What I experienced was worse. Vine City/English Ave. I get an emergency phone call on a Saturday morning from an urban farmer telling me that shenanigans are afoot. We had recently been told by the NPU to GTFO of Atlanta or else Bankhead thugs and corrupt APD blah blah blah followed up by BeltLine threats and intimidation stemming from our "materially interfering with plans set in stone 3 years" earlier. We were told that if you did not take advantage of the opportunity to speak at the one meeting set aside for public opinion, tough shit. Yay BeltLine.

So when I get this call to tell me that the same characters were holding one of these unicorn meetings, I immediately sent someone to the meeting see what's up.

The meeting invite was sent out to a list of people who had previously added their name to a clipboard somewhere/sometime else. If your contact email wasn't on the clipboard, you didn't get the invite. The email invite was sent out after midnight on the Friday, for an 8am Saturday meeting. Remember, this is your one chance to participate in the process.

Who's at the meeting? 15-20 people from the host organization, and two members of the public. Of the two citizens, one did not live in the zipcode and was disqualified. The other was the NPU chair who had earlier played the race card and poisoned the BeltLine.org against my non profit (we wanted to create a community garden in our local park, sorry, her and only black people park). Yup, she was the NPU chair of an area that she didn't live in, making sure that her area got the new beltline love. Which it has. Beltline farm anyone?

This is just business as usual. I will note again on this subreddit, that they have no problem taking whitie's money, now that there's enough to grease palms aka organizational capacity. Of course, you didn't hear a word of protest from the food organizations that everyone loves to stroke themselves over. They know how to play the game. Don't want to go against the scary black people!