Johnson, who resigned from the city two weeks ago, won't talk about the grant or other related work in Central City South, or why she decided to leave her city post.
City records show that in early February, Johnson informed Avent, Fairbanks and other top city officials that the grant application had passed the first round of NEA review and that the city needed to submit a formal application by mid-April. She sent Avent a copy of the proposal letter, which details the purpose of the grant, how the city would have used it, and the names of the private corporations that had agreed to contribute $50,000 in matching funds the NEA required. Johnson also outlined her efforts to other city officials, who passed the information on to Avent.
Paolo Vescia
Residents of Central City South meet with city officials to discuss whether housing can be built in the area.
Paolo Vescia
John McIntosh, left, and Michael Dollin, coordinators of ASU's Joint Urban Design Program, told city councilman Cody Williams about decisions city officials were making without his knowledge.
Paolo Vescia
Terry Davis, executive director of the Phoenix Revitalization Corporation, has been pushing for more city involvement in Central City South.
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City officials say Avent was adamantly opposed to encouraging anything that raised expectations for housing, and that any new housing in the area would quickly become another slum. He, Fairbanks and others were particularly wary of repeating another ASU-like workshop where city management could not control the outcome.
Several days after the meeting with Avent, Johnson asked Frank Fairbanks whether she should go forward with the application.
"I don't have time to support an NEA application fight," he replied via e-mail. "Besides, I don't really understand the connection between the arts and the solution of this problem ..."
Fairbanks now tells New Times that he was worried the NEA grant would result in "a grand plan that turns South Central into the town of Paradise Valley. Then everybody's going to presume that somebody in the world has the money to do that. That would be okay if we had it, but we ain't got it."
Johnson formally withdrew the NEA application in mid-February. The city has "no consensus on the future direction for the area," she wrote in an e-mail to the agency's administrator. Without that "and a commitment to make future investments in this area, our grant application would not have been viable."
Cody Williams heard about the decision to kill the NEA grant four days after the February 10 meeting. And then it was from ASU urban design staff, not someone from City Hall.
"We told him at a community meeting," says John McIntosh of ASU. "It was the first Cody had heard of it. So he said he was going to call Frank Fairbanks that night to find out what was going on."
Fairbanks told Williams the city was going after the $35 million HUD grant instead. What Fairbanks didn't tell Williams was the grant was so last-minute that it probably wouldn't fly. And that Fairbanks had to overcome Avent's opposition to applying for the grant for Central City South, and that the NEA grant would have led to a design that was required to qualify for the HUD grant.
Moreover, the HUD grant is an odd choice for someone wary of raising expectations. The Hope VI grant program, as it's called, was designed to overhaul public housing and reverse its negative impact on surrounding neighborhoods. Cities have used it to replace blighted concentrations of low-income rental housing with new combinations of mixed-income owned and rented housing.
Still, Fairbanks' scurrying to get the Hope VI grant is perhaps not too surprising. City e-mails reveal profound ignorance and confusion at top levels of city management about both the grant process and the steps the city needs to take to assemble a plan to salvage this troubled city neighborhood.
Johnson and HUD officials had been advising Fairbanks and other city managers that the concentration of older public housing in Central City South and the community's efforts to rethink the neighborhood made it a good candidate for the large HUD grant.
The problem was that Avent and Gonzalez were opposed to spending the grant money there. Instead, they preferred to ask for money for the city-owned Foothills housing project, despite having been told by local HUD officials that Foothills probably would not meet the community-development criteria used to judge the grant applications.
E-mails show that Fairbanks was trying to convince Avent and Gonzalez to get an application on track. But time was short. The application is due in less than 45 days. HUD officials say most successful applicants spend many months, if not years, laying the groundwork for grants of this magnitude.
It requires extensive community involvement. And thus far, say Gonzalez and others, no one from the city or the PRC has mentioned the idea to the residents living in any of the affected housing projects.
Gonzalez says he hasn't been directed by anyone in city management to write the grant. "Frank did tell me to look at it. So at this point, I'm still assessing it."
Another problem, he adds, is "you need to actually have a design of what you want to do. I wasn't aware of that."
Carol Johnson was, but she's gone.
"So we are just going to have to pull a rabbit out of the hat," Fairbanks says now.
Contact Edward Lebow at his online address: ed.lebow@newtimes.com
