I have been following the controversy about the proposed golf clubhouse in Audubon Park, and have been attending public meetings about it. I took time off from work to attend the meeting of the Audubon Commission at noon on October 24. I have a huge number of concerns about what is going on, and also about the undemocratic process by which these decisions are being made.

First of all, I received an e-mail from the Save Audubon Park group the morning before the meeting, saying that an item had been added to the agenda, to vote on a 15-year consolidated contract that might merge the leadership of the Institute and the Commission. That morning before the meeting I tried to call some of the Commission members. I found C.C. Langenstein¹ at home, and asked her what was to be voted on that day. She confirmed that the contract would be voted on, but denied that the contract would involve any change in the role of the Institute and its leadership vis a vis the Commission and its leadership. Mrs. Langenstein told me that she did not know whether there would be a vote on this day about the clubhouse proposal. This surprised me greatly, because at the public forum of the Audubon Commission on Monday, October 15, we were told that the Commision would indeed be voting on the clubhouse proposal on October 24, and we were not told about any vote on new contracts.

When I arrived at the meeting of the Commission at noon on October 24, I discovered that the Institute was now offering the Commision a Plan A and a plan B.

I read the map of plan B with interest: it made several concessions to the concerns that citizens had voiced at the forum on the 15th; it moved the clubhouse to the river side of the grove, eliminating the road through the grove, and it reduced the amount of new parking lot to be built. I was pleased to see a proposal with these changes, and I was pleased that the Institute for the first time offered some numbers (though with no attribution of the source or confirmation of their validity) on the possible impact of the project on traffic, but I still had extremely serious questions and reservations about both.

Most of all I was extremely alarmed to discover that the Commission would be voting on this proposal which had never been seen by the public until this moment, and even now was being seen only by those citizens who were able to attend in the middle of a workday.

There were papers on which to sign up to speak. I saw one sheet of paper marked SPEAKERS FOR PLAN A, and another that just said SPEAKERS. I asked some people what the procedure was, but nobody could tell me, so I put my name on the list that just said SPEAKERS. Many people, well over a dozen, put their names on this list. The meeting commenced, and the president said they would be begin by hearing the speakers for one plan, then the other. Some people came up to speak; their names were not called by the president, but they seemed to know in what order they were to speak, so I don’t know how the procedure was being carried out. Then the president did begin to call on speakers by name. One speaker addressed the question of the contract, and the president said it was not on the table at the moment and could not be discussed; the speaker asked whether there would be public input on that question at this meeting at the proper time, and the president refused to answer.

At this time I noticed that the speakers’ list which I and several other people had signed had never been carried up to the president’s table. A lady, who I recognized as the representative of one of the Uptown neighborhood associations, carried it up to the president. Very shortly after this, he called an end to the period for public input! There was a question from one lady about whether the people opposed to both plans were to speak, but the president said that all time for public comment was now at an end. I think that he did not call a single speaker from the list I had signed; if he did call any from that list, it could not have more than one at the most, in the time between our list being placed on his table, and his cutting off the time for public comment.

When he did so, a cry of alarm and protest rose from the whole body of citizens present. At this time, I rose and said (to the best of my recollection): "I took time off work to come here in good faith, and I put my name on the speaker's list, and the speaker's list was not brought to the president's table, and I want you to know that when I first heard about this whole project I was in favor of it, but the continued arrogance of the Institute has driven me to the other side. I am making an honest effort in good faith to inform myself, but it takes me half an hour to walk here from my office, and half an hour to walk back, and so I had to take time off from work, and there is no process here, and I am extremely concerned about the process by which these decisions are being made" -- by which I meant that although technically I was out of order, I felt that the whole meeting was out of order, and the president was out of order, since he had had not even had the speakers' list on his table.

The president answered, and I quote verbatim: "Public comment will not be tolerated". I remember his exact words. He did not say anything else, as I recall. The room was filled with voices of protest. I turned to the citizens present and quoted the president’s words: “Public comment will not be tolerated! Public comment will not be tolerated!” Then I said, “I have to go back to my office; I have work to do.”

It is perfectly true that I was speaking out of order. I felt that it was necessary to speak immediately to protest what I considered the derailment of all democratic process at this meeting -- the contradictory messages the public had received about what exactly was being voted on, the introduction of a proposal to be voted on that had never been seen by the citizens until that hour, and the cutting short of any public comment on this.

Public Meeting, September 4th.

Editor's Note: For more commentary on the September 4th meeting click here

Many community-minded citizens were unaware of this project until they saw all the grass of the golf course torn up and fences around the heart of the park.

The Institute has argued that it has given fair notification to the public, but fully half of the newspaper articles they cite were actually published after the beginning of construction last summer, and the original notification was a tiny notice no bigger than a postage stamp. The owners of this Park cannot be expected to read every word of every legal notice in the Times Picayune every single day. Moreover, that tiny notice said nothing about the particular plans that we are now seeing actually under construction.

The bond issue approved by the citizens of New Orleans spoke only of "improvements" and contained no language that can be construed as describing these plans for a radical departure from the existing character of the Park.

The information on the Institutes’s website is extremely vague, it was not posted until very recently, and it keeps changing. Even though I have spent a great deal of time in the past few weeks researching these matters and talking to the Institute on the phone, I was completely ignorant of the "open house" tour of the club house site until too late, when I heard about it at the meeting October 15. Why did the Institute not taken the very obvious step of posting notices in the Park itself?

Why did the Audubon Institute pack the "Save Audubon Park" group’s September 4 meeting with its employees, to the exclusion of nearly a hundred citizens who were not able to get into the room?. Why did the Institute allow those employees to disrupt that meeting with constant chatter, cell phone use, coming and going through the doors and into the kitchen, and hooting the speakers? Why did those employees uniformly and continually jeer at citizens who requested them to be quiet so that they could hear the speakers? Why did not one of those employees yield a space in the meeting room to any of the nearly one hundred citizens who wanted to hear, but couldn’t get in, even when the chairwoman of the meeting requested that they kindly do so?

At that meeting the Audubon Institute presented a petition with the signatures of 3,000 citizens in favor of the Institute’s plans. The organizer of the meeting asked, "How many employees does the Audubon Institute have", and the Institute admitted it had just about 3,000. Is it true that the petition had been presented to the Institute’s employees at the time and place where they pick up their paychecks? Exactly how many signatures on that petition were names of Audubon employees, and how many were names of non-employees? When and where was that petition circulated for signatures?

At that meeting the Institute argued that the redesign of the golf course is absolutely necessary for the users of the jogging path to be safe from stray golf balls. Has any person ever been hit by a golf ball while on the jogging path? Has any person in the world ever been killed by a golf ball? Of those people who have been hit by golf balls while on the golf course, how many were injured, how many were hospitalized? How many people on the jogging path have ever been struck, injured, or killed by cars crossing on the drive off of Magazine St.?

Why was a proposal which had never been seen by the public presented to the Commission for a vote on October 24? Why was one of the speakers’ lists not placed on the president’s table for the public comment session, and why did he close that session after that list was presented to him by a citizen? Why were the majority of the Commission members absent from the public forum on October 15? Did the absent members receive any report of the comments made by the citizens at that meeting? What number of Commission members constitute a quorum?

Mark O'Bannon

¹ In the original version of this letter, Mr. O'Bannon mistakenly referred to the Audubon Commissioner he spoke to as being Phyllis Taylor, when in fact it was C.C. Langenstein. He offers his sincerest apologies for the mistake.