“Baffled to Fight Better”

By Katherine Watt, Mark Williams and Antoinette Rinehart
(former/current NPCCR Co-Chairs)

…..One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake…

-Robert Browning

Airing dirty laundry is not always a bad idea.

Sometimes, it’s one of the steps to getting cleaner laundry later on.

There’s been some behind-the-scenes turmoil within NPCCR in recent weeks, and things are settling down enough to allow some reflection. So, this post is offered to readers as an airing of that dirty laundry, to clear the air, clarify the lessons learned, and highlight a key difference between NPCCR and business as usual in NP:

• Within NPCCR as a civic organization, community members go through difficult times, acknowledge them publicly, reflect on them, look at what worked and what didn’t, and incorporate that information to strengthen the work going forward.
• Within North Plainfield local government, business as usual is to ignore or categorically deny problems without investigation, competent policy or practice, or public explanation. Borough officials refuse to accept or acknowledge responsibility (their own or others), sweep problems under the rug and hope nobody ever comes looking. And if anybody comes looking, business as usual for North Plainfield officials is to blame the people who look, for whatever problems they find.

Here’s what happened:

Back in 1999 or so, Council and Mayor authorized formation of the Shade Tree Advisory Board (STAB), charged with supervising the protection of the shade tree canopy in the borough, and planting
replacement trees whenever possible.

According to STAB Chair Thalia Saloukas, the STAB has been a “political football” then to now, occasionally used as a Shade Tree “Commission” with enforcement powers, when it suited Mayor Allen and cronies, but usually marginalized as a toothless committee forced to stand by and watch shade tree destruction with no power to intervene, and attempt to play catchup by planting saplings to replace towering, healthy, leafy trees cut down on public and private land.

As Ms. Saloukas has often said, “We can’t keep up. They cut down trees faster than we can replace them, and we’re losing our shade tree canopy.”

Thus, for the last six years or so, the STAB members have been attempting to get Council and Mayor to convert the advisory board into a Shade Tree Commission, which would have authority, like such commissions in other communities, and be empowered to actually intervene to prevent shade tree destruction, implement workaround solutions (like sidewalk bump-outs to go around roots) and mandate
shade tree replacement, costs to be paid by those who remove the trees.

The consistent sticking point has been Mayor/Council unwillingness to share authority. The Shade Tree Commission ordinance has failed to move forward time and time again, inarticulate Council “debate” after
“debate,” subcommittee review after subcommittee review, draft after pointlessly-revised draft.

This spring, after the sixth revision, Ms. Saloukas and the STAB finally turned the ordinance over to NPCCR, seeking NPCCR support for an initiative campaign to cut through the bureaucratic crapola, end the delay tactics, and put the question directly to North Plainfield voters on the November ballot. Prior to mid-May 2008, NPCCR had supported the measure from the sidelines, advocating Council adoption.

With the STAB’s green light, the full sixth revision was posted on the blog on May 14, 2008.

Shortly after, NPCCR began recruiting petitioners for that measure and two others (Municipal Open Space Tax and Charter Amendment/Nonpartisan Elections). Each initiative and referendum measure must have a five member Committee of Petitioners to shepherd the measure through the process to the ballot.

STAB members were strongly encouraged to be the Committee of Petitioners, because they are the most knowledgeable and passionate tree advocates in the Borough.

They declined out of fear of retaliation.

Having experienced the Allen Administration’s delaying disbursement of shade tree budget money in the past, often moving on tree planting bid packages well past the optimum planting seasons, the STAB members feared tree money would be withheld altogether if they publicly signed on to the initiative measure as petitioners.

Thus, the volunteers who ultimately stepped up included Antoinette Rinehart, Barbara Habeeb, Christine Holman, Margaret Mary Jones and Fred Jones. That list was complete as of June 13, when the Joneses
signed on, and all five members had ready access to the Shade Tree Commission Ordinance draft as posted May 14.

On June 9, during public comments at the Borough Council meeting, Mr. Jones had urged the Council to adopt the Shade Tree Commission ordinance, as a way to prevent deforestation at the Villa Maria site.

At the June 21 Street Fair, signature gathering began. Jerry Jacala began an intensive course of self-education in the initiative process to help the Committee get the required number of signatures. By
early-July, after a coordination meeting and door-to-door campaigning, the signature count was approaching 200, toward the goal of 243 valid signatures.

And then, days before the deadline for submitting the signatures to the Borough Clerk, the Joneses suddenly came forward for the first time with multiple concerns and revision suggestions. Barbara Habeeb (now a Council member) began to have concerns about serving on the Committee of Petitioners while on the Council. Christine Holman began to question her own views on the ordinance.

The campaign quickly unraveled.

At an emergency meeting of the NPCCR shade tree campaign leaders and supporters on July 17, the Joneses stated that they had reluctantly stepped up to fill the remaining petitioner spots because no one else
was stepping up. They initially hesitated, wanting to keep the Shade Tree a bi-partisan activity, although they did not convey this hesitation when they volunteered. (Habeeb and Holman are registered
Republicans, as are Mr. and Mrs. Jones). The Joneses also said they felt that the Committee failed to communicate clearly and often as to the status of the petition, although they took no steps to initiate clear communication between themselves and other Committee members.

So, on July 17, the group was confronted with several bad options:

• Leaving the ordinance in its original form would mean putting an ordinance on the ballot without the full support of its own Committee of Petitioners.
• Debating and rewriting the ordinance within NPCCR would take time, and would have to be followed by door-to-door visits to the original petition signers, to explain the changes and get their signatures on the new draft.
• And replacing the non-supportive Committee of Petition members with supportive ones would also require additional rounds to get repeat signatures on new forms.

Following the heated July 17 NPCCR meeting on the matter, the Joneses withdrew from the committee, and the initiative campaign fell apart. They have described their action as feeling that they could not place their names on the document in its current form, but were willing to continue to work with the committee on the needed revisions. However, their names had been on the document from the start, as of June 13, and by July 17, needed revisions could not be made in time to meet the submission deadlines, which they well knew.

If the Joneses did not and do not support NPCCR, or if they didn’t like the ordinance as written, or if they felt the committee was not communicating clearly enough, then they had a responsibility to steer clear of the action, since it was NPCCR-sponsored; speak up early and clearly about their revision proposals; or take responsibility, as committee members effective June 13, for initiating clearer communication among themselves and the rest of the committee.

They did none of those things.

The Joneses are not solely responsible for what happened, but they bear a portion of the responsibility, along with fully supportive NPCCR members who failed to sign on to the Shade Tree effort, and along with NPCCR leadership who failed to intensely question and monitor volunteers, including the Joneses, to assess their level of commitment and discourage less-than-committed volunteers from signing on.

The unraveling of the Shade Tree initiative has been a bitter disappointment to many, who feel that a crucial opportunity to “learn by doing” the initiative adoption of ordinances has been lost.

And it has left some NPCCR members feeling betrayed.

Why did the Joneses – apparently well-informed about the ordinance and supportive as of at least mid-June (when Mr. Jones urged Council  adoption and both Mr. and Mrs. Jones joined the Committee of
Petitioners) wait until the last possible moment to make their concerns known and formally propose ordinance revisions? Was it an oversight due to the busy-ness of early summer family schedules? Or
deliberate sabotage? In either case, it seemed a failure to honor their commitment to the petition signatories and the initiative process.

What have we learned?

One of the things that can trip up an initiative campaign, very early in the process, is a lack of full commitment by the committee of petitioners. If the committee members are not fully on board from the start, or if fully committed people won’t agree to join the committee, don’t launch the campaign.

Could this outcome have been prevented? It’s hard to tell; it’s a complex situation, and, to paraphrase Robert Burns, “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”

But there are many alternate scenarios that would have worked better, and considering them may help us plan future campaigns better.

If the Borough Council had voted, at any time in the last few years, to put the Shade Tree Commission on the ballot for a non-binding referendum, to gauge community support and give themselves political cover for adopting it after the community vote, then North Plainfield might have a Shade Tree Commission already, and the initiative campaign would be moot.

The Council could still do this for November 2008.

If the Shade Tree Advisory Board had given consent for NPCCR to move forward with an initiative campaign earlier than mid-May (as urged by NPCCR leadership many times over the last year), then there might have
been enough time to go through this incident and recover in time for the November 2008 ballot.

If members of the STAB had swallowed their fear and joined the Committee of Petitioners, then the Joneses would not have been on it, and the initiative campaign might be moving forward today.

If other NPCCR people with more passion for the shade trees and/or more willingness to put time and energy into coordinating the effort had stepped up sooner, then the the Joneses would not have been on it,
and the initiative campaign might be moving forward today.

If all five members of the Committee of Petitioners who did volunteer had read the ordinance draft carefully sometime between May 14 and June 13, and had got together to discuss their views and make revisions or committee changes before the signature campaign formally kicked off June 21, the initiative process might be moving forward today.

If NPCCR leaders (including the three of us) had anticipated the possibility of a breakdown like this, and supervised the Committee of Petitioners more closely, questioning the members intensely and regularly to gauge their commitment levels, then perhaps the problems could have been identified in time to coordinate revisions from outside the Committee of Petitioners. But we suspected nothing, mistakenly assuming that the volunteers had accepted full responsibility for their volunteering action; we attended to other
pressing matters instead, and got blindsided.

There’s no shortage of blame to go around.

The question is, who among us (active NPCCR people and sideline-watchers) will demonstrate the common sense to learn from this experience and build a stronger, more effective citizen empowerment movement in North Plainfield going forward?

Here’s to the hope that we’ve been “baffled to fight better,” next time.