Cuomo's Concept: Community Connections

January 1996

EXECUTIVE MEMO

Cuomo's Concept: Community Connections

f you build it, and they don't come, go out and get them. That's the philosophy behind a new effort at the Department of Housing and Urban Development to increase citizen participation in community planning.

Andrew Cuomo, HUD's assistant secretary for community planning and development, is concerned that average citizens have grown alienated from their government. "Some say, if people wanted to get involved, they would come to the hearing in the council chambers at 7 p.m. on Tuesday night," he says. "No. I think the burden is on government to be relevant to the people. The burden is on government to speak the citizen's language, not require that citizens learn our acronyms or read our 200-page planning documents. This means we must give information in the way other institutions do-quick, informative, concise. On computer. In the home."

Enter Cuomo's brainchild-Community Connections, a citizen outreach effort that makes full use of information technology. Cuomo's office has set up a toll-free number (800-998-9999) and helped create a Web site on the Internet (http://www.hud.gov) from which citizens can obtain information for more than 900 communities. A second Web site (http://www.ezec.gov) provides information about empowerment zones and "enterprise communities."

But HUD officials say the centerpiece of Community Connections is the mapping software package the department will provide to community groups and citizens for a subsidized price of $125. When the Windows-based mapping software and accompanying Census data and federal project files are loaded onto a personal computer, a user can pull up a map of a neighborhood and view it according to race, income levels and unemployment rates; see where the locality plans to build its next police station; or compare development projects on a block to projects in another area of a city.