Why I Serve on the VHCA Board (and Why I Don’t Like Social Media)

by Jenifer Keenan

I have been a proud member of the VHCA Board for three years.  People often ask why I do this “thankless job” and the answer is always the same – I love Virginia-Highland and want to give back to our great neighborhood.  The things that VHCA and the hundreds of volunteers who support VHCA accomplish are pretty amazing – we put on Summerfest and the Tour of Homes, meet with home owners and neighbors on all construction variances, coordinate and finance major improvements to John Howell Park, funded over $100,000 in grants to the public schools in our neighborhood, and own and maintain North Highland Park.

VHCA also acts as a liaison (or instigator!) for projects big and small, whether it’s working with the city on one-sided parking for a narrow residential street, improving sidewalks, requesting (and getting) weed abatement from the City for our neighborhood and surrounding areas, facilitating safety improvements on our streets, organizing and funding supplemental clean-up and maintenance of our business districts, helping with runoff from poorly regulated construction projects, spearheading efforts to preserve the fire station on North Highland, leading the Master Plan, meeting with all kinds of city agencies, or helping neighbors with concerns about renovation and development occurring in our neighborhood.

In spite of all of these wonderful accomplishments, “the Board” is often criticized or attacked on social media.  In my role as a Board Member, I have been accused on social media (never in person or on the phone) of “pursuing my own agenda” – a particularly strange claim given that I don’t have an “agenda” for our neighborhood.  And recently, someone on social media even suggested that the Board members should be sued for voting on, and approving (at a meeting that was open to the public) an expenditure for a project to explore the development of design guidelines/overlay for VaHi.

Rather than asking “what is a design overlay,” people assumed that it was the same as historic designation.  And although a few vocal voices on social media claim that “the majority of the neighborhood” is vehemently against any building restrictions or development guidelines, the emails and calls that the Board constantly receives asking us to “do something to fight the McMansion going up next to my house” or “prevent the modern design proposed by my neighbor” show otherwise.  In fact, during the Master Planning process, more people said that the destruction of historic properties/in-fill development is the biggest challenge facing our neighborhood than any other issue.

And yet, all of this really misses the point, because the Board has not proposed any guidelines – we have hired a consultant to explore the possibility of guidelines.  Why not simply ask for more information on this, or any other of the dozens of projects undertaken by VHCA, rather than accusing the Board on social media of pursuing some nefarious agenda?  At this point, the consultant has merely taken an inventory of existing structures in VaHi.  If, and when, any guidelines are developed, they will go through the same process used for the Master Plan – there will be a series of small meetings and large public meetings and various opportunities to determine if guidelines are appropriate, and if so, what those guidelines should be.

The Board has also been accused of “doing things in secret” – a claim that I find particularly disturbing given all of our efforts to keep the neighborhood abreast of all VHCA activities.   During the Master Plan process, I personally wrote six articles for The Voice, as well as attended over a dozen meetings on the Master Plan.  Furthermore, all of our Board meetings are videotaped, and all committee and board meetings are open to the public.  Remarkably, there has even been criticism of our use of videotaped minutes of our meetings, even though videotape minutes certainly provide a more complete picture of what transpired at the meeting than the cursory summary that is typically found in written minutes.

I often invite these critics of VHCA and the Board to sign up for a VHCA committee or attend a VHCA meeting, and am always met with the same refrain:  “I don’t have time.”  I don’t have time either.  I’m a full time lawyer at a large law firm, mother to two wonderful daughters at SPARK, and a wife to a busy marketing professional.  And yet, I make time.  I can’t even count the number of times I have brought my daughters to VHCA meetings when my husband has been traveling or at work, but I have done it because VaHi is important to me and I want to show my daughters that I am willing to be a leader and work to make our neighborhood a better place.

Before you go onto social media and chastise “the Board” or suggest that we should be sued for taking a position that you may personally disagree with, I suggest you take a step back and remember that we are your neighbors and are all volunteers who are trying to do our best for the neighborhood.  Come to a meeting and meet us, or give us a call if you have questions . . . that is certainly more effective – and a lot more neighborly – than complaining about us on social media.

Jenifer Keenan is a VHCA Board Member and she chairs the Planning Committee.