OPDC Transparency

2025 Plan   Rock Alley   Circulator Busses   Bates Street Slope   Community Mural   Tara_Sherry-Torres   Joncaire Street Stairs   Conclusion   Contact

I drafted this site in February 2015. However, since it has been posted I have been given the feedback that it may take more time to read than many readers can spend. To make this site more accessible I have added these bolded executive summary lines throughout the document.

Executive Summary:

The site is written as a letter to a current OPDC employee as an explanation of why he may receive less response to a recent community survey than he had hoped. The reason that I suggest is that OPDC has asked for community input in the past, which it has later ignored. The remainder of this letter covers three major examples of OPDC’s past behavior, a complaint about one particular past employee, and three minor examples. The remedy that I suggest in all cases is that OPDC provide greater transparency regarding its use of the community input that it collects. Although this letter is addressed to one current OPDC staff member, the audience is intended to include the entire staff of OPDC, its board of directors, the leaders of other Oakland organizations, and members of the Oakland neighborhood community at large.

Dear David,

In your recent correspondence, you asked me to take part in Oakland Planning and Development Corporation’s (OPDC) Involvement Survey, which I have now done. I have also received several other emails requesting that I fill out this survey. However, I consider that the time I spent completing that survey was wasted minutes of my life that I will never get back. In the five and a half years that I have lived here in Oakland, what I have learned is that OPDC uses such surveys only to provide the appearance of community involvement in their decision making process. The truth is that there is no transparency about how the community input from these surveys is used in actual decision making. Worse, in the cases where I have finally found out what happened with community input, I have learned that this input has been ignored.

In this letter I will cover three significant cases where OPDC collected community input and then did not use it. In each example, there was a large amount of community involvement, which was then dissipated by OPDC’s mismanagement. In each case, in addition to my disappointment at seeing OPDC set aside projects that I was committed to, these instances represent months of my time and years of collective community time that was wasted by OPDC. I will also cover three recent examples where OPDC has lost credibility with the community in smaller ways. In these cases, you have been present at the meetings and so you could clarify what happened with regard to the input collected from community members. In all cases, my recommendation is the same. In order to rebuild some of its lost credibility, OPDC needs to increase its transparency with regard to community involvement and to do follow ups. This needs to include formal statements regarding OPDC’s position on these decisions and the response made by the city or other officials. If OPDC is asking for people’s time, it needs to respect this time, or it will continue to generate increasing resentment and decreasing involvement.
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OPDC’s 2025 Plan

One major example of OPDC ignoring community input is with the development of their 2025 plan. To develop this plan, extensive community input was collected from hundreds of community members over the course of months. The highest priority of all community members who responded was a revision of Oakland’s transportation and parking systems. However, because OPDC decided that these topics were too difficult for community members to work on, this input was ignored, which alienated many Oakland residents.

One example of OPDC ignoring community input was in the development of their 2025 Plan. This was, and continues to be, a disaster. To develop this plan, OPDC claimed that they wanted a large amount of community involvement and engaged the services of a group called Everyday Democracy to hold meetings and get as much community input as possible about what was important for Oakland. On the first day, I voiced my concerns that OPDC was asking me to spend two months of my time in meetings with no assurance that the outcome of this process would even be used. As someone who has spent more than twenty years as a community organizer in Massachusetts, what I know is that if you ask a community what is important to them, the answer that they give may not be one that you want to hear. In order to truly respond to the community’s needs, it may require that you change the direction of your organization in ways that the current administration may not have the interest or expertise to proceed with.

Because I have a background in city planning and community organizing, and am someone who had lived in Oakland a while, when they asked me what was important, I had a good idea of where the consensus would lead. On that first day, I said that what was most important for Oakland was a revision of its transportation systems. For the next eight weeks, I sat in meeting after meeting where community members were asked to brainstorm and finally distill what was important for them in Oakland. The group I was in was one of ten spread throughout Oakland, each comprising twenty community members. At the end of the process, all of the groups were brought back together and asked what their collective highest priority was. At that meeting, as I had predicted, the consensus of all of these groups was, by a large margin, that transportation was the highest priority across Oakland. I want to say that I was a smart guy for having seen this, however the truth is that transportation is clearly the biggest problem that each Oakland resident faces every day, such as when they need to cross the street, park their car, or get on a bus. I just stated what I saw early on.

With this information now documented, OPDC had the challenge of responding to this community need, or risk permanently alienating the people they planned to serve. Unfortunately, OPDC chose to take this second route. OPDC had exactly one transportation group meeting and then disbanded the group because, according to Wanda Wilson, “The issues of transportation were too hard for community members to deal with.” I think that it is the role of the community to decide what it can deal with and not for OPDC to be our parents. So, with the ending of the transportation group, my second prediction was also correct, that OPDC would not use the information that it had received from this community consensus. At this point, I wanted to send OPDC a bill for all of my wasted time. Now I have come to accept that the loss of that time is unrecoverable.

There were several ways that OPDC could have answered this community need for a voice in transportation here in Oakland. One way would have been to work with the transportation initiative started by Pittsburgh City Planning that took place in the next year. If OPDC had been involved in this initiative, they might have been able to provide City Planning with the information collected by Everyday Democracy. Whereas City Planning did employ Pfaffmann & Associates, the same transportation group employed by OPDC, when I talked with the engineers involved in that process at City Planning, they told me that they had never received the tabulated data from the 2025 Everyday Democracy process. Further, they told me that they had needed to hold their own series of community planning meetings to re-derive the information regarding the Oakland residents’ concerns about transportation. I personally submitted the write-up I had done for OPDC about transportation in Oakland to Pittsburgh City Planning. I doubt that many other people did this, and I suspect that most of the information collected by OPDC was never made available to the people who could have used it. The fact that OPDC has never disclosed what happened to most of this information demonstrates the largest issue that I have with their organization: their lack of transparency.
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Rock Alley

A second major example of OPDC dissipating community involvement was in a group that resulted from the 2025 planning process. This group was interested in the development of a walking path that would connect South Oakland to the Eliza Furnace trail. This group was taken over by OPDC’s staff who then berated community members until they left the group, and may have lied about filing funding proposals. OPDC has never reported to the community what the final outcome of this project was.

Another OPDC disaster that came out of the 2025 planning process was the proposal for the Rock Alley slope, a transportation planning project. I live only a quarter of a mile from the nearest Pittsburgh bike trail as a straight line drawn on a map. However, in order to reach the trail, I must take a dangerous one mile ride descending down Bates Street and then traveling along 2nd Avenue to a makeshift wooden ramp which serves as the entrance to the trail. The difficulty that I have in getting to the trail system is common to most Oakland residents.

Long-time Oakcliffe resident, Dave Panasiuk, developed a proposal for a more direct route to the bike trail system. His idea was to reopen the existing pedestrian tunnel, which originates near the intersection of Lawn and Ophelia Streets and passes under I-376. The proposed route would require that a bike trail be constructed down the former Maurice Street slope to the tunnel entrance, and that a staircase be constructed back up onto the trail. This would not be an ideal bike route because it contains stairs, but it would be more direct and much safer than the alternative routes.

At the beginning of that project, more than twenty Oakland community members attended meetings and were actively interested in helping with the project. In one of the early meetings, one group member suggested that the project be named after one of the paper streets that was once on that slope, Rock Alley. The suggestion was voted on and carried. The two coordinators from OPDC present were Samuel Su and Elly Fisher.

Over the next several meetings, I suggested that the coordination for this project be put on a website, to describe our project to prospective funding sources. At the time, I thought that it would be a good idea for there to be a Rock Alley page on the existing OPDC website, since I believed that it was a project that OPDC was supporting. I work as a website developer, and I was able to determine that OPDC’s web site is built on a WordPress backend, the same website back end that I build websites on professionally.

It was my suggestion that the Rock Alley group be given limited access to the OPDC website, allowing us to create pages for a Rock Alley section of the site, which their staff would then approve to make visible. I even volunteered my time and the paid time of my staff to build these pages. Apparently, Elly Fisher then made a unilateral decision that we would not be allowed to do this. In a meeting that I had with Wanda Wilson months later, I told her that I was disappointed that the Rock Alley project could not be represented on the OPDC website. She told me that she thought it was a good idea that it should be on the OPDC site but that she had never been asked. I entered that meeting feeling angry at Wanda for her lack of cooperation on the project, and left the meeting understanding that she was out of control of her staff.

My answer to OPDC’s lack of cooperation was to launch my own site — http://RockAlley.org — to promote the project. It is not a perfect site, but it was done completely with volunteer help. I took pictures of the Rock Alley slope, created maps, and added contributor pages that discussed historical context and other routes to the bike trails. On that site, we also covered nine other ways to reach the trails from Oakland, each with its own problems, and each annotated with recommendations for Pittsburgh City Planning.

The RockAlley.org site took four months of my time and volunteer time to complete. However, in the next several meetings, the behavior of the OPDC staff was to obstruct the progress. OPDC made exhaustive lists of reasons why the project could not be done, and offered nothing that community members could do to help the project progress. At one point, I asked Sam Su if he was even interested in seeing the project completed. In reply Sam said, “I don’t care if this project actually gets done. What is important is getting community involvement.” My view of OPDC darkened. In the following months, Elly Fisher’s relentless negativity gutted the group. Any suggestion made by community members for how to proceed with the project was met with Elly’s near monotone diatribes of why the idea would not work. Eventually people didn’t want to be berated any longer, and I was the only one who showed up to the meetings. After even I stopped attending, I was told that there was one final meeting where only OPDC people showed up; no community members were present.

After the meetings ended, I continued to stay in touch with Elly by phone and email regarding grant proposals for the project. Elly sent me the rough draft of part of a grant proposal, which I had my copy editor refine. Elly told me that it would be six months until we knew the outcome. I never learned which organizations these proposals were sent to. Once this project was taken over by OPDC, the community no longer had any involvement in it. Several months later, I spoke with Wanda and she told me that the funding had not been approved because there was no mention of a staircase included in the proposal. Wanda went on to say that once one organization had rejected the proposal, “the word gets around,” and no one else was interested in funding the project.

I think I know what happened. In several of the planning meetings for the Rock Alley slope, we discussed the need for a staircase from the tunnel up to the Eliza Furnace trail. Dave Panasiuk told the group that plans for a staircase had already been developed by another Oakcliffe resident years before, and we could just include those plans with the proposal. I think what may have happened is that Elly never contacted Dave to get these plans, and what went out was only my part of the proposal. So, “the word had gotten around” about our project and it had been turned down because OPDC did not coordinate with the community. Instead of helping the Rock Alley project receive funding, OPDC took over the project, stopped communicating with the community, and ultimately ensured that the project would be rejected by any funding organization.

I also wonder how the funding organizations knew that a staircase was needed. To know this, a person would need to climb down the steep Rock Alley slope, and look down the eighty foot of unlit tunnel and identify that light at the other end was not the bike path, but was indeed 2nd Avenue. Further, they would infer that this was a problem. Or one could walk a half a mile on the bike path to find where the tunnel from the Rock Alley slope goes beneath I-376 and notice that there was an eight foot difference in grade. Then they would need to make a decision that this project should not be funded because the proposal failed to provide a description of the needed ten-step wooden staircase. It also occurs to me that these proposals went out in December and that these funding organizations would have needed to do this reconnaissance in the middle of the winter. I think it is extremely unlikely that anyone from these organizations actually went out to these locations to notice this omission.

Perhaps what happened is that the staircase was left out of the proposals and someone from OPDC told the funding sources that this was an unresolved problem. If this is what happened, it would be an act of sabotage against the project by OPDC. However, what I think is even more likely that the proposals were never sent out at all. I think that someone at OPDC decided that this project was not something that they wanted to follow up on, and Wanda just told me about the staircase because it sounded like a good reason to her at that moment. Actually, if no funding proposals went out this would be good news. In this case, the word about our project would not have “gotten around” and the community could now seek funding without OPDC being in the way. This would be an example of OPDC marginalizing itself, which is what I see happening anyway.

The truth is that as a community member, I have no idea what happened. I don’t know if the project wasn’t funded due to incompetent proposal writing, or if the staircase plans were intentionally omitted and then pointed out to the funding organizations. I also don’t know if there was a lack of follow through on the part of the OPDC staff which resulted in the project being dropped, leaving Wanda to give me her fragile excuse. I can’t know what actually went on because there is no transparency in OPDC’s process. OPDC is a black box to community members. What I do know is that community momentum for the project has been lost. I also know that OPDC stood in the way of this project getting done, and not did facilitate it.
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Circulator Busses

A third project that was disbanded by OPDC was one that was started by Oakland residents who thought that university shuttles could be used to replace the local circulator busses. Extensive work was done by the community to follow up on this idea. However, when OPDC took over this project, no further information was returned to the community and the project was effectively dropped.

In yet another transportation issue, at the time that the Pittsburgh 84B circulator busses stopped running through South Oakland, I contacted the Port Authority and asked why this decision had been made. To their credit, the Port Authority sent me worksheets that showed ridership statistics for this route. From these statistics, I understood that from a financial perspective the fifty or so people who used these buses each month did not make it worth keeping this line running. However, I personally knew a number of elderly neighbors who were now unable to get from their homes to the supermarket without someone to drive them.

In our community group, there was a proposal that the University circulator busses be made open to the community members who needed them. This seemed to be a simple solution to the problem. If there was a shuttle going where you needed to go, just allow the people who needed it to be able to ride.

When I contacted a representative at Pitt, there were two objections raised to this idea.  One concern was that community members on these shuttles would displace the students who needed them. This issue was easily addressed by comparing the usage data for the 84B with the usage data for the University shuttle busses. Based on this data, students rode the shuttles in the morning to get to class and in the evenings to get back to their housing. In contrast, residents needed the use of these shuttles during the day, at a time when there were the fewest students on them. To enforce these usage patterns for residents, it was further suggested that shuttle passes for Oakland community members have restricted hours.

The other concern was regarding the insurance coverage of Oakland community members who would be riding the university shuttles. There were a number of creative solutions to this problem. One suggestion was that Oakland residents who wanted to use the shuttles would enroll in a special university course just for this purpose. In this way they could receive a University ID and be allowed to ride the shuttles. Another approach was to the have the universities add an insurance rider for Oakland residents, and that a proposal would be sent to City Council for Port Authority funding of this insurance rider. The logic was that paying for the insurance rider would be less than paying for drivers and busses.

I have no idea if the two months of phone calls that I made regarding this idea would have lead anywhere, but I did start making connections with the city, the universities, and the Port Authority that would have eventually connected me with the decision makers. I either wanted to solve this problem or know why it couldn’t be done. I had gotten to the point of asking the Universities to contact their insurance companies to find out what the cost of the needed insurance riders would be. If this cost was low enough, it might even make sense to seek private funding to compensate the schools.

One of the people I contacted was Wanda Wilson at OPDC, and she told me that there were already planning meetings to discuss the 84B Circulator. These meetings were to take place with Pfaffmann & Associates, and Fitzgerald & Halliday Engineering Consultants. She told me that I would be notified when these meetings took place. I never was. The last email that I received from Wanda was in September of 2011. I have no idea if the meetings ever took place or what was decided. I do know that Oakland residents are still not allowed to use University shuttles, and that there is no replacement for the 84B Circulator. As far as I am concerned, this is another community project that fell into the black pit of OPDC, never to be heard of again.

I was finally learning how OPDC worked. If you had an idea, you called Wanda and she would tell you that it was already being worked on and not to continue working on it yourself. You would then hear nothing more about the project, ever. I had finally realized that the essential part of doing any project in Oakland is not calling Wanda and notifying OPDC about what you wanted to do.

David, In case you are keeping score, this is now two months of my time wasted on OPDC’s 2025 Plan, four months of my time wasted by OPDC on the Rock Alley project, and another two months of my time wasted by OPDC on the circulator busses.
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Bates Street Slope

After enough failures, members of the community have now chosen to actively exclude OPDC from their plans. Only after one project was almost complete did community members notify OPDC, and then only to calm those upset by the community’s actions. For many members, this small project serves as a model for the only way that they will work with OPDC into the future.

By the spring of 2013, I understood how to get things done in Oakland. When a group of community members decided that we wanted to clear a walking path on the Bates Street slope, we all agreed that the one thing we would not do was contact OPDC. We knew that if we did, our initiative would then be bogged in months of planning meetings, and that OPDC would take over the project and not follow up on it. We did every part of the project ourselves. We made the calls needed and finally got permissions from the property owners. We then went out with hand saws and loppers to clear the path. I think we did a good job on that trail. This path is also documented on the RockAlley.org site. One group we knew we could not contact was the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. We knew that they were working with OPDC for beautification along the Bates Street corridor and we were doing whatever we could do to keep OPDC out of our project.

After the trail was mostly clear, I got a call from Gavin Deming at the Conservancy regarding the clearing we were doing. As I understood it, we had upset Judy Wagner, the Conservancy’s Director, because we had done our work without coordinating with them. We then set up a meeting with Wanda, Judy, the Conservancy’s forester Mark, and me. Wanda botched that meeting. The three showed up at a different location from where we had agreed to meet, and I was not able to show them the planning that our community group had done before we walked the slope. As we walked along the path, Judy Wagner was visibly agitated and Wanda did her best to calm her down. Although our community group did ruffle some feathers, it serves as a model for how we can work with OPDC in the future. Our groups can do what we need to get done, and then OPDC can clean up the details of whoever gets upset. This was a successful project, only bringing in OPDC’s help when needed.
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Community Mural

For a small community mural, initial community input was requested, however the decision of what to paint was made without community notification, wasting whatever community time was spent on this discussion.

In a minor recent meeting that you, David, attended, there was a discussion of a mural to be painted on the side of the Mad Mex restaurant on Atwood Street. There was the initial community meeting that I attended. At that meeting, community members were shown various past works by the mural artist, and Photoshop mockups of his works on other buildings. Then, as far as I know, there were no further community meetings to discuss his work or to approve the final design. There was only the announcement that the mural was being painted after it was started.

I understand that since this mural is on private property, the owner has the final say about what will be painted on his building. And I do feel that the mural painter and his group did do a good job. Their design is bright and colorful and incorporates oak leaves, appropriate to Oakland. However, it would have been good if the community members who were asked their opinion were kept informed. Even just an email from OPDC would have helped me feel that there was some reason for my involvement.

The truth is that the lack of follow up after community involvement is consistent with my other experiences of OPDC. They make a show of valuing community input at initial meetings, but then there is no transparency about how decisions are actually made. Maybe I missed a follow up meeting in this case, but seeing the choices made without hearing from OPDC continues to be my experience.
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The Incompetent Tara Sherry-Torres

One OPDC staff member was particularly known for failing to follow up on community projects. Even though she is no longer on the staff, her incompetence will long be remembered by members of the community.

In December of 2014, I was notified that Tara Sherry-Torres no longer worked for OPDC. Tara is someone that I refer to as a do-little. If you want someone to say that they will take care of something, and then not do what they say, give it to Tara. In meeting after meeting, there would always be tasks that Tara was supposed to take care of and then didn’t do. She would be apologetic and would be theatrically surprised about the things she had forgotten, but nonetheless she repeatedly dropped the ball, even when the matters were important to the community. Although I had complained to Wanda about Tara as far back as 2010, Tara continued to make mistakes that affected the community into 2014. If you want to be friends with me, you need to proactive, and you need to do what you say you are going to. Tara was not a friend of mine.

The most amusing response to Tara’s leaving was when an OPDC intern attended an Oakcliffe Housing Club meeting. At this meeting, this intern told us that she was taking over Tara’s position, but that she was new to the job and didn’t know much yet. Being a bit catty, I said to her that even if she was new, I was sure that she would do a better job than Tara. The intern replied, “A lot of people tell me that.” To which everyone who had worked with Tara laughed. I understand that Tara is now running a coffee shop somewhere. I feel that whatever she is doing is wonderful, so long as it is far away from us. The fact that we were subject to Tara’s incompetence for so long will live on for years in the memories of Oakland community members when we think of OPDC.
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Joncaire Street Stairs

After a meeting regarding the renovation of the Joncaire Street stairs I was told that there was no follow up emails from the community. This lack of follow up may have been due to my criticism of OPDC during the meeting, or due to residents’ longtime experience that their input given to OPDC has not been forwarded to city officials. As above, greater transparency of OPDC’s actions would improve community relations.

In a recent transportation project meeting that I attended with you, there was an announcement that the Joncaire Street stairs would be rebuilt. At that meeting, Pat Hassett from the City of Pittsburgh’s Department of Public Works attended to receive the public’s input on the project. He and his assistant did a good presentation of the history, costs, and issues associated with rebuilding the stairs.

One concern that I had was the repeated assertion by Barbara, an OPDC volunteer, that community input sent to OPDC would be forwarded it to Pat Hassett’s office. At the meeting I saw no one from OPDC taking minutes of community input, and I sincerely doubt that any letter was sent. Speaking with you ten days later, you told me that no community member ever sent their views to OPDC be forwarded to Pat Hassett. This may have been partially due to my comments in the meeting, or it could be that community members already know that OPDC is not an effective conduit for community input.

Whichever the case, what I can tell you from experience is that getting community input is challenging. You are asking people for their time without compensation. It is hard to get community members to come to meetings and it is even harder to get them to write to you. The only reward that community members may have is the possibility that what they want will actually happen. And for this reward to be a possibility, they need to feel that the organizations they are working with have a high level of integrity. At this point, OPDC has lost its credibility with the community.

The only time where I feel that OPDC is effective is where there is no assertion that any action will be taken in the future. An example of this was in a recent meeting with a representative from Pittsburgh’s waste management. In this meeting, OPDC facilitated the discussion between community members and a Pittsburgh city official without getting in the way of their interchange.

In the long run, I think it is inevitable that community members will set up their own parallel community organization to provide services where OPDC fails. I have considered starting this organization myself, but after years of wasting my time with OPDC, I now just want my time for myself. At this point I will not be the one to start another group, but I will offer my support to whomever does. If you want to turn this around, the first step will be for OPDC to demonstrate that community members’ input will be valued.
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Conclusion

The conclusion of the letter is that OPDC may be better or worse than I have experienced, with no way for me to know which. There is a prediction that eventually the Oakland community will completely ignore OPDC, leaving ground level decisions to be handled by smaller groups who are not profit driven. My impression is that this is what OPDC wants anyway. The letter ends with the statement that this letter expresses only my personal views.

One may argue that I have only been in Pittsburgh for five and a half years and I have not known about every project that OPDC has been involved in. Maybe there are projects where OPDC has done good work, and I just haven’t seen it. However I think it is more likely that OPDC has dropped more projects than I know about. Worse, I have seen OPDC taking credit for work that they had no part in. Whatever the case, there is no way of knowing what is actually going on because there is no transparency.

What I can say is that until OPDC makes amends for their mishandling of the 2025 Plan and the groups that it created, I will continue to remind community members that OPDC does not represent them, and they should not waste their time with OPDC as I have done. What I and other community members have learned is that OPDC is where community initiatives go to die. If you want your community project to be taken over and then discarded, bring it to OPDC.

The problem is that Pittsburgh City Planning still feels that community ideas should first go through local Community Development Corporations, who will then bring them to the city. What they do not understand is how OPDC’s internal goals obstruct community involvement. In other areas of the city, communities have been so alienated by their CDCs that they have taken action against them. OPDC is going in that direction.

Unfortunately, OPDC is actually becoming more entrenched in Oakland as time goes on. As OPDC becomes a real estate developer, it is turning into such a large financial force that community groups will not be able to get rid of it. The only option will be to discredit OPDC to the city so that community members can provide their input to City Planning directly. Then, once OPDC is shifted aside as a community service organization, it can leave the actual community service to smaller groups. Ultimately, I think that this is what OPDC wants, to just make money and not have to deal with ground level issues. The only problem is, David, you are on the wrong side of the fence.

Over time I have learned that if I wait long enough, the incompetent and the self-serving go away of their own accord. I have waited long enough to see Tara finally move on. Bless her. Now OPDC needs to step aside to allow an effective community organization take its place. At very least OPDC needs to refer community members to other organizations when they are not going to carry through with an idea that is brought to them. Saying that they are going to do something and then not doing it is far worse than just stating that an idea is outside of the organization’s scope of work.

David, I do appreciate your enthusiasm for community involvement, but at this point you will need to overcome the large threshold of past OPDC failures for community members to stay involved with your projects. In my case, I think that I am actually doing a disservice to Oakland and the City of Pittsburgh by attending OPDC meetings. When I do attend these events, my presence lends credibility to the claim that OPDC uses community input in its decision making, which it does not.

I feel that you personally are a nice guy and you are welcome to call or write me at any time. When you are done with OPDC, you can decide if you want to leave that experience on your resume.

Finally, the views written here are mine alone and do not represent the views of any community organization that I may be a member of.

Regards, Phil

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