How do you say “catenary” in Hmong or Swahili? How do you elicit information from people, who don’t think their opinion will matter, that can help engineers design the Central Corridor light rail transit (LRT) line?
The public is always welcome to stop in and meet the outreach coordinators anytime during business hours Monday through Friday at the new Central Corridor LRT Project Office in the Griggs Midway Building, 540 Fairview Ave. N., St. Paul. The general phone number for the project office is 651-602-1940. See a map of the outreach coordinators and their territories. (pdf)
Coffeehouse owner Molly Barnhart (left) and outreach coordinator Jessica Hill chat during the September grand opening for the Overflow Espresso Café at 2929 University Ave. SE., Minneapolis. The coffeehouse is on the Central Corridor LRT route.
Tené Wells (left), president of WomenVenture, and outreach coordinator Rita Rodriguez discuss the advantages for the nonprofit organization’s transit-dependent clients of LRT. A Central Corridor LRT station is proposed in front of the Midtown Commons building at 2324 University Ave. in St. Paul where WomenVenture has its office.
Community outreach coordinator Shoua Lee (left) peruses the lunch menu with Hai Truong, owner of Ngon Vietnamese Bistro, 799 University Ave., in St. Paul. Truong told Lee he believes the half-mile distance between light rail stations on University will increase pedestrian traffic and neighborliness in the area.
Ephrem Mekonnen (left), an owner of Piazza Market at 512 N. Snelling Ave., talks with outreach coordinator Nkongo Cigolo about the location of the nearest LRT station.
You hire outreach coordinators who speak eight languages among them and can draw on their varied life experiences to talk face-to-face with residents, business people and community groups.
The Central Corridor LRT Project this summer hired Nkongo Cigolo, Jessica Hill, Shoua Lee and Rita Rodriguez to do community outreach, and assigned each a territory on the route based on their language skills and backgrounds. The coordinators, along with Robin Caufman, manager of public involvement for the project, have been hitting the streets to reach people who would be unlikely to attend public meetings or contact them.
As intended, the outreach staffers have learned things useful for project planners that they couldn’t have found out over the phone. Time is of the essence because important decisions must be made by spring, such as:
Sometimes, getting the information needed to help make the big decisions requires breaking bread with the public.
When Caufman went to give a speech about the LRT project to a gathering of the Norske Torske Klubben in St. Paul, she enjoyed cod slathered in butter with the Norwegian-American men’s cod-eating club.
When Hill dropped in on the Overflow Espresso Café’s grand opening one evening this month, she discovered more than a new place to have coffee. There was a lot of traffic.
Traffic in the Prospect Park section of Minneapolis is high on Hill’s list of concerns. “Prospect Park’s portion of University Avenue is narrower and has so much truck, student and residential traffic,” Hill said. “I am documenting everyone’s concerns, including parking layout, delivery locations and access to businesses to present to the engineers so that we can have a solid plan for the construction phase of the project.”
All of the outreach coordinators occasionally work evenings and weekends to talk with the public. They worked at the Metro Transit booth at the State Fair to distribute flyers and answer questions. Their intelligence gathering takes them to art fairs, music festivals and ethnic chamber of commerce events to hear the concerns of people who otherwise might not come to them.
Every month, the coordinators attend evening meetings of the Business Advisory Council (BAC) and Community Advisory Committee (CAC), groups that were created by the project to receive updates and provide advice. They also held several public open houses on summer evenings in community centers, a grocery store, a church and a senior housing complex. What they have learned will be very useful to consultants beginning preliminary engineering work that must be completed in less than a year.
“At the BAC meeting last night, we were discussing the first six stations,” Caufman said. “Nell McClung from the Griggs Midway Corp. noted that the location of the Fairview station floods every time it rains. That’s just the kind of thing we need to know about.” A project staffer noted the street flooding problem at Fairview and University to share with engineers.
Outreach coordinator Rita Rodriguez went a step further by arranging for an engineer to visit two businesses with her to answer the owners’ technical questions about how they would be impacted by construction. She did this after recalling her own frustrations trying to get information in the mid-1980s when curbs and sidewalks were reconstructed outside her mailing service business on University Avenue and the building was renovated.
“As a business owner, I looked at what I would have wanted to know,” Rodriguez said. “I couldn’t take the time to go to meetings back then to get information. Both owners are feeling like they’ve been heard and also that I’m going to keep them in the loop.”
To help the public better understand the project, Shoua took 13 community members from the Aurora/St. Anthony neighborhood for a ride on the Hiawatha LRT train.
“None of them had been on the Hiawatha before and had reservations about light rail going on University,” Lee said. “After a few minutes on the train, several of them started saying much more positive things about the light rail. Comments I heard were that the light rail was a very nice, comfortable ride.”
Face-to-face meetings are invaluable with groups with limited English skills.
“One challenge with languages is trying to explain things like catenaries and right-of-way, which often do not have an exact translation into other languages,” Lee said. “Sometimes, it comes down to simply bringing graphics with you or sketching out some graphics to explain how the trains will run down University Avenue.”
Cigolo, who came to the United States from Africa to attend the University of Minnesota, speaks Swahili, French, Spanish and two dialects of Bantu, a group of languages spoken in equatorial and southern Africa.
“I find it useful being an immigrant myself to communicate with other immigrants,” Cigolo said.
On a visit to the Rondo Community Library, he encountered a group of Somalis who spoke Swahili. “We chatted in Swahili about Central Corridor LRT, and it was very useful because some of the people in the group could not understand English.”
Misinformation about the project is something all of the outreach coordinators have encountered.
The owner of Christo’s, an African clothing and cookware shop, told Cigolo she had heard that the project would be acquiring buildings, shutting down businesses.
“I pulled out a brochure and showed Christo a map of how LRT will run in the middle of University Avenue,” Cigolo explained. “I also showed her a map of the proposed alignment with proposed stations. She said that the LRT was a very good project and mentioned that she would want to ride the trains.”
When Lee hears people say they shouldn’t bother to give feedback because project planners won’t listen, she said, “That’s when I tell them how many outreach coordinators have been hired to engage the community. “I tell them that if they don’t tell us important things about their neighborhoods, such as where their access points are, or where the dependent elders are in the community, then it’s impossible for us to know and plan for them.”
(A catenary is a system of overhead wires used to supply electricity to a light rail vehicle. The right-of-way is the area between and directly adjacent to the tracks.)
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