After receiving two detailed presentations on the program in two weeks, the Vance Organization to Implement Community Excellence is sold on the federal Weed and Seed program.
On a unanimous voice vote, VOICE decided Wednesday to pursue official designation for Henderson as a Weed and Seed city, joining 10 cities in North Carolina and more than 330 sites nationwide.
Operation Weed and Seed is a grass-roots strategy to drive out criminals from an area — weeding it — and to bring a variety of services to that area — seeding it — to spark revitalization; community policing bridges the two elements of the program. The revitalization could include the sort of physical overhaul of neighborhoods that the Clean Up Henderson Committee has moved toward.
Weed and Seed advocates such as City Manager Eric Williams, VOICE’s newly elected chairman, and Team Vance leader Marolyn Rasheed have pushed VOICE and the Vance County Coalition Against Violence to pursue the federal program.
Weed and Seed is a Department of Justice initiative that began with 21 cities in 1991 under the first President Bush, expanded rapidly through the 1990s under President Clinton and has leveled off amid flat funding under the current President Bush, Don Connelly told VOICE on Wednesday morning at the Aycock Recreation Complex.
Connelly is the official in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina who coordinates Weed and Seed programs in any of the 44 counties U.S. Attorney Frank Whitney handles. There are four Weed and Seed zones in Whitney’s district: two in Raleigh, one in Fuquay-Varina and one in Lumberton, although Lumberton’s designation is set to expire this spring after five years.
In explaining the program and the application process for Weed and Seed, Connelly emphasized that federal funding is not guaranteed, nor is it the primary benefit of the program. “Even if no new money was brought in, no new grant money from the federal government, if you can come up with a locally driven, coordinated strategy, that effort can pay off more than any amount of money will.”
The other benefits are preferences for federal grants, the possibility of training and technical assistance, the right to use the Weed and Seed logo, and the eligibility to apply for Weed and Seed grants for each of the five years of the designation.
“Getting the designation makes all kinds of resources available to you,” Police Chief Glen Allen said.
The core Weed and Seed grant is for $175,000, at least half of which must be spent on the Weed side and community policing. But Connelly said more than 80 of the 330 Weed and Seed sites in the nation did not receive program grants this year.
“The program grew in popularity much faster than the funding,” Connelly said.
He also said the Department of Justice would like to move toward funding all Weed and Seed sites, but that goal leads to tougher judgment of applications. Connelly said only 25 percent of last year’s applicants nationwide received Weed and Seed recognition.
“You need to look at crime statistics because right now that’s what drives the designation process,” Connelly said.
At the same time, he recommended “that you try to kind of get an early success. Pick something that’s visible that people will buy into it.”
Weed and Seed’s fundamental principles closely align with VOICE’s:
* Community involvement. Connelly said Weed and Seed does not use a cookie-cutter approach to solving the crime problem in various cities. Instead, it relies on individual communities to develop the appropriate strategies for them. “You really have to get the people involved that the program is going to affect.”
VOICE has an open membership and is looking for innovative approaches to fight crime and its causes in Henderson and Vance.
* Coordination and concentration of resources. Connelly said Weed and Seed operates as an “umbrella organization” to bring together various service and government agencies and ensure they know what one another are doing. Weed and Seed brings those agencies together and concentrates their efforts in the target community.
VOICE is essentially a coalition of service and government agencies that Williams regularly referred to as an “umbrella group” before it adopted a name. As part of VOICE’s effort to coordinate those agencies’ efforts and expose the gaps in services, Ben Foti and Donna Stearns are creating a spreadsheet that shows the programs of the agencies and whom they serve. Foti said Wednesday that he intends to present the first version of that spreadsheet to the organization at its next meeting, set for June 1.
* Private-sector investment. “Frankly, this could be the most difficult part of the program,” Connelly said. People won’t invest in an area, seeding it with new jobs, until they feel safe there. He said private investment is crucial to the whole program.
One of VOICE’s basic purposes is to draw new money to Vance and Henderson for law enforcement and other programs that can improve life here.
VOICE could play a direct role in the Weed and Seed program, Henderson police Lt. Perry Twisdale said two weeks ago during his presentation on how Weed and Seed works and how it could be brought to Vance County.
The first step in planning a Weed and Seed initiative is to form a steering committee combining law enforcement, local government, human services, interested nonprofit groups and residents of the designated community. VOICE already has all of the elements, with the possible exception of the community residents — it depends on where the proposed Weed and Seed area’s lines are drawn.
Connelly also said the steering committee could wind up being VOICE.
“As you can see, we have (along with a couple of other organizations that are quite active) assembled all the key players who, collectively, can help develop our strategy and seek designation as a Weed and Seed community,” Williams wrote in a thank-you e-mail message to Connelly later Wednesday.
Twisdale led the city’s effort to seek Weed and Seed recognition in 1998 and 1999, when Henderson wanted to designate an area centered on the Orange Street corridor. That extensive effort fell short, Allen said, when the city couldn’t identify the required “safe haven” — a building providing necessary seed services in complete safety from drugs, gangs and other criminal activity.
Such a haven is no longer mandatory for a Weed and Seed application, Connelly said, but it is highly recommended. Designating a haven will help the application win approval, he said, and as with many elements of the Weed and Seed process, it’s a good idea even without Weed and Seed. It could be a community center, a church, a school or a vacant building, as long as it is accessible within the neighborhood.
Selecting that neighborhood and that haven will be part of the task for a VOICE subcommittee the group authorized Williams to appoint. Businessman Cliff Rogers made that motion, which City Council member Lonnie Davis seconded.
The designated area must have contiguous borders and must be home to at least 3,000 people. Williams would like an area that stretches beyond the city limits to bring in county resources and create a stronger, multijurisdictional application.
VOICE faces an Aug. 31 deadline to get a letter of intent signed by local officials and the U.S. attorney, but Connelly said there’s no challenge there. Drafting a letter shouldn’t take more than an hour, and Whitney will sign the letter even if it arrives Aug. 30.
The real deadline for the Henderson-Vance application is Oct. 15. By that date, the city must have a complete application of no more than 50 pages submitted to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which then has until Oct. 31 to reject the application or send it on to the Community Capacity Development Office at the Department of Justice.
Connelly said Washington officials are putting more pressure on the U.S. Attorney’s Office to weed out questionable applicants.
Rogers asked whether Henderson will be at a disadvantage because it’s not a big city. While Connelly said the program was designed to pull the worst neighborhoods out of big cities, Fuquay-Varina and Lumberton are examples of smaller cities that have succeeded.
Dollie Burwell, an aide to Congressman G.K. Butterfield, D-Wilson, noted that her boss’s 1st District has no Weed and Seed sites, so that could be a point in Henderson’s favor. Greenville, part of the 1st District, was a Weed and Seed site, but its designation expired.
Because official designation as a Weed and Seed community does not necessarily bring money, the Justice Department has no cap on the number of Weed and Seed sites, Connelly said. If a city’s application scores enough points, it should receive the designation.
“You’ll see us pretty aggressively try to seek Weed and Seed designation,” Allen said, but the VOICE subcommittee needs to keep local funding in mind. Weed and Seed programs involve so many elements for so many people that they require a full-time coordinator, and neither the police nor any other department in local government has a person to spare for the job.
The next step for the local effort could be attendance of a June 13 meeting in Durham. That session will gather representatives of North Carolina’s Weed and Seed programs to share information and ideas on what works in replacing drugs, gangs and violence with community activities and social services.