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The Viroqua City Council has approved the Neighborhood Conferencing program developed by council member Gail Frie and a number of city residents. The city council agreed to allocate $1,000 to the program for training and a later review.
Frie started developing the idea earlier this year after the city held public hearings on some potential yard and home maintenance ordinances.
After those meetings, Frie continued to meet with 25 to 30 residents and some other council members with a goal of developing an informal way to solve some of the issues. Frie said it was obvious in the working group that every time it tried to come up with a rule or an ordinance, the system became too rigid.
“It became very apparent when we met in the work group that our ordinances are not the problem,” Frie said. “They are really very good. It was just the fact that people don’t talk and they don’t interpret the ordinance in the same way. So if we get them talking, we are closer to a solution.”
Frie said Neighborhood Conferencing is a variation of the restorative justice model and combines some aspects of small claims court and mediation.
“A real key is early intervention,” Frie said. “Our current system takes months to get the process executed and a lot of times by the time that process is through, people are not even talking to each other.”
Frie said under the new program, residents can fill out an “expression of concern” form at city hall. All parties have to voluntarily agree to participate. Frie said the questionnaire on the concern form asks whether the parties agree to use a mediator and the conferencing program.
Frie said the most difficult part he has found in mediating issues is how to find a starting point for discussion, and that everyone has to come to terms with the fact that they will probably not get everything they want.
“Everyone wants to be 100 percent happy and that is just not the real world,” Frie said.
Frie expected a typical case to take about a month to resolve and that he already has a couple cases suited to the program.
“This is meant for neighborhood issues, and a lot of them shouldn’t be handled by the police,” said Frie. “This would be more informal and less intimidating. The court system is set up to be cold and hard and just, and that makes it difficult to accommodate this kind of program.”
