When Lori Covington started attending the Southside’s Tomorrow’s Neighborhoods Today meetings in 1998, she witnessed a lot of complaining and little action.
“I wasn’t seeing any progression forward,” said Covington, the coordinator for the Southside Family Resource Center of P.E.A.C.E. Inc. It is a nonprofit, community-based organization. Added Covington, “Everything was constant complaints.”
In 2011, she said, she returned to a more evolved TNT. “At a TNT meeting, you’re actually hearing from the community and it’s actually connecting with City Hall,” she said.
TNT was created in 1999 to allow residents, businesses and organizations to meet, to formulate five-year plans on neighborhoods’ priorities and to voice their concerns to the city government. The TNT covers the city’s eight areas: Downtown, Lakefront, Northside, Eastwood, Valley, Southside and Westside. Each neighborhood receives a $5,000 grant from the city’s general fund to spend on the neighborhood’s priorities.
Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner’s office took over responsibility of the TNT last year. “I think it’s really helped, having this direct communication between the TNT and the mayor’s office and the city as a whole,” said Luke Dougherty, the city’s community engagement director, who oversees TNT.
Barbara Krause, TNT facilitator and chair of the Court-Woodlawn Task Force on the Northside, cites several accomplishments for TNT groups. For example, the Danforth-Pond-Butternut and Washington Square Task Forces pushed for the new Tops Friendly Markets supermarket on Pond Street.
“They advocated for it and asked Mayor Miner’s office to support it and obviously, she did,” she said. “She saw a need for it.”
And when students at Grant Middle School faced harassment after school, police officers responded swiftly. “They stepped up patrols, watched what was going on, made their presence known,” Krause said.
Other accomplishments on the Northside: an oval garden in front of Grant Middle School, a karate program at the Pastime Athletic Club, a profit men’s club and code reform.
In the Downtown neighborhood, the TNT organization also works with the Downtown Committee, which represents property owners and tenants in the central business district.
Neighborhood groups, said Lisa Romeo, the Downtown Committee’s communications coordinator, give citizens a voice. “Anything that allows us to better represent our constituents is a really good thing,” Romeo said.
But some others in different neighborhood groups say the TNT is geographically limited. Among them is Maarten Jacobs, director of the Near Westside Initiative. It is a non-profit that focuses tightly on revitalizing the Near Westside.
Smaller groups than TNT, said Jacobs, would be more effective because they would draw enough people to clearly represent the needs of their neighborhood. “If you’re only getting 15 to 20 people to show up from a quarter of the city, it’s definitely not representative of the issues and concerns of the city,” Jacobs said.
At a Southside TNT meeting in February, three projects were approved: $2,825 for bleachers for Kirk Park’s baseball field; $2,040 for a batting cage foundation at Wadsworth Park and $350 for a wooden sign for a community garden on Midland Avenue. These projects are likely to be approved at the Common Council’s meeting on March 4 and completed by May, said Dougherty, the city’s community engagement director for TNT.
For Southside’s returning TNT participant, Lori Covington said, those are more good signs. “Just in the last few months that I’ve been going back to the TNT,” said Covington, “I’ve seen it grow.” Now, she said, she’s optimistic about TNT’s future. “Coming back to it after being gone for 10 years,” Covington said, “I actually see a new sense of energy taking place.”
(Madina Toure is a graduate student studying magazine, newspaper and online journalism.)
-30-
(Editor’s note: This story was updated to include the status of Southside projects.)
