking to folks working in transportation and housing and parks and uh business all that was important we fought early on try to build as big of a tent as possible it also helps that our steering committee uh myself included has some professionals working in urban design or architecture and real estate which both helps with their expertise but also their connections in those various industries it was it's helpful to find volunteers and interests that way um a lot of one of the ways we got folks on board with this was to ask to go to their meetings you know approach it humbly and uh you know just ask to be a guest speaker and present the project seek feedback early on and that really helps as part of that coalition building talking about the project from a variety of angles helps you know environments climate change social justice economic developments public health uh quality of life building family friendly facilities all that was important and we got some additional data from that feasibility study looking at some of the more specific numbers that could be possible under different uh lid construction scenarios with different ranges of park space amount of housing that can be built um a number of jobs that could be generated as well um in the second lesson would be to offer a variety of public engagements um as as you get more established um once you get momentum uh invite the media and invite your elected officials um not everyone will say yes but um you know if you can get one reporter or one tv camera in the room you have a big event that can really help turn the tide and help spread public awareness and just help cement yourself um some other ways we've uh gotten folks involved who may not have as much time as volunteers on the steering committee are just simple uh petitions letter writing uh sending in comments to official public processes that relate to i5 or or transportation planning we've engaged with students at a variety of levels of education from the kind of elementary level students who are just doing like artsy things looking at how they would imagine their future city too all the way up to the college level where we've had um engagement with grad students and undergrads looking at architecture and real estate applications and landscape design opportunities with living i5 um our coalition also includes elected officials on multiple levels of governments um we still have work to do at the county and the federal level but we have some good connections with our city council and our state legislators um and uh you know just in general just being professional times showing patience and respect and uh knowing how to summarize your project in an elevator pitch has really been helpful with this um and of course because elected officials are constantly rotating part of our role has also been to talk to folks who are newly in office or running for office that help make it part of the debate before folks actually get elected third writing useful data has been really helpful just last year we started doing some scientific public polling and we were surprised and delighted to find that a super majority of seattle residents support the project um and this has helped not only with political connections but also just talking to the people uh in general uh the business community and others that we're still trying to engage with um so i think this is my this is something that might start the poll every year just to kind of set it as a benchmark and see how things change over time and it's been pretty affordable for us because we have a seattle's very politically active we have some a local think tank here who does scientific pulling anyway so we kind of just latched on to that for a fairly reasonable cost and kind of part of that too we took advantage of that and you know we found it was it's kind of wonky but we found that it made sense to latch on an additional question about the i5 ramps downtown and you know this was mid pandemic and we were curious what people thought about you know what the commute how the commuting patterns have changed and generally would folks be interested in changing those because modifying some of those i5 ramps might be important to make a more better public space in the lib project so there we also found some support um a last bit of data it's also important for elected officials and the community to know who will benefit from the project who lives nearby who works nearby so that feasibility study and also our look at the census data from 2020 uh what has been helpful just to demonstrate that yes it's it is a diverse community it is mostly renters it's the most dense part of the city um and so that's just been helpful to you know show people that it's gonna improve quality of life for people from all all walks uh and lastly seeing is believing having lots of examples and case studies helps um to make the projects look more real and show that it's not just a pie in the sky idea so you know for example in the top left and clyde clyde warren park in dallas texas is probably one of the one of the best lit projects of recent years um and some others from around the country it also helps to find construction photos of live projects or or freeway removal projects or whatever you're working on just to show you know things that actually these things are actually happening uh one of our projects our efforts as well as a volunteer organization has been to track all the other lib projects across the country um so we've gotta um i'll post the link in the chat here but we've got a map online that identifies every single lit project that we can find which is either built or in various stages of planning there's about 100 of them right now which shows the scale of the problem of the interstate highway system where it runs through cities and also the opportunity to help create new public space and create new connections for people lastly we developed some of our own local renderings we were successful in getting a grant from the city of seattle's neighborhood department to helped fund a year-long design program that was a little bit um more intentional with some of our kind of scrappy workshops before that we had some teams of architects and landscape designers uh come up with some more realistic designs based on their expertise and then we contracted out some renderings to really help get some eye candy for the project and just show what the what the real potential is and these have been very helpful we will definitely be using these for a long time and other are they um kind of separate from this other artists and designers have produced their own images over the years which have been helpful just to show how the breadth of ideas and interest um so that's in my presentation and uh yeah happy to take questions and continue being part of the free fighting movement here thanks for having me wonderful thank you so much everyone that was really great presentations all around definitely learned a little bit so now i'm going to just ask you some questions that i have about your work in the freeway fighting movement uh the first one uh scott b touched on this a bit with the end of his presentation but i was wondering uh what approaches have worked best for building a local and diverse coalition yeah oh sorry let's scotty or scotty no you go ahead scott i'll go now okay i'll just start by saying um you know start by approaching uh other groups humbly and you know just say you're asking for their advice and and like i mentioned going to their meetings is really helpful just to you know latch on to some existing events that are scheduled that really helps save everybody time and um and once you do get one organization or partner endorsing your efforts barbara coalish and you can use them to kind of find other people like ask them who else should we be involved with here that kind of helps kind of spread from there fairly quickly yeah i i agree with scott you know everything he's saying uh the one thing that we found is is you know when you're you're dealing with a something that's been there so long uh you need to get people to stop thinking that it has to always be there because in the case of ours it was built in the late 60s 70s so they're just assuming it's always going to be there uh and one of the things that we found that has been very helpful is instead of going in on a negative note you go in and start you start talking about what the common benefits and outcomes are whether it's walkability whether it's generating income affordable housing connecting the river climate change all the things that generally speaking are positive and that you can give data points for and you can say if we do this we do it together so so what our group came together for was to work together to create the solution together as opposed to come in and push a solution and try to sell a solution it's more about the whole co-creation so we find uh just getting back to it again it's just going in with what we're all working towards and it's really easy to get people uh to buy in if they see the benefits of it they may not know the path to it but we can all work together to figure that out awesome and i kind of want to also build off of what scott said um like instead of always going negative also being positive one of the first things rethinks 35 started off with was just renderings of that proposed boulevard before any of the logistics were even talked about because it's something that grabs people's attention and it seems like people will look at it and say wow i'd love to live somewhere like this tell me more um and once you have that there um you know the next thing is trying to create as low a barrier of entry as possible for someone to join you because we're all volunteers um everyone does have day jobs they have other things going on so making it as easy as possible to become a volunteer and we've done that by holding a lot of community events such as webinars because that's a way for someone who just has a passing interest from seeing us on social media can actually hear from us directly see our faces learn our names and then we follow up with them directly whether it's sending them a text or sending them a personal email so that way they just don't hear an automated email about volunteering they hear our name they might remember us from the webinar or some of our in-person community events where we'll have you know free soft drinks and pizza to talk to neighbors you know just an excuse for someone to talk to us one-on-one because when you do build that personal connection with someone they're way more willing to actually want to make the effort you know with a volunteer in after work you know they want to make that effort to continue working on it with us excellent and as kind of was covered a bit in your presentations uh all the three of these campaigns are at different stages of their life being on when they were established up till now and so based on that i was just wondering how do you communicate campaign goals with different groups we we have a um here and i see it in the other presentations too is it's a wide variety i think sean made a great point you want to do it so it's it's it's a comfortable environment uh but one of the things that we did in terms of getting the message out is and we did it behind the scenes i mentioned before where before we launched we built a robust website that asked some questions that showed some renderings and it had a whole area of resource of articles and case studies and everything that it became basically a library for research for anybody that gets lost in it it also had pages where we can show engagement so where they could reach out to their politicians or they could reach out to us to to become part of it so we want to get that really robust and then that that we consider like our foundation and then the social media uh we have some uh derek who's been a volunteer and we're all volunteer also just like everybody here he's been doing a great job with um doing social media to illuminate and educate and kind of keep everybody engaged so it doesn't become stale that's i think it's really important i'm sure both of these guys agree so we've been doing that we've also had our public library reach out to us recently we're they're going to be doing community reach outs and we're also doing presentations constantly and i know i'm on the screen today but there's there's a dozen people that are doing it also that are going to neighborhood organizations and doing presentations and q and a's and just informing everybody what we're talking about so all of those things are important any any way you can get out there and communicate and do it in a comfortable way we find it beneficial something that our group has found over time is think about whatever organization you're talking with try to find out what their interests are for example a city council member will have very different goals and interests than someone who is environmentalist or even as we're door-to-door canvassing people in different neighborhoods have different concerns and that really just underscores the importance of having a very diverse group of people on your team um and that could be diverse from anything for different ages people who live in different parts of the city or people who even work in different industries or have different you know experience levels um like me personally i don't have a ton of experience before this with you know political work or advocacy um i'm more in you know my backgrounds in the tech field but one advantage that gives me is that you know i know how to speak their language um you know not everybody responds to the language used by um you know political advocates they you know were just very dry and technical and that's you know where my personal um strength is but we have some other members of our team some that work for law firms or some that have worked for the government or you know lived in different neighborhoods in the city and the more voices you have from a more diverse audience within your organization that actually helps you you know correct your language in some cases as an example um there's another existing highway in the city that we originally talked about oh that could be good for i-35 and then we had some people who live in that area saying no that would not be good because that's a neighborhood that's increasingly becoming a neighborhood where people of color are moving to if we move the highway there um then that would basically be repeating our mistakes of the past and that allowed us to introspectively say wow that's a great point and we caught that you know before we sold that to anyone else in the community for communicating goals with different groups um like i probably heard i'm an advocate for uh going to people um where they are so we have that standard presentation we tailored to the audience with different focuses um like was mentioned whether we're talking to a city council member or a chamber of commerce or um a housing group we kind of have you know emphasized the different aspects of the project that would be relevant to them we also have a very robust websites that explains what we're doing who we are um has a collection of documents and our powerful photos um ask questions and and how to connect with us um and you know we have a we do a pretty good job of having an email newsletter and social media posts to help people engage in a variety of different ways just knowing those different levels of attention span out there and some people want to you know some people want the nitty-gritty details um others just want to hit like on some things and let us know that they like what we're doing so um another thing we've been fairly good at as well is having friendly relations with members of the news media since it's such a visual projects um you know having the renderings and the photos and having it taking a tv crew around to actually stand next to the highway is really compelling and that's um so it's been great for visual media and just having you know keeping up with folks that actually write stories about your projects um is helpful um just so you know and also um like child mentioned we have some members of our team who work in real estate and architecture and have had government clients before who have worked in this space um so that they help us continue refine our messaging kind of fit within what's politically realistic and what will jive with the transportation department versus the city government and whatnot wonderful thanks so much for your insights and one more question before we i turn it over to the audience q a um i'm wondering what's either one piece of advice or a lesson learned that you would offer to someone who's looking to start a freeway fighting campaign in their own community well i'll start with that one the one thing that we did and it's i every city is different the politics the chemistry of the communities the neighborhood so you have to kind of realize what's what's going to work you know for your community so that's that's important to say uh the reason i did that preamble is albany is an interesting city uh because it's it is the capital of new york state and there's a lot that goes with that that's assumed but because it is the capital and uh it also has a very strong city government and there's been a lot of change in dynamics but the one thing that has been lacking in the past has been that real community there's been some input but not as much because there's so much government it's heavy in government and so the one thing that we decided to do because of our context and our community is we've seen a lot of projects where if someone just comes out and says and states that we're gonna do this so we're thinking about organizing it you know it's something that's just being conceptualized it gets shot down pretty quickly it's very easy to critique something that doesn't have any data or doesn't have any visioning behind it so in our case it it really was important to balance out the visuals i know scott was saying and i agree the visuals are really good on both of these all these presentations is that if you can get people excited about it but you don't want them then they say you don't want to say oh but that looks good you know we don't deserve it or it's going to cost too much so what we did is we balanced the left side you know are the right side of the brain of stimulating it but also we looked at all the data so we didn't have we tried not to have any weak spots because if you don't have the research about how much acreage you're going to capture how much potential extra square footage you're going to have or extra revenue you're going to have for tax revenue and you're just showing the visuals you're going to have a weak spot and vice versa if you come out and you just do data it's not exciting so i really got to balance it but you got to balance it in the way that it would argue best for your community something else and i'll go on a more um strategic route here is when you're just getting started even if you don't think you need it right away make sure you have a suite of tools available for you to manage both you as an organization and also all of your stakeholders that you're trying to reach you know rethink 35 our main thing is our petition which on the surface it just shows people that this is a popular idea but what it really does is we collect their information their email address their phone number their city council district who their representatives are and also what their personal interests are that's the first point of entry from them from there they're then on our email list um we can then reach them to volunteer we can reach them to collect donations so that's just the very first step of the funnel for them and second you know internally just having some sort of task management system we originally used trello but we've moved on to asana just so we know what tasks people within our organization are working on whether it's making a new flyer or doing a t-shirt order or having a meeting with the city council member i'm just so everybody is held accountable and you know we could easily pull up a task and ask someone hey any update on this um getting that started sooner rather than later um you'll definitely thank yourself for that and in addition to that um just don't give up it's gonna be hard in the beginning you're gonna get a lot of no's you're going to get a lot of politicians telling you all that'll never work you're going to hold public events where nobody shows up you're going to not have money or not have donations but just keep pushing and also you know have a team of people even if it's small if you're doing it by yourself you know sometimes life gets busy and you're willing to put it even if you're passionate you know you might not have time for it um as long as you have a group of people who are passionate someone will take up the reins uh yeah what scott he and sean just said definitely applied to us early on being organized and balancing data with with visual things um i would say you know just to start asking starting by asking around your community to see if there's any other interests india talk to activists urbanists social justice groups um architects and one uh just to see if you know maybe someone else has thought of the idea but they don't know how to get started um because those kind of folks are kind of the lowest hanging fruit they kind of get on board with bold city shaping visions um then if i can get into the nitty-gritty uh i would advocate first as soon as you find at least a little bit of interest um in the in the project or revisioning start with an event in person as soon as you can like a design workshop or a charettes or just having a walking tour because it can really help um just really helps exchange ideas helps build energy and it shows people that they're not alone and other people can show up um and then you use the lessons from that person uh to help make better events down the road uh but yeah supplementing that with other low barrier things like a newsletter uh webinars whatnot it's talking to people one on one um and something scott said earlier about co-creation i think is helpful as well to help kind of draw more or ideas and perspectives into the project because as litigi5 we've been i don't think i mentioned we've been fairly neutral on what goes on top of the lid in downtown seattle we kind of see ourselves as a clearinghouse for ideas and we're very open-minded uh but i can say the things that definitely float to the top have been park space affordable housing and civic functions like a new community center that we don't have there um yeah just kind of you know start small and see where it goes from there see if you can get momentum and build on that as you can awesome advice all around uh so i'm gonna go over to some of the q a questions uh we have a lot that are directed at specific panelists but i think we can also open them up to all of you this first one is directed at scott t and it starts with what are some of the issues you spent time getting out in front of before launching what would you recommend to others uh be prepared for before they launch something similar in their city so scott he can start with you and then if sean or scott b have any insights from their own experiences that would also be great yeah i think we may have hit on it a little bit um what what we wanted to do was to get out in front of it and get some visuals there was a lot of we have a very diverse group but there's definitely urban planners and designers on it and we know it's really critical to get people to to see what it could be we're very careful to say this is not our the answer it's just something to get you to see beyond what's there because we have such a tangled network of highways between the river and cutting off and cutting off our um black and underprivileged communities that are really bad so we want to get those visuals out there but like i kind of mentioned before we looked at it from how we could build using the current zoning laws we weren't trying to reinvent the wheel we were just saying this is what it could be using existing rules and knowing what the data could be we had some people that volunteered graciously to provide us analysis of income generation from tax base uh and job creation and we also looked at it from a you know climate change standpoint so when we were doing the the web site behind the scenes we were trying to make sure we were doing all the resources but we were also collecting data specifically for the project that we were proposing so that way we didn't have a weak spot and then the other thing we did is we we started building our collaborative we all tapped into scott alluded to is once you tap into one or two people and they're bought into it there's a good chance they'll know some more people and what we want to do is get a diverse group that represent all all of the communities all of the you know the economic development down to people that are citizens and so we wanted to be really well-rounded so before we launched we also got um some folks that are in the media to get behind us and knowing that that was really important so we had that and so it was launched through the media and it was it came out all at once which was what we had hoped and it was good um scott and sean do you have anything to add for this question um one thing and one piece of advice i could give um and it's something that i learned you know years ago with my experience in customer support is always try to predict what they're going to ask next um when you present this plan you're going to get skepticism and some questions commonly where will the traffic go or how will this be paid for or you know how are you going to get local elected leaders even on board with this um and you learn that through all the time you spend talking to people you're going to have those questions um but one little trick that i learned because i recently helped build a faq page on our website for these questions we get um i've even just posed the question in our local city subreddit on reddit or even when sharing our petition on nextdoor um you look at the comments and see what people are asking because they're gonna ask you don't know who these people are but they're gonna ask you the questions that you're gonna get over and over again so even before you even really pitch the project or launch it um just try finding even online audiences it's almost like a free focus group because you're gonna get some some of the questions might be crazy but you know that's representative of what you're gonna find in person awesome thanks so much for tackling that question we have another one here which is can you talk about running a sustainable advocacy organization on infrastructure issues this question is mainly asking about what is your funding structure and kind of what is the overall look of your organization i can start briefly um we're we're all volunteer here with the exception that we had a kind of a part-time administrative staff person for a couple years like eight hours a week just help stay organized and run newsletters and whatnot but most of our funding comes from just individual folks leading small donations um pre-pandemic we would have annual fundraising events or we got some bigger donors who are active in city politics or work at big engineering firms or whatnot who our group had connections with just to help push us for a little bit more um but yeah volunteer burnout definitely has been a thing so um finding a way to you know keep things interesting having a drip of news or activities come out instead of doing big things at once maybe more helpful with that aspect but yeah definitely you know finding people who are young and energetic helps as well yeah i'll i'll add in a little bit um our our organization's very similar to scott's all volunteer um we do have some older folks though um uh the one thing that the funding is actually mostly through its combination of individuals and and some companies that have a vested interest in the city and what what's going to happen in the future um and what we don't really have a formal structure but one thing that we've done is when we start talking to people and talking to them about their interests we found out what their comfort zones and what what their expertise was or what they are willing to provide and so we don't want anybody to do something that's out of their comfort zone you know they obviously believe in what we're doing but everyone has something to give and in an organization like this and all three of these um initiatives let's face it are extremely complex and there's a lot of facets to them and so basically anybody that comes with the right energy and the right attitude and a positive attitude that it can happen we can more likely use whatever skill sets they have so it's important for us to realize where our where we may be lacking skill sets and look for people to help along those lines and we find that every once while we're recruiting and trying to tap into the community for those things that will help us in the long run great thank you so much um looks like we're just now at one o'clock um if you want to stay on for a few minutes we have a couple various nitty-gritty questions otherwise we can end it here so it's up to you guys i have time to stay on for a little bit wonderful um so i'm combining these two questions are actually for you scott b i'm just going to combine them and the first one is how has the alaska way viaduct improvement work worked as a case study to paint a better picture for i-5 have there been any drawbacks to alaska way as a precedent and i'm going to combine that with how do you work specifically with a washington d.o.t yeah the um i would say the alaskan way vita from a physical standpoint um it shows people that we don't need highways to want run a roughshod over our cities forever and change is possible despite despite the size of highway infrastructure despite how permanent it looks as you know as a concrete thing um so that's been helpful just to show people that you know change is possible um there was there were some negative aspects of that particular project with cost and schedule overruns but um which is probably not surprising for any highway project but overall it's helping to build a more people-friendly waterfront just a few blocks away from where i-5 is as far as watchdog we started a meeting with them fairly early on we reached out we found out who their administrative staff are which first of all that's that's hard as well just to get the directory and sort through who is relevant to your city um sometimes dot isn't provided by administrative districts different levels of hierarchy um but once you find the senior staff um or once we found them we had fairly productive meetings we've even met with the secretary of transportation a couple times who i would describe as kind of arms length supportive or positive or neutral they're more interested in maintaining i-5 and preserving it um with this kind of lingering knowledge out there that's not really official yet but uh the a major retrofitter rebuild of the project will be needed um for uh earthquake safety and longevity purposes um and i saw part of that question too mentioned rerouting the freeway around oklahoma city that maybe i don't know if sean might be interested in answering that part yeah for him a little i don't have um any for that one great and then it looks like um actually that was the end or questions because this last one is a very nice thank you from a participant so i will just roll into my thank you to all three of you as well for being part of our first freeway fighters webinar um i really hope people got some good lessons out of this and we're really excited for the work that you guys have been doing uh there will be a recording of this available starting tomorrow and we look forward to seeing most of you again next week thank you very much thank you everybody bye everyone yes thank you