Results: Case Studies

CBI conducts a stakeholder assessment and facilitates intensive mediations regarding a contentious redevelopment plan in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Background and Challenges

The North 4th Street Corridor in Albuquerque, New Mexico stretches from a dense, mixed-use community to a four-lane traffic corridor characterized by strip development, fast food restaurants, and automotive shops. The product of a long history of haphazard development and redevelopment, most of the corridor is lined with chain-link fences, driveways, and parking lots that provide security and easy access for merchants’ customers.

In June 2006, the City of Albuquerque released a draft plan to redevelop a four-mile stretch of the North 4th Street transit corridor. Residents and merchants responded with conflicting concerns about the plan and the City’s planning process. Following the City’s unsuccessful attempt to facilitate an agreement, the City Director of Redevelopment asked CBI to work with merchants and residents to assess and resolve the conflict.

The CBI Approach

The team conducts a stakeholder assessment and initiates sixteen mediation sessions to educate stakeholders about the conflict and help them reach consensus on redevelopment recommendations.

CBI conducted a stakeholder assessment that canvassed merchants, residents, a resident committee, staff from the City’s Metropolitan Redevelopment Agency (MRA), and planning consultants who had been involved in the project. After speaking with about 70 individuals, CBI prepared a conflict assessment summarizing the participants’ perspectives on the existing plan and proposing a framework for future negotiations. CBI’s assessment revealed that the parties had a strong interest in negotiating a mutually agreeable plan.

Next, CBI began a process of 16 intense mediation sessions. Nine sessions were devoted to educating the participants, and seven to reaching agreement on recommendations for the redevelopment plan. The residents and merchants each selected six representatives (plus alternates) to sit at the negotiating table. The director of MRA and the staff planner in charge of the project also participated in the negotiations, which were open to the public. CBI set ground rules for communication and collaboration.

After months of negotiating, the residents and merchants agreed on the majority of their recommendations for the city’s plan. They created documents outlining guiding principles for the process and design; a plan for an overlay zone; trigger mechanisms; and recommendations for a 30% engineering design of the full corridor. Though stakeholders still disagreed about the working design for the public right-of-way, two stakeholder groups drafted separate, but very similar, concepts for making public improvements for infrastructure and transit investments in the corridor.

The negotiating group’s work was compiled into a white paper for presentation to the City of Albuquerque’s Environmental Planning Commission (EPC). Representatives of the merchants and the residents worked with CBI to draft the paper. The white paper described the group process, explained their recommendations for the plan, and suggested that the paper — and continued community engagement — guide the city’s implementation of their final plan. The entire group signed off on the paper. 

Results

The City of Albuquerque redrafts the redevelopment plan to reflect the citizen recommendations; merchants, residents, and the City Council support the new plan.

The City redrafted the plan based on the white paper. A small group (comprising a lead negotiator from the resident group and the merchant group, the project manager from the MRA, the mediator, and two technical and design consultants from Community by Design) met weekly to make further revisions in the plan. Afterwards, the lead negotiators reviewed the redrafted plan with their respective constituents. The public reviewed and commented on the plan before it was resubmitted to the EPC.

Following the resubmission, public testimony from merchants and residents strongly supported the plan’s technical approach and its shared vision. The EPC then made extensive editing suggestions to clarify the plan, and CBI and the negotiators finalized the work. The revisions were then approved by the EPC, and the plan was approved by the City Council. 

Photo credit: Flckr Creative Commons/teofilo