City Park Conservancy, the nonprofit that oversees New Orleans’ largest public park, will ramp up efforts to reach historically underrepresented groups for feedback on an ambitious — and controversial — park redevelopment proposal, the group told Verite News.
The conservancy announced this spring that it planned to extend its public engagement process for the City Park master plan following months of intense public criticism over a proposal from an early draft plan to build a road through the site now occupied by Grow Dat Youth Farm, a popular urban farm and youth program.
The July 10 statement on reaching underrepresented groups comes weeks after Cara Lambright, who led City Park when it proposed the road as part of its master plan, announced her resignation as CEO and president of the conservancy. Rebecca Dietz, who was previously the park’s vice president and chief administrative officer, will replace her.
One of the most persistent criticisms from opponents of the proposed road through Grow Dat is that the plan showed that park leadership hadn’t meaningfully engaged with Black, low-income and young New Orleanians. Some have said the lack of engagement with these communities is just the latest in a history of local redevelopment schemes that undermine the needs of the city’s Black and low-income communities.
Now, park leadership is aiming to use this extension of the redevelopment process to gather more input from those underrepresented groups, City Park Conservancy spokesperson Keith Claverie said in an email.
“We believe in the power of community engagement and shaping the development of City Park for the future for all people,” Claverie wrote. “We continue to deepen our engagement efforts as we move forward through the process.”
Claverie said the conservancy will continue to ask park users, neighborhood and community organizations, churches, schools and libraries to spread the word about the redevelopment plan and the extended public engagement period. The organization will also use its social media accounts, newsletter and website to encourage people to give feedback on the plan. And the conservancy is working with specialists “who have rich lived knowledge and experience in the New Orleans community” to try to help reach underrepresented groups, he said.
But park officials didn’t respond in time for publication to questions about whether they had plans to collect more robust demographic data during their additional outreach efforts to ensure they are reaching these groups. A Verite News analysis of feedback and data gathered by City Park Conservancy revealed that the park only collected zip code and age data as part of their master plan feedback survey, which is one of the main input sources the conservancy has relied on since the planning process began.
City Park’s initial outreach efforts
In April, City Park officials said they would extend an initial year-long public engagement process, originally slated to end in December, to June 2025. That announcement came weeks after a public planning meeting where more than 100 Grow Dat supporters showed up to express disapproval.
“We just haven’t heard from enough people and groups yet to make an informed step forward,” Lambright said while announcing the decision at a meeting of the City Park Improvement Association, the park’s governing board.
At that point, the park had hosted three public input meetings and collected more than 5,000 survey responses. The survey included questions on how often respondents use the park, what they use the park for and what they think the park needs.
Through a public records request, Verite News obtained information on the park’s first round of outreach efforts, including the survey results and demographic data collected as part of the survey. Claverie also outlined its outreach efforts in an email to Verite News.
According to the email, the conservancy’s initial outreach effort included emails to hundreds of schools, churches, public agencies and community organizations asking them to encourage people to fill out the survey. The planners also placed advertisements around the park and other public places throughout the city, like libraries, grocery stores and cafes.
The spokesperson said that during the initial engagement period, park officials also contacted prominent members of groups with significant numbers of non-English speakers, such as the city’s Latinx and Vietnamese communities. And they followed up with organizations and zip codes with low numbers of respondents and offered to bring hard copies of the survey and administer it themselves.
“I think those are the components of a robust outreach effort and one that is working to ensure that you hear from a wide variety of voices, regardless of demographics,” said Lamar Gardere, executive director of The Data Center, a nonprofit that collects and analyzes data about southeast Louisiana. “So those plans sound good. I don’t know anything about the effectiveness of what they did.”
The effectiveness of those efforts is not clear because the park only collected two pieces of demographic information from survey respondents — age and zip code. The largest portion of responses came from people between the ages of 35 and 44 (27%). The age brackets with the fewest responses were the city’s youngest and oldest residents — those under 25 and over 74.
The three zip codes with the most survey responses were 70119, 70124 and 70122 — all of which border the park. Those zip codes accounted for approximately 46% of the surveys.
Zip codes with larger numbers of white and wealthy residents than the city as a whole made up a majority of the survey responses as it relates to race and a plurality of the survey responses as it related to class, Verite News found.
But zip codes don’t tell the full story about respondents’ demographics. Unlike smaller census tracts, zip codes cover large areas with wide swaths of demographic groups, Gardere noted. He said that zip codes can signal the general areas where people are responding from but not details about race or socioeconomic status. Zip code 70119, for example, is almost evenly split between white and Black residents and includes largely white neighborhoods directly to the south and east of the park, majority-Black neighborhoods in the 7th Ward and neighborhoods with significant Latinx populations in Mid-City.
“You being given only a zip code doesn’t tell you whether people have been engaged in an equitable way,” Gardere said. Age gives more detail, he said, but two data points aren’t enough to give a full picture of survey respondents.
Annette Hollowell, a member of the Friends of Grow Dat advocacy group and a subscriber to the farm’s community-supported agriculture program, said City Park’s initial outreach effort wasn’t sufficient because officials didn’t make sure they heard from a representative sample of the city’s population.
“It shows that they’ve put some effort in there and that some of their strategies did get out there,” she said. “But they didn’t do the deep work. They went wide but not deep.”
Verite News reached out to the City Park Conservancy to ask why it did not collect demographic data beyond age and zip code. Claverie did not answer the question directly, instead saying that the survey has never been the sole driver of the master plan engagement process.
Park officials are also working with community outreach specialists to connect with historically underrepresented groups, Claverie said, and have held public meetings at Warren Easton High School, a majority-Black charter school, and Dillard University, a historically Black university.
A youth movement
Park officials and staff haven’t said how long the engagement process will last or when they plan to reschedule a May community meeting that they postponed in April.
In a press release announcing the extension of the planning process, the conservancy said it had scheduled meetings with neighborhood and community groups and active park users, which included Grow Dat, to get more feedback on what people want for the future of the park and to hear more about park conditions that are adversely affecting parkgoers.
Park officials also announced the launch of an Ideas Youth Committee, aimed at giving New Orleans-area residents between the ages of 15-25 a voice in the master planning process. All of the young people who participate will get a Friends of City Park Family membership, a Carousel Gardens Amusement Park Family season pass and six tickets to the 2024 Celebration in the Oaks experience.
The committee is supposed to meet starting this summer through the fall. Grow Dat leadership and supporters have pushed for youth participation in the planning process since news of the proposed road broke earlier this year. Grow Dat has also engaged its teenage participants in the park planning process. Julie Gable, co-executive director of Grow Dat, said the program’s leadership is excited about the Ideas Youth Committee.
“Youth at Grow Dat have been invested in following the master plan process, and as part of our leadership development work, care about using their voices and experiences to help create change and build out a park of the future,” she said.
To give feedback to City Park Conservancy on its master plan, email [email protected].
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