Navigating without a North Star

It’s Throwback Thursday here at the Columbia Flyer and we’re throwing it back to…. February.

I wrote the following piece in February, before the pandemic up-ended everything, and had planned to submit it as an op-ed. However, as the reality of COVID-19 start setting in, my attention and priorities shifted.

I’m sharing it now to highlight the fact that CA’s struggles pre-date the pandemic and maybe also to show that this is something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

The bottom line for me is that CA has lost its way, and its response to the pandemic and associated challenges has caused it to drift even further off course. Or: “CA needs leadership that is looking out for Columbia’s interests, not just CA’s…”

But you can read the whole thing and let me know what you think!

Columbia founder James Rouse still looms large over the “Next American City.” His name is invoked often, usually in a nostalgic callback to the halcyon days of the city’s birth when the visionary developer conducted a grand symphony of big ideas and bulldozers.

What is often missed is that Rouse’s greatest strength was not as a planner, businessman, or salesman—it was his perspective. Notably, it was his ability to be clear-eyed about problems of the day, pragmatic about potential solutions, and optimistic about our ability to collectively shape our futures. Rouse anticipated change and sought to steer it, building a city that could help its residents manage the uncertainty of change.

Unfortunately, Columbia hasn’t had this kind of leadership for many years. Indeed, over the last two decades, Columbia’s leaders—in particular, the elected members of the Columbia Association’s Board of Directors—have struggled both to acknowledge the world for what it is and to present a compelling vision for how Columbia could evolve to respond to our challenges.

Columbia was founded in the context of and in response to great social upheaval, but its leaders often seem unaware of the upheavals of the 2020s and the need for Columbia to respond.

Instead, we’re re-arranging tot-lots while society’s tectonic plates collide underneath.

The Columbia Association is not Columbia, to be sure. It is not a municipal government, and its elected directors are, like directors of all corporations, responsible primarily for ensuring the organization’s financial solvency. But CA enjoys the benefits of steady, dependable government-like revenue by way of its annual charge on all property owners, and it has none of government’s daunting responsibilities like emergency services, public utilities, or school funding.

With such a stable financial foundation, CA’s directors can and should focus on ensuring Columbia remains a great place to live, work, and play and that it reflects the essential values embedded in the community’s bedrock. But when faced with opportunities to guide Columbia’s future with visionary leadership, CA’s directors have abdicated these responsibilities.

For instance, starting in 2005 residents of Columbia engaged in a years-long community dialogue that lead to a new master plan for Downtown Columbia. Motivated largely by reflexive opposition to new development, CA’s directors at the time removed the organization from the planning conversation, losing 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 no role or influence in the future of Downtown Columbia.

More recently, the conversation in Howard County turned to economic and racial segregation in our neighborhoods and public schools, particularly those in Columbia. While the school system’s redistricting process was incredibly contentious, an essential component of Columbia’s identity is integrated schools. And for CA, the organization founded to further the Columbia way of life, to remain silent on a matter that is essential to Columbia’s identity is a rejection of its own foundational purpose.

These are large examples, but the small ones are everywhere too. CA’s most recent capital improvement projects include an exclusive and expensive wellness retreat, a new clubhouse and restaurant at one of its golf courses, and an indoor tennis club. Not only are these risky investments in the rapidly changing fitness market, but none of these projects helped to address ongoing disinvestment in Columbia’s older villages and village centers, an opportunity lost.

What makes this especially frustrating is that CA is full of friendly, dedicated team members who take pride in their work and their community. From the operations crews to the lifeguards to the division chiefs and executives, CA staff are exemplary ambassadors for the organization and the community.

And to be sure, there are members of the board of directors who work as diligently as its staff in spite of the myopia of their colleagues. But even best board member will get bogged down in the morass of unnecessary meetings, busywork, and intra-board conflicts that have come to characterize the board’s operations.

CA has such great potential to reposition Columbia as a vanguard for how suburban life can be reimagined in the 21stcentury, a place that recaptures some of the optimistic zeitgeist of its founding, renewed for a time of even more social, political, economic, and environmental upheaval. Instead it is adrift, rudderless in ever-changing seas.

The solution is within reach, however, and it is not especially complicated. CA needs leadership that is looking out for Columbia’s interests, not just CA’s, and who recognize that this is a city that was built to anticipate change and foster positive solutions for society’s challenges.

James Rouse can no longer point to the path ahead for Columbia. And unfortunately for now, neither can CA.

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.

Nuts and Bolts

I have no clue what frequency I’ll be writing, but my hope is to dedicate a couple hours each week to writing. Whether these will be fruitful hours or not is and will remain for some time an open question. So, expect a post a week, maybe two. The next post will come out on Monday. 

My plan is to keep posts between 500-800 words. Long enough to delve below the surface of a particular question or problem, but not so long as to make every post an exposition. Putting a cap on word count will help me keep posts focused. One of the biggest challenges I have faced in trying to think and write about CA is that it can become an expansive conversation, with many intersecting threads that go back decades. Rather than one long manifesto, this will make writing, reading, and discussing more manageable. 

 

It will also allow me to reflect on feedback I receive. While I’ve done a fair amount of research in the last few months—reading old newspaper reports, legal documents, and other archived materials—I know there is much I have missed, nuance and context that have been lost in time. 

 

So I encourage conversations about the posts or about this effort more broadly. For that reason, I have opened comments on the blog, but you can also comment to me on twitter (@iankennedy7), on the Columbia Flyer facebook page, or you can send me an email (handle is the same as twitter, but put a “.” between my first and last name and address @gmail). 

 

Finally, because I have to say it, everything I write here reflects my personal beliefs and opinions, and not those of any other person or entity. Obviously, I have inherent biases that anyone is welcome to question.

 

But this blog and my writing is a good faith exercise in community dialogue and an attempt to add perspective, context, and information to a matter—the governance and future of the Columbia Association—that has not been subject to sufficient consideration and conversation. During the first few decades of CA’s existence, its actions and deliberations were exhaustively covered by multiple regional and local newspapers. These days, you will generally only see the Columbia Association in the newspapers as an advertiser.

I am not suggesting that I can fill that information void, but I hope to close it at least a little. 

A New Direction

I have a potentially unhealthy obsession with something no one else seems to care about: the Columbia Association. 

 

It is not entirely fair to say that no one else seems to care much about the Columbia Association. The truth is that most people don’t care, but a small number of people really, really care. And I am one of them.

This dichotomous dynamic—community-wide complacency combined with narrow, intense interest from a select few—has characterized the Columbia Association’s governance and politics for almost its entire existence. How and why it got this way and what to do about it are the questions I hope to confront on this blog over the next few weeks, months, years, whatever.

 

Despite some high-profile disagreements with CA and members of its leadership over the years, however, I’m not embarking on this work out of spite, professional obligation, or personal animosity. (At least I don’t think I am, but we’re all selfish beings with fine-tuned engines for motivated reasoning so who really knows what underlies any of our actions?) 

 

I am writing because of a long-held conviction that CA can be so much better than it is. 

 

That’s a pretty vague statement and it could mean all sorts of things. Anyone who’s followed CA over the years also knows that making it “better” has been the rallying cry of the most significant—and, more or less, only—community advocacy organization focused on CA, the Alliance for a Better Columbia. 

 

So, I should clarify what I mean by “better.” Columbia is a special city founded on a set of lofty, aspirational ideals and CA is the only organization that exists expressly to promote the social welfare of this city. While Columbia continues to be a great place to live and work, it has evolved from its early days and faces challenges—both local and global in scale—that call into question the foundational values upon which it was built. 

 

A better CA, therefore, is one that recognizes its unique role as a steward of the ethos, values, and aspirations of Columbia’s founding; it is one that examines its place within the cultural, social, and political currents of the day and asks whether its actions embody the core values of the organization and the community it serves; and it is one that questions its institutional structures, biases, and blindspots to ensure its practices and programs are not undermining its own mission; and it is one that proactively seeks to include voices and viewpoints that are or have been underrepresented among its leadership.

 

In short, a “better” CA is one that pursues the aspirations of Columbia’s founding and holds itself accountable to those values and ideals.

 

It is the only institution that is truly dedicated to this “garden for growing people” and my contention is that it is currently failing to live up to this critical role. 

 

Amidst the howling social, cultural, economic, and political winds of our time, CA is unmoored and adrift, uncertain about what it is or what it should be. This predicament became even more precarious in the last six months as the pandemic brought on dire, existential questions. In answering these questions, CA’s leaders choose to prioritize re-starting its fitness businesses, which serve “members” and “customers,” while abandoning most of the community programs and services that are available to all residents. 

 

During the greatest disruption in social and community life in CA’s existence, it chose business over community, and this, in my mind, the most glaring example of why Columbia needs CA to be better. 

 

However, before CA can be the better organization that I know it can be, there needs to be a shared literacy about what it is, how it got here, what it does, and what it can be. 

 

Consider this a spotlight, dim as it is, to help illuminate and understand the path we took to get here, the intersection where we now stand, and the divergent paths that lie ahead.