I'm over the moon right now! The good news for the community is that Penn's "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain"-style manipulation of community groups has been exposed. In the course of this fight it was revealed that certain persons who were associated with community-based groups were trying to manipulate the appearance of community support in favor of Penn/Campus Inn: going in front of city agencies claiming that community meetings took place that never occurred; claiming that community meetings on this topic were scheduled that in reality were routine membership meetings that made no notice, either in meeting notices or the meeting agenda, that this proposal was going to be discussed and feedback sought; and having Tom Lussenhop show up unannounced at various meetings; all done to create the appearance of community notification and involvement while blatantly trying to suppress the number of people who would otherwise turn out and possibly object.
The one thing that I've heard time and time again from people who were trying to justify this behavior was that the individuals involved in this "were just volunteers" who put a lot of time into community affairs. This justification carried the implicit message that being a "volunteer" somehow gave these persons the right to manipulate the community and to make decisions totally separate from and in direct contradiction to the will of the community as a whole. I was also surprised, and yet not surprised that there were also those who believed that a subcommittee of an organization can ignore the clearly stated opposition of the organization's members. Hopefully community members have learned from this that everyone has to be active in his or her community. It can't be left to a neighbor, or someone around the corner; everyone has to be active and informed, and cannot cede their involvement to someone else. Serve on the boards; go to the meetings; keep people accountable. No one person or small group should have the power to make decisions for an entire neighborhood. Otherwise other Campus Inns may be in the offing. And maybe at some point the folks at Penn will finally wake up and learn that their so-called "community partnership" has to be a genuine partnership, and not just the sham that it's been up until now. From: [email protected] Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2009 13:22:04 -0400 Subject: [UC] Late breaking news about the Campus Inn To: [email protected] Late breaking news has just been posted on-line by the University City Review about the Campus Inn. It appears as though the developers have finally figured out that their plan was so outrageous and riddled with inadequacies that even Penn's money and political clout couldn't buy their way to a project with such obvious inadequacies. So... well, you'll have to read about it yourself by clicking on the link below: Click here: University City Review - West Philadelphia's Independent Community Newspaper Al Krigman Limited Time Offers: Save big on popular laptops at Dell
