In Part 2 we continue our series on the up-and-coming innovative city, Lancaster, PA. Milzy Carrasco, Director of Neighborhood Engagement, and Chris Delfs, Director of Community Planning & Economic Development dive into some projects underway in their departments, and more generally, how priority projects align with the city’s strategic goals.
In Part 1 of our series on,the up-and-coming innovative city, Lancaster, PA, we talked with Mayor Danene about some organizational changes made to support open lines of communication internally and more effective engagement with residents. This interview with Milzy Carrasco, Director of Neighborhood Engagement and Chris Delfs, Director of Community Planning & Economic Development, we dive into some projects underway in their departments and more generally, how priority projects align with the city’s strategic goals.
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Featured government: Lancaster, PA
Episode guests: Milzy Carrasco, Director of Neighborhood Engagement and Chris Delfs, Director of Community Planning & Economic Development
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Lindsay: (00:05)
Welcome to the Govlaunch podcast. Govlaunch is the Wiki for local government innovation and on this podcast, we're sharing the stories of local government innovators and their efforts to build smarter governments. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, co-founder of Govlaunch and your host. Today, we continue our series on up and coming innovative city, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Last week I talked with mayor Danene Sorace about some organizational changes made to support open lines of communication internally and more effective engagement with their residents. I have here with me today Milzy Carrasco, director of neighborhood engagement and Chris Delfs, director of community planning and economic development. We'll talk about some projects underway in their departments, and more generally how these priority projects align with the city's strategic goals. So let's turn to Milzy and Chris to learn more about their work and hopefully get some tips for how to leverage some of these strategies in your own local government. Milzy and Chris, thanks so much for being here today. Can you quickly introduce yourself and share a bit about your role? Milzy I'll start with you.
Milzy: (01:13)
Thank you, Lindsay. Thanks for having us here again. Um, my name is Milzy Carrasco. I am the director for neighborhood engagement for the city of Lancaster. I work in the mayor's office and our department's charge is really to create engagement both internally and externally and I'm excited to share with you a little bit more about what that looks like.
Chris: (01:33)
Thank you very much for the introduction. My name is Chris Delfs. I am the director of community planning and economic development for the city. I have purview over six bureaus within the city and overall we focus on the economic, social and environmental, uh, growth and development of the city.
Lindsay: (01:54)
Excellent. Well, Milzy your role is relatively new in Lancaster. Um, and was a result of the restructuring that we talked about with your mayor in the prior episode, can you talk a bit more about your department structure and what are some core responsibilities you've been tasked with?
Milzy: (02:09)
Absolutely. And so our department's fairly new as you mentioned in 2018 new mayor and, um, one of her strategic priorities is strong neighborhoods. And we'll talk a little bit more about that later on in our work. As we're sharing it here in the podcast and part of strong neighborhoods was really developing this department. Department of neighborhood engagement. It was one of the things that residents have asked for. And so the primary function is really to create access externally for external partners, residents, you know, organizations, and then internally, really create a connection from our project managers, from city staff to the residents. As you know, local government is very service oriented, and sometimes you just need a liaison to connect some of the residents and the partners from the outside internally to some of our project managers. Internally, the work that we've started here is really developing a process on how to connect residents through our programs that we've developed here in our department, which is love your block neighborhood leaders academy, the citizens academy. So really creating a pipeline into projects for our city department.
Lindsay: (03:19)
Well, I know you touched on this a little bit, the internal engagement piece, and your role is primarily oriented around community engagement. but you do a lot of work in this internal engagement realm as well, which is less obvious for folks in neighborhood planning or neighborhood engagement. A lot of the times so much of the work that needs to happen is internal and breaking down those silos and getting communication barriers broken down, and working together toward these common goals across departments. So can you elaborate a bit more on the internal engagement piece for us?
Milzy: (03:53)
Sure, absolutely. So our department is really a resource and it's picked up, I would say through COVID it's become a very popular resource here in city hall. So it's, um, really working with project managers at the ideation stage. So if there's a new initiative at city hall, which is really where community engagement is so important is making sure that we're getting resident feedback and input at the beginning. So we've really developed a process on how to incorporate residents into the beginning, starting with resident advisory committees to help support their projects and getting them prepared. So there's this whole other preparation of setting expectations, making sure it's technology set up if we need language interpreters, you know, someone's, um, LEP. So that's kind of our function is making sure that there's residents that are prepared as well as how are we supporting our internal staff and just understanding the barriers.
And so how are we using simple language to make sure that we're connecting with residents? When we're looking at the three kind of areas for engagement, you know, is it informing, are we consulting or residents, are we collaborating with them? And so that's really the beginning process. Just understanding how we're working with residents and then developing an engagement plan for their project to support that. Really exciting.
Lindsay: (05:09)
Yeah, definitely. And your department is merged now with the Lancaster office of promotions and. I want to talk about the importance of that merger and the impact that's had on the mayor's strategic priorities of strong neighborhoods.
Milzy: (05:22)
Yeah. So Chris is on the call with us and Chris oversaw the Lancaster office of promotion also known as loop. Through COVID, um, we started to work very closely. There's communications in a marketing individual, you know, that works in that department. So as you know, a lot of cities had to pivot. And so our department transitioned to making sure that there was a ton of communications that were going out to residents. And I've talked to you Lindsay before about some of the creative ways that we did that. And so through that work that we were doing together, that was just a lot of synergies. We had a conversation with Chris, our chief of staff who is Jess king, and really talked about what this can actually look like. And I really do believe that this is the missing piece, right?
Milzy: (06:07)
We have this external engagement that's really creating access and informing residents of how government works and how they can get connected. And then we have this internal process that's happening really specifically to projects, but that now we have this incredible opportunity. And so the Lancaster office of promotion is really focused on promoting small businesses. So the economics, which ties back into Chris's department, and creating events, excitement in the city, bringing tourism that also supports small businesses. And so when you look at strong neighborhoods, um, the downtown area is a neighborhood. And so how can we expand the work of the department? That's really focusing the downtown area into all of our neighborhoods in the city. And, and it's looking at what we're doing, not changing what we're doing, but how can we increase what we're doing and making sure that it's accessible to all. And it really ties back into the equity commitments that the city has and making sure that we're equitable in the services that we're providing to all of our city residents.
Lindsay: (07:05)
And we're going to tap into some of the equity work in a future episode. So we're looking forward to that. But I want to talk specifically about a project or two that you feel really highlight the work your department has been doing and the success you've had there.
Milzy: (07:19)
Sure. I'll reference the external engagement. One of the programs is love your block. That was in partnership with Bloomberg philanthropies and cities of service, and really was the foundation of understanding what residents' needs were because we really actually built the program by canvassing and asking residents what their needs were. And so through canvassing and speaking to residents, we identified that people wanted to fix their neighborhoods, but really didnt have access or the know-how or the funds to do so. And they wanted to know their neighbors, engage with their neighbors in projects, but didn't know how to do that. And so love your block was really a project where we were training neighborhood leaders, showing them how they can identify issues in their neighborhoods and create solutions, and then fund some resident led projects. With that, that's created a lot of leadership.
Milzy: (08:11)
We have people now sitting on boards, commissions, and authorities like contacting us all. So we've really activated people through that program. And then internally a really great program that I love referencing. And we talked about this before we manage now and engage Lancaster platform, which is a digital prep platform in partnership with citizen lab. And one of the very early on projects that we launched there was, is duke street mobility project on duke street. And so the opportunity to work with project managers here, work with a citizen advisory board that's kind of guiding that process, and then working on a digital engagement and then traditional engagement where we're canvassing knocking on doors and partners are really two great examples of internal and external engagement.
Lindsay: (08:57)
Well, I want to tap into the love your block program. I know there's a grants component to it. Can you explain a little bit more about that and really what inspired Lancaster to roll this out?
Milzy: (09:08)
Yeah. So what inspired? Again and just referencing back to 2018, we needed this tool, like residents are telling us like, this is what they want. And we were just thinking about, all right, we need, we need funding. That's the first thing, the second thing is we need a framework of how this work, um, is going to be done. Right. And so, and then we need support to do this because this is just a team of one right here. We were doing more research and looking for opportunities. That's where we came across the cities of service grant for love your block. And it was really the framework that we needed and that our residents were asking for. So that's kind of what started. And that program actually is really the foundation. It's taught us about how to build community engagement internally, externally, it's expanded this national cohort. You know, last night, actually at eight o'clock. I was talking to the director of neighborhood engagement from Buffalo. That was part of the love your block cohort. So it's also an opportunity to share best practices. And it's literally the foundation of everything that we do here in our department.
Lindsay: (10:13)
Yeah, that's great. It's super inspiring. And if other local governments are curious or want to find out more, we've got some resources referenced in the Govlaunch story tied to the podcast. So Chris getting to you, obviously your work in economic development is really closely tied Milzy's work on the neighborhood level. Do you have a project or two you'd like to share with our listeners today?
Chris: (10:35)
Sure. I'd love to. And I'd like to pick up on some of the themes that Milzy mentioned in her remarks, particularly with love your block. I think that it is a really wonderful example of how innovation actually happens in local government. It was started as a pilot and as a framework, as Milzy mentioned, and it created this model for us to understand how we could do this work in other spaces. And so when innovation works well, we're able to replicate and then we're able to scale up, uh, as well. Um, there are a lot of different areas where we've been able to capitalize on that work that was seeded through Milzy's department. One thing I'd like to talk about, which is just top of mind right now, because we had a really great milestone in the last couple of days is related to our comprehensive plan. Our comprehensive plan.
Chris: (11:38)
If you're a city planner or otherwise, you may have had experience with comprehensive plans in the past, they are primarily land use documents, but they really establish a 20 year community vision for a city or municipality. And the last time that we had a comprehensive plan here in Lancaster was in 1993. So we have our work cut out for us. There is a huge appetite and interest in the comprehensive plan right now. The piece that I'd like to talk about for a moment is the process of designing the scope and creating a body of representatives that will help guide and drive the work. It is fairly common that comprehensive plans or other planning efforts utilize some kind of representative body or multiple representative bodies. But, uh, the part that I think is so creative that I'd like to speak to is the fact that we were able to create the comprehensive plan committee early in the process before the project got launched. And we have involved them in both the scoping of the process and ultimately in the selection of our consultant team, who will be managing the project. And it's a way to create that buy-in early in the process and to connect to leadership that Milzy developed through her programs. If we think about sustainable and equitable development, we need all of these stakeholders as part of this comprehensive plan, which will shape the economic development of the city for generations to come.
Lindsay: (13:28)
It's great that you bring up the comprehensive plan, more local governments are looking to this. Yeah they had one 30 years ago or however long ago. But a very wise manager once told me if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. And so this exercise of coming up with a, this is where we want to go, and yes, you have to be a little bit flexible because a 20 year plan the who knows where we're going to be in 20 years, but it at least gets the departments talking to each other and resources working together on how are we going to accomplish some of these goals and some of these milestones set. It's very closely tied to economic development and community planning, but really it involves, the vision for the city more holistically long-term. So I would encourage local governments listening regardless of size to take a look at this, the process of developing a comprehensive plan if you aren't already doing that, um, I want to talk about your housing assessment project. Let's get into that one. I know very little about it. So I'm just curious to talk about it more.
Chris: (14:30)
Sure. I'll start and then Milzy may want to jump in as well, because one of the areas that we both work on a lot these days is housing. It is a top concern of residents, both here locally, and also throughout the country, early in 2021, we completed a property condition assessment of every parcel in the city that amounts to about 18,000 properties overall, actually a little bit more than 18,000 properties. It was only an exterior assessment. So it doesn't give us the whole story, but it does give us a snapshot of both the quality of the parcel and the quality of the structure and this applied to all land uses, but it has a special value for the housing stock in the city in particular. I have a background in capital and facilities planning. And so I often look at the work that we do through an infrastructure lens. With respect to housing, it is a privately owned resource.
Chris: (15:37)
It is not a publicly owned resource like a park or a street, but I think it is very helpful to think about housing as a layer of infrastructure that is not tied to one owner, but that actually passes down from one family or household, uh, to the next generation. If we start to think about the value of housing over time, it's important that we understand how is that condition changing? Are we making progress? So one of the main purposes of this housing condition assessment was to really understand what is our baseline quality of our housing stock. And then how can we measure that progress over time and are the efforts that we're making with respect to our housing programs, actually making a dent in the problem or not.
Lindsay: (16:31)
We always like to leave local governments with some actionable insights, you know, takeaways. So I listened to this and go, okay, you have exterior assessments on all of these properties. How did you do that with your staff? Break it down for me, dumb it down. If I'm in local government and that sounds like a good idea. How do I do this in my city?
Chris: (16:54)
This points to a silver lining that happened because of the pandemic. And Milzy touched on this in one of her comments as well. We had housing inspectors that were during part of the year, uh, furloughed for a portion of the time because of the budgetary and financial challenges that we were up against. When we brought the housing inspectors back online, we crafted this as an activity that could, uh, temporarily replace a lot of the housing inspection work that they were doing on a day-to-day basis. There is a big question going forward. If we want to do this assessment on an annual basis, or every few years, for example, we will need to figure out how to resource this in the future. We have started looking at possibly supplementing the work through outside parties as well. I think this just speaks to trying to be nimble when the universe deals you a bad hand. I think it not only provided really critical data and information for the city. It also gave a sense of purpose to the housing inspectors and to that staff who really were not able to execute some of their core services during that time.
Lindsay: (18:19)
So Chris, your city has also launched a community priority survey. Can you tell us more about that and what the feedback is being used for specifically?
Chris: (18:28)
Absolutely. This relates to another planning exercise that is a requirement as part of our department. The US department of housing and urban development requires that cities complete an action plan every year for HUD funding. Every five years, it is necessary that cities complete what's called a consolidated plan or five year horizon of funding. In the past, there have been citizen participation requirements that are articulated by HUD, but to be honest, they are bureaucratic and they really just are intended to check the box. We very rarely received comments on the consolidated plan because it was a hundred page document that followed a very regimented, um, format through HUD. What we decided to do this year is during the development of the plan, the five-year consolidated plan, we use the engage Lancaster online platform to try to determine what are the priorities of our residents or that five years of funding, particularly for housing and community development related solutions. And we went from getting almost no comments the last few years to 322 responses through the online survey.
Chris: (20:02)
And we utilize those responses to help determine how would we allocate approximately $9 million of housing related funding over that five-year period.
Lindsay: (20:15)
Wow, that's great. Milzy, you're smiling. Do you have anything to add here?
Milzy: (20:19)
I mean, it's just so exciting. So when it goes back to like the internal, external communication that we were talking about before. Like here is, uh, such an impactful project, that's really going to fund some really critical initiatives here in the city. And so utilizing the digital engagement platform and really tracking, you know, the feedback and that it's visible, it's transparent, you know, it's accessible. And so when we're just talking about overall engagement, um, this is actually just a great story to tie back into our initiatives and our priorities. We're piloting this new engage Lancaster platform. So there's some competition as project managers are launching their projects on engage Lancaster. Everyone wants to beat the next one. It's creating like this excitement internally, which is really, you know, so important in the work that we're doing and ultimately creating access, um, for our residents to really influence, you know, the work that we're doing. So I get super excited about these things, I don't know if you can tell, and it was just super working with Chris and his team on this project.
Lindsay: (21:25)
It's really impressive to me. I hear it not as often, you know, being excited when you have all this transparency and you can really see how one project manager is performing relative to the other, and that there's this fun sense of competition. And that's when teams really come together and can accomplish great things. At Govlaunch, we like talk about failure too. You've had a lot of successes, but you're obviously each exploring some uncharted waters with these new innovative initiatives. Would love to talk about some of the lessons you've learned along the way. Things you'd want somebody else listening in to know before they start on the same journey.
Milzy: (22:00)
So I would say on the external engagement side of things, when I first started here, I came from working in a community base and bringing some of the assumptions of like, what I've been working on in the community into local government was definitely an area where I needed to improve upon. And I think that happened within like two days of working here, like, oh, okay, wait, this is actually how it works. And so bringing people into the programming and seeing it for themselves versus coming and saying, actually, that's not how it works. Being that one voice isn't the best way of influencing some of the change. Actually, how you're bringing people in to that change is really important. So I think that was an area within the first couple of months of starting here, that I was quickly able to adjust and say like, people need to see it for themselves. How are we creating that access? And I think related to, um, engage Lancaster and our new kind of focus on digital engagement and traditional engagement, how we're merging those two together. As I mentioned, we have several programs that are up there. The community's priority pole, by the time we had the community's priority poll we'd launched two other, um, initiatives on there, which was really related to community and policing in the city. So one of our early assumptions were, this is a hot topic, let’s just put it out there, let's see how people will engage there. Wasn't a lot of engagement, right? And so it's just not launching the product or the project. It's really about how you're still connecting an engagement with really key stakeholders, how you're making it more accessible. Are you completing that survey, making sure that it's printed. Are used still canvassing. So I think earlier on, um, on our digital engagement side of things, it helped us set up some best practices. We can see, um, came across on our community priorities poll.
Lindsay: (23:51)
Yeah, certainly there's this misconception that you sign up with some digital platform and you're going to get automatic engagement and it doesn't solve for the need to be campaigning for these types of things. So that's a great, great point that you bring up. Chris, how about you?
Chris: (24:07)
Milzy, I appreciate that you focused on some concrete lessons learned when I was thinking about this question, I actually zoomed out and was thinking about change management and about leadership. I think about those things a lot, because change management is very challenging in a local government or government setting period. I would say that resource allocation is always a challenge within local government and we usually talk in dollars, but I actually think that time is the most precious resource. And I think it is really critical that you're finding a way to balance your ambition for these new programs, new innovations and practicality, because we're always stretched. And it makes sense in my mind to try to prioritize quality over quantity where possible. I also think just on a personal level that self-awareness in terms of what type of leader you are, is really important. And I was thinking about this element of failure, things that went well and didn't and things that have not gone well, and it is important to understand what kind of decision-maker you are, are you a fast decision maker?
Chris: (25:30)
Are you a slow decision maker? Where is the sweet spot? And I tend to be a little more deliberative and try to be thoughtful, but I would advise that managers and leaders should typically trust their instincts. If it feels like something is off, there is usually something off. And to try to put in place a, a clear process for making a decision that is tied to a particular timeframe. I think that is really important. On the flip side, if you tend to be a fast decision maker, you should probably check yourself and make sure you are collecting all the facts and that you're seeking to understand first before making change. Because if you make change without understanding the system *then you can create big mess. So, um, I think it is that Goldilocks strategy of trying to find that middle ground that works and is actually effective in terms of institutionalizing change in the long term.
Milzy: (26:37)
I'm going to add something to that. I appreciate you sharing that. Both Chris and I have experienced, um, several things that he's just mentioned. And I think the key here is like really having a team, right? And so part of this administration, something that's really, um, strong and unique. And as we work with other municipalities, understanding that the connection at the executive leadership team, and then the buy-in into the work that we're doing, you know, I have an incredible privilege of working with Chris, bouncing ideas off. This morning, we had a great conversation as I was coming into work. We discussed some challenges, some opportunities and how we're supporting each other. And I think that, um, not that I think I actually know why this city has had an opportunity to be so innovative in our work is really that comradery at the executive leadership team and really like that unified focus on the priorities that we're working on. So I can't tell you Chris, how much I appreciate you. And this opportunity just to share this moment of the work that we're doing together, because we do support each other in the work that we're doing.
Chris: (27:48)
I echo that sentiment, Milzy completely. Milzy, and I are actually very different, but we work very well together. And it is important that you seek counsel amongst your trusted team members. And there really is wisdom in that dialogue and tapping into those different perspectives. It, uh, is really a blessing that we get to work together every day.
Milzy: (28:12)
It is.
Lindsay: (28:13)
Well, you guys are just a breath of fresh air. Everybody should want to come work in your city. It sounds great.
Milzy: (28:19)
They should. It is great.
Lindsay: (28:23)
Chris, you mentioned time is a very valuable resource. And so I want to thank you guys for giving me so much time today. I really look forward to continuing the conversation next week, as we talk about equity and sound government and some of the great ways your city is making this a priority. You've certainly given a lot of local governments listening in great ideas, and creative ways to engage and build loyalty and trust with the community, work better together as a team and collaboratively as leaders. So thank you again for being here and really sharing your important work.
Chris: (28:54)
Thank you so much, Lindsay.
Milzy: (28:56)
Really appreciate it, Lindsay. And for more information, you can always go to visit Lancaster PA or you can also go to cityoflancasterpa.com. I had to do that. Thank you Lindsay.
Lindsay: (29:08)
We will also attach this as resources to the Govlaunch story. Thanks guys.
Milzy: (29:14)
This is great. Thank you so much, Lindsay.
Lindsay: (29:22)
I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano and this podcast was produced by Govlaunch the Wiki for local government innovation. You can subscribe to hear more stories like this, wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a local government innovator, we hope you'll help us on our mission to build the largest free resource for local governments globally. You can join to search and contribute to the wiki at govlaunch.com. Thanks for tuning in. We hope to see you next time on the Govlaunch podcast.