Symphony of Lights

I started writing this blog as a way to get out of the day-to-day. My relationship—personal and professional—with the Columbia Association and its people is complicated, especially now. In the last couple years, it has become increasingly contentious. 

Conflict changes your perspective—it demands a narrower focus and leaves lots of space for emotions (which can be good and bad). 

So this blog is meant to be a place where I leave the conflicts of daily life behind and broaden my focus—to write considered, thoughtful and analytical pieces about something—the Columbia Association—that I am passionate about. I believe as strongly as ever in the purpose and the potential of CA, and I believe that its current predicament is a critical crossroads that demands our attention and energy. 

CA is Columbia’s most important civic institution, and the decisions its leaders make over the next year or two will have profound and lasting impacts on CA and Columbia for many years to come.

The Symphony of Lights op-ed is, contra this blog’s purpose, about the day-to-day (year-to-year?) conflict, a portion of it anyway. I have mixed feelings about calling CA the Grinch, but I have no such hesitation about the need to tell this story in this way. 

Because it is part of the larger story about CA, where it stands in these extraordinary times, and how it plots a course for its future. To be blunt: I think the Columbia Association has lost its way.

I want only the best for Columbia and the Columbia Association. Sometimes that means writing lengthy pieces about committee structures (stay tuned!) and sometimes that means embracing the starkness of the conflict. 

Symphony of Lights will turn on or it won’t. For these lights, there is no dimmer, nothing between on and off.

CA: Columbia Apathy

Institutions are shaped by many forces, and this is true of the Columbia Association. One of the stronger forces that has influenced CA and its politics over the years, however, is one of absence and omission—namely, indifference, or perhaps more fittingly, apathy.  

Indifference is a silence that can be mistaken for consent or contentment, and a force that creates a vacuum that those with specific or narrow interests can fill for their own ends. And they have, and we’ll talk more about some of those interests later.

 

For now, we’ll focus on the lack of interest. 

 

In a community that is as informed, engaged, and active as Columbia, the broadly shared apathy towards CA is curious. When I first got involved in the community, I joined and eventually chaired the Columbia Association’s Environmental Matters subcommittee in the early 2000s and our staff liaison at the time made a joke that’s stuck with me: Community meetings are the official pastime of Columbians.

 

While that’s not entirely true, it’s not wrong. We love meetings, and we have many of them in our community. Indeed, many Columbia residents are involved and engaged in a variety of community matters, but aside from periods of upheaval or controversy, engagement with the governance of CA and participation in Columbia elections is and has always been relatively low. 

 

Even going back to the early 1980s, around the time a grassroots community movement successfully managed to wrestle complete control of CA from the Rouse Company, newspaper articles detail and editorials bemoan elections that failed to meet the minimum quorum of 10 percent of eligible voters. Village managers at the time threw parties and gave away free beer to get more participation, but they were largely unsuccessful, even when the founding zeitgeist of Columbia was still in the air.

 

It’s true that at the time the biggest matter affecting CA—financing—was somewhat obtuse, but this has been true of CA throughout the decades. Elections struggle to reach quorums and the CA board, while once having received generous coverage from local papers, operates in a manner that is at least somewhat disconnected from the community itself. Which is, in some ways, fitting because the structure of CA is such that the only real “members” of the organization are the members of the board. The rest of us are just leinpayers and residents.   

 

I had long assumed that Columbia’s glory days were defined by greater involvement with CA governance and politics, and while I think that assumption is part true, it is more false than not. 

 

While CA generally enjoys broad awareness, many people are unclear about what it does and who runs it. Indeed, a survey conducted in the 1990s found that only 21 percent of Columbians knew it was governed by an elected Board of Directors and I would surmise the number is about the same today. It’s no wonder, then, that most aren’t engaged with the politics of it.  

 

Many early writers posited that this was complacency—Rouse gave Columbians everything they ever wanted and they got fat and happy. Maybe it was complacency once, but that complacency has clearly given way to apathy and indifference, except in a few specific instances or from a few specific constituencies.

 

And I think CA’s leadership is generally happy with the state of affairs. Those who are elected can maintain power by engaging the small constituency that elects them and ignoring—either willfully or by omission—the overwhelming majority of Columbia residents and lienpayers who don’t engage. 

CA doesn’t generally hold public hearings, setting aside only 15 minutes each meeting for “Resident Speakout;” it doesn’t promote village elections in a meaningful and deliberate way; until the pandemic, its meetings were not broadcast publicly; it rarely uses its communications channels to talk about its governance; and throughout this pandemic has made drastic cuts to its programs and services without any real engagement with the community it serves.

 

In short, the Columbia Association indifference seems to be a two-way street. A community that is indifferent to the institution that is supposed to be serving it, and an institution that is indifferent to the community it is supposed to serve. 

 

And a cycle that has repeated itself decade after decade.

 

Of course, not everyone is apathetic about CA. And those who aren’t have leveraged this imbalance effectively. 

What's in CA's DNA?

When last we wrote, the question of what the Columbia Association is led us to what it was supposed to be. 

Interestingly, unlike Columbia itself, the association created to promote the social welfare of Columbia did not seem be to imbued with the same core set of values in its founding.

Which is to say, CA was not necessarily created to be the “keeper of the vision” or the institution tasked with tending the “garden for growing people,” and without that charge among its first principles, what is it? 

 

Indeed, with hindsight, it seems that CA was largely created out of expedience. Jim Rouse knew the Howard County Commissioners of the time would have no interest in funding recreational and community facilities in this new city he was building. He also knew that his company and its financial backers alone could not fund everything promised in the grand Columbia vision. 

 

Enter CA. By placing a lien on every property owned by the Rouse Company as part of the Columbia project, CA would collect annual assessments to fund its operations and the costs of construction of the facilities envisioned in Rouse’s plan. As the community grew, so would CA’s finances, allowing early debts to be repaid in time.

 

CA was, therefore, a financing vehicle to support Columbia’s growth, a point made clear by the fact that CA was fully controlled by Rouse for its first decade-plus of existence. 

 

This framework led to the first big effort at reforming CA, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

 

In the early days of Columbia, CA lost money every year and took on lots of debt to build facilities for the community, which was very small at the time and which could not fully support the costs of CA’s operations and construction. 

 

The oil crisis and economic slowdown of the early 1970s slowed the pace of construction in Columbia and caused all sorts of financial trouble for CA and Rouse. They both weathered the storm, but CA’s debt ballooned and residents of the young community grew increasingly concerned about CA’s debt load, which was compounded by annual operational losses. This set up the first real political fight about CA.

 

CA’s foundational documents include no reference to Columbia’s values of inclusivity, optimism, sustainability, or more. Instead, they speak of the Columbia Parks and Recreation Association existing to engage in any manner of development, construction, or operations that the Rouse Company choose, so long as it conformed with a broad definition of supporting community welfare. Indeed, among other things, the original CPRA deed allows for the entity to construct an airport and pretty much anything else deemed “necessary and desirable” by its Board. 

 

So, if CA was supposed to build and operate facilities, who was nurturing the social well-being of the community?  

 

A story I’ve heard is that Jim Rouse established the Columbia Foundation (now the Community Foundation of Howard County [CFHoCo]) early on as an entity to promote community philanthropy and support social services. 

 

CA, therefore, handled recreation and amenities and the community foundation would weave together the fabric of social services necessary to support a racially and economically diverse community.

 

While CFHoCo has grown to become a sizeable and effective community foundation, engaging thousands of residents in philanthropy and supporting many worthy organizations and initiatives over the last 50 years, it is dwarfed by the CA in terms of size, financial resources, and reach. 

 

And so now in 2020, as the foundational values that form the essence of this “garden for growing people” demand our attention and effort, who is the true steward of those values? Who is tending the garden, tilling the soil, ensuring that Columbia’s fundamental purpose for being—to be a city that nurtures love—is being met? 

 

CA proclaims itself to be the keeper of that vision, but that vision is being strained in many ways and what is CA doing to ensure it holds strong? 

 

Columbia’s schools have grown increasingly segregated in recent years, which is in direct conflict with the Rouse’s founding vision. What has CA done to address this alarming trend?

 

Many of Columbia’s neighborhoods are struggling with disinvestment and negative, often racist perceptions. What has CA done to affirmatively reject stereotypes and reinvigorate these neighborhoods?

 

Where was CA in the planning for Columbia’s Downtown? Rather than approach a conversation about Columbia’s future with openness and optimism, CA’s directors in the mid-200s at removed the organization from the planning conversation, largely in an effort to stall or stop any development, and in so doing lost leverage and a critical opportunity to help shape a master plan that would guide development of Columbia’s urban core. That plan was passed ten years ago and the Columbia Association is mentioned less than a handful of times in it, leaving the organization with almost role or influence in the future of Downtown Columbia.

 

Or, going back longer, where was CA when River Hill was built without apartments? When Dobbin Road and Snowden River Parkway became retail centers, robbing village centers of tenants and business?

 

You could ask many more questions like these and still arrive at the same conclusion, one which seems a hallmark of Columbia. The truth is that CA picks and chooses when it engages in the work of nurturing Columbia and when it engages in the work of supporting itself for its own sake because it wasn’t created with a clear focus—the values of Columbia were not baked into the organization’s DNA, and so it’s been shaped by interests and forces with other aims. 

 

For more on how CA has been shaped over the years, we need to examine the cultural and political dynamics surrounding CA governance and politics.  

Identity

The Columbia Association’s identity crisis is almost as old as the organization itself.

Misperceptions about CA, what it does, how its funded, and who it serves abound, and in the absence of a strong, compelling, and cohesive identity for CA, these misperceptions often manifest in the community as confusion and indifference. 

 

Here’s my most basic definition: The Columbia Association is a community services organization funded by a combination of a tax-like “Annual Charge” assessed on each property and earned income, and it is governed by a Board of Directors elected by members of affiliated associations. It manages community facilities, programs, and thousands of acres of open space for benefit of people who live and work in Columbia. 

 

Unfortunately, this is a technical answer to a question that demands more, a question that shapes and defines the organization itself. 

On some level, this question of uncertain identity is inherent to an entity like CA, which resembles a lot of things but doesn’t fit into any one bucket. 

 

On the surface, it seems to most closely resemble a homeowner’s association and is, in fact, considered one in state law, but that’s a bad description for a few reasons. Notably, CA (and the affiliated village associations) explicitly serves all residents, owners and renters alike, as well as those who own or are employed by businesses located in “Columbia.”

 

Also, CA doesn’t give a hoot what color you paint your door. That’s the villages (and some of them really care). 

 

So if it’s not exactly an HOA, what is it? From the IRS’s perspective, it is a 501(c)4 social welfare organization, which is a broadly defined category of tax-exempt, “not-for-profit” corporations that operate exclusively to promote public welfare but that don’t quite fit the traditional, 501(c)3 charity mold. A notable drawback of this status for CA is that it is unable to accept tax-deductible donations and is excluded from many grant funding opportunities. 

 

But identity is more than legal distinctions. It is perception, reputation, and also the secret, often unknowable, and increasingly important sauce of emotional bonds between an organization or an institution and those it serves.  

 

In its almost 55 years of existence, CA has been many things to many people—an arm of a developer; a bully pulpit for neighborhood busybodies, an impenetrable and sometimes shadowy bureaucracy, a community leader, a major local employer, a convener, a fitness business, an event planner and community programmer, a grant-maker, an HOA, and many other labels, concepts, perceptions, and misperceptions. 

 

Got all that. Anyway, here’s what CA says about itself in a letter from its President on its website:

Despite the breadth and variety of our services, what makes Columbia truly special is an ongoing commitment to the vision espoused by James Rouse, our founding father. As he stated, “By creating the image of the rational potential of a city, we generate the power to carry it forward. Without vision, there is no power.” At Columbia Association, we consider ourselves keepers of Columbia’s vision.

 

In support of this vision, Columbia Association offers a vast array of recreational, cultural and community services. 

 

In addition, CA maintains nearly 3,600 acres of open space as a permanent asset for residents. Neighborhood amenities include lakes, parks, tot lots, basketball and tennis courts and 95 miles of walking, jogging and biking pathways.

We will talk more about the idea that the Columbia Association consider itself keeper of “Columbia’s vision.” 

 

But first, we still need to get some definitions right. “Community services corporation” raises an important question: What is a community service? 

 

Clearly, managing Columbia’s open spaces is a community service. Is providing tot lots and outdoor play spaces? Probably. Running community programs like a Teen Center, Lakefront events, and Art Center? Sure. Outdoor pools? We’re starting to get into a gray area of private/public use, but I’ll go with it. Fitness clubs? Golf Courses? A “wellness retreat”? 

 

Yeah, see, you start the pull the thread and there’s no telling where it stops. 

 

Why does it matter? It matters because you need a solid sense of what you are and what you stand for when faced with complex questions and problems that challenge your values and conception of who you are. 

For instance, when faced with a pandemic and economic upheaval that will close facilities and end programs, what do you choose to save and what do you shutter? Or, less severe: what do you prioritize and protect first? CA has made those priorities clear over the last few months as fitness clubs and golf courses have opened while community services and programs have been abandoned. 

 

Perhaps, then, the question of CA’s identity comes down to priorities. In that sense the pandemic has boiled the identity question down to this: Is it a community services organization hoping to salvage its struggling fitness business, or a struggling fitness business trying to preserve itself by scuttling community programs and services?

We have lots of questions, a few answers, and still a lot of uncertainty about CA. So, maybe the real answer lies in the question: What was it supposed to be? 

Stay tuned.