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We Want You: FNA Is Looking For More Resident Involvement, Board of Director Election 11/19


In the Fishtown Rec Center there are murals on the walls that look like they were painted by children: outer space, an ambiguous skyline, a few trees. The multi-purpose room is lit by that familiar fluorescence, the brightness serving to remind you it’s dark outside, perhaps leading you to imagine that you’re eight years old again and sitting in your elementary school after hours. So you turn in your plastic chair to check out your peers and you see that a lot of them are in their early thirties and some of them much older than that. Instead of a blackboard, the front of the room is taken up by large-scale blueprints and digital renderings of future projections. No teacher either. That space is filled by a developer fielding questions from the room.

“This project is determined by the cost of the land,” he says. “I have to build these homes this way to recoup the cost of the land. I’ll be honest with you, I don’t want to build these homes.”

“Well, at least we agree on something there,” says the man the developer is addressing and a little laughter trickles around the room. But laughing at a joke is not the same as agreeing with a sentiment.

The woman who speaks next has something very different to say.

“Let’s think about this for a second y’all,” she says with the voice of a teacher gaining control of a classroom tangent. “We know this man. We’ve seen his work. He is in the neighborhood every day. We trust this man. We can grant these variances and have the project done by someone we trust or we can say no and have the project passed onto someone who will go over our heads, who will make sure we don’t have a say.”

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Her words are met with applause, a stronger indicator of agreeing with a sentiment, a stronger indicator of the popular opinion. And when the developer steps out and the votes are cast and the ballots are counted, this agreement is reflected. The community votes 20-3 to approve the zoning variances requested for two projects on the 1100 block of Shackamaxon Street and developer Roland Kassis will be able to continue with his project as planned. This is a meeting of the Fishtown Neighbors Association Zoning Committee.

For the last two decades the Fishtown Neighbors Association (FNA) has been the neighborhood’s primary civic organization. Formed in the late 90s as a response to quality of life issues in the neighborhood, one of the organization’s first campaigns was a beautification effort that resulted in the towing of 200 abandoned cars and an abandoned boat from neighborhood streets.

These days Fishtown doesn’t have an abandoned car problem, but FNA beautification efforts are still apparent. You may recognize their work from the “Feed the Fish” project, which provided festive fish-head-sculpture-topped trash cans to neighborhood street corners and parks. Other projects include popular events such as the annual Chili Cook-Off and River City Festival.

Currently, the FNA is comprised of two ongoing committees: beautification and zoning. The beautification committee has done a lot for how things look around Fishtown, but it’s the zoning committee that gives residents the power to approve or deny major changes in the landscape of the neighborhood.

Zoning committee meetings give the neighborhood a voice in terms of new construction projects and protect residents against unwanted or unchecked development. And with Fishtown being one of the most rapidly developing zip codes in the country, this kind of protection is growing more and more important

Here’s how it works: The FNA is recognized by the Zoning Board of Adjustments (ZBA) as a Registered Community Organization (RCO). Whenever a developer wants to build something that doesn’t comply with city zoning regulations, he or she applies for a variance. Before any variance can be granted for a Fishtown property, the ZBA must notify the FNA of the variance and the FNA in turn puts the variance to a community vote at its next zoning meeting. Anyone with a Fishtown address is eligible to vote. The FNA reports back to the ZBA with the results of the vote and the ZBA permits or denies the variance with these results in mind.

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However, attendance at these zoning meetings is disproportionately low. According to FNA President Jamie Ware, it’s rare that more than 50 people show up at a zoning meeting. Generally attendance varies somewhere between 15 and 30 — Not a great sample size in a neighborhood of almost 60,000 residents.

The FNA recognizes that these numbers leave something to be desired and they’re working on a solution. Recently, the organization received a grant from the Penn Treaty Special Services District. This money will be used to hire an outside consultant who will help the FNA design an outreach program geared toward getting more of the community involved. Granted, not everyone cares about zoning and many people are indifferent to the rising tide of local development projects. But these attendance numbers this low would suggest not apathy but a general unawareness of role of the FNA zoning committee. The organization hopes this new campaign will help change that.

On November 19th, the FNA will hold its annual election for the 11 seats that make up its Board of Directors. The election will take place at the FNA’s monthly general membership meeting. Anyone over 18 with a Fishtown address is eligible for membership but in order to vote for the nominees, one must have attended three meetings prior to the election. This year the nomination process is a little different from years prior. It used to be that all nomination for Board seats would take place over the course of single meeting of the members, but this year nominations were kept open from the middle of October up through November 12th. FNA President Jamie Ware hopes this will increase the overall number of nominations and fill all 11 seats for the coming year.

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