The relationship between the City of Anaheim and its residents has been fairly contentious over the past few decades. Residents see the City as unresponsive, which City staff seem to have the attitude that residents are an obstacle to overcome instead of participants in the decision making process. This status quo will not produce a vibrant and invigorated community. Residents need to be more involved and the City needs to enable residents to become more involved at a time and place their input can make a difference.
Through the late 1970s and into the ’80s, the City of Anaheim, lead by the Anaheim Redevelopment Agency, sought to revitalize the city’s flagging downtown by demolishing what was there and rebuilding. At the time, some Anaheim residents tried to save downtown, but the Agency pushed ahead with its plans despite the objections.
Everybody, residents and City Hall alike, knew that something needed to be done with Anaheim’s downtown. The storefronts had been taken over by adult bookstores, the movie theater showed x-rated films. Many residents wanted a reinvigorated downtown, bringing it back to its heyday from decades earlier. The Redevelopment Agency’s plan was to scrape the existing buildings off the land to make way for something new. The Agency moved ahead with its plans, which unfortunately has turned out poorly.
As a reaction to the city moving forward with a plan that was not supported, Anaheim saw a resurgence of civic participation throughout the city. Many organizations were revitalized or created in reaction to the City’s lack of responsiveness to the residents. These organizations—such as The Anaheim Historical Society and the Anaheim Neighborhood Association—are still active within the city and they are influential along the margins.
The City of Anaheim, to its credit, also made some changes to get residents more involved. Anaheim expanded its boards and commissions and created the neighborhood district council system. While these bodies allow more people to be involved in making recommendations for the city, they are toothless bodies unable to affect change. So while Anaheim made some token efforts to involve more residents, there was no fundamental change at City Hall to make the city more responsible to the residents.
The Anaheim Redevelopment Agency continues to be the worst offender in this regard. The Agency will almost always reach out to the communities in which it wants to build something new, but only after the project has been decided on. That is not to say that the Agency does bad work, only that their process is backwards and broken.
What Anaheim needs, and residents should demand, is a new system for civic engagement within the city. This new system needs to be responsive to the residents so they believe that their voices will be heard. The first step in this process needs to be residents being consulted in the initial stages of a project when real changes can still be made.
For any of this change to happen, City Hall and the residents need to trust one another a little more than they do now. Residents need to understand that City Hall is trying to look out for the best interests of the city as a whole. At the same time, City Hall needs to trust the residents to be reasonable in their feedback to the City’s plans. But residents will only be reasonable if they are well informed and believe that new city projects are truly the best thing for their community.
The City of Anaheim has made many missteps and done many misdeeds that have created mistrust within the residents of the city. The city needs to regain that trust if we are to come together as a community to work towards our common good.
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