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Public Participation: Dead or Alive?
In the really old days, that meant we just advertised that it was available for review and told people they could write in or speak at a designated MPO hearing time. Later we got more creative and tried open-house meetings in big rooms where we put up posters of network plots and cross-sections of the road projects, and let people fill out comment sheets. Most of the comments we got were either complaints about projects people opposed, or complaints from people who were tired of waiting for a project to get built. Either way, there usually wasn’t much we could do about them. The projects people didn’t like were obviously necessary according to the technical analysis, and we only had so much control over the funding and engineering process. So we documented the comments in a book and then put together the final plan. We’d have an official public hearing at the end, usually in City Hall or somewhere with an auditorium and a microphone, and the comments were usually the same as the ones made before. We’d duly document them and then adopt the plan. After ISTEA, we tried to do better. We tried creating Citizen Advisory Committees, which meant a lot more meetings. We jazzed up our meeting advertisements, conducted surveys, and distributed the draft plans more widely. The comment books got thicker, but in the end, it still boiled down to the same old DEAD process. No matter how many creative ways we tried to involve people, we seemed to wind up spending most of our time defending the technical analysis and trying to explain why we couldn’t meaningfully consider ideas that we couldn’t run through the model. Attendance at meetings might bloom for a while, but the people who stuck it out were usually the same old crowd of folks who either wanted to stop a project or push one (and often it was the same project). With conditions like that, it would take a miracle to raise public participation from the DEAD. But in the past few years, I’ve had an opportunity to meet some miracle workers. There is a growing body of MPO’s, cities, and counties who are making a fundamental change in their whole approach to transportation planning. They’ve decided to stop putting the model in charge of their planning process. They’ve put their community in charge of it instead. They are crafting new models and methods that allow them to seek out and analyze creative ideas in a meaningful way. Their plans are becoming more flexible, more dynamic, and more complex. And their public participation is coming to life. What do these innovative MPO’s and communities do differently? I call it the ALIVE approach: Ask, Listen, Integrate, Verify, and Engage. Ask: As the very first step in their planning process – before any models are run - these folks go out and ask people what they want for their community. They conduct broad-based surveys by phone, mail, and the internet. They hold meetings on Sunday afternoons in church basements and conduct workshops at elementary schools. They conduct interviews and host focus groups with transit riders, bicycling advocates, freight companies, realtors and developers, and social service providers. They facilitate webcasts and huge town-hall meetings with the aid of computer technology (see www.NeighborhoodAmerica.com and www.PlaceMatters.com for more ideas about new technologies for public engagement). At this stage, the conversations aren’t highly technical. Instead, people are asked about their daily experiences -- walking around the neighborhood, getting to work and school and day care, helping their elderly parents get to the doctor, and making the rounds of soccer games and grocery shopping on the weekends. They talk about the places they love, and the ones they hate. They talk about the successes and challenges they face as local employers, shippers, and retailers. Through these stories, a picture emerges of those aspects of their community people value, and what they want to see changed, particularly by improving the transportation network. And planners promote these discussions in creative, effective ways. Gone are the days of the cryptic black-box ad, thick with fine-print jargon, duly printed three times before the meeting somewhere in the local paper. In these communities, you see huge ads on the sides of buses; posters in bike shops and senior centers; dialogue flying through cyberspace via listserves and websites; plugs and interviews on radio call-in shows; videos running on local government cable channels and special interest stories on TV news programs. Listen: Planners don’t talk too much at these meetings. After at most a brief overview of the planning process, they turn the floor over to the participants. They organize interactive workshops, usually with a lot of small-group breakouts. People mark up maps and pictures of their town, and their ideas fill up reams of flip chart paper and hundreds of post-it notes stuck around the walls of the meeting room. Kids write stories and draw pictures about their dreams for the future. In big meetings, hundreds of people complete visual preference surveys, using keypads to vote on their favorite community design images, and see the results in real time. Meanwhile, during drop-in sessions at the library, groups of four or six folks sit around a small table and just talk. The key to success here is that the planners and officials who conduct the meetings understand how to be good facilitators. They learn how to carefully structure meetings to ensure fair, comprehensive discussions and techniques, and how to keep groups on track while encouraging a free flow of ideas. They practice active listening skills to ensure they are clearly understanding and properly reflecting participants’ comments. They discipline themselves to sit on their hands, resisting the temptation to jump in and correct a minor misperception or subtly steer a conversation the way they want it to go. Not everyone is innately comfortable with groups of people, but more folks than you’d think can be good facilitators. Introverts generally prefer to listen than to talk, so taking notes and closely observing meetings is right up their alley. Extroverts complement this role by drawing people out and guiding conversations with an open, friendly demeanor. It’s helpful to recruit and train a lot of volunteer facilitators, and organize them in complementary teams that make the most of their skills and personalities. Often these include staff from government agencies involved in the plan, but facilitators don’t have to be technical experts. In fact, it can be helpful to encourage members of community advisory committees or interest groups such as people with disabilities to take on this role. They only requirement is that they have to set aside their personal or organizational agendas in order to act in a fair and neutral way. Integrate: This is the step that requires a real re-thinking of the traditional planning process. Before any public meetings are held, planners sit down and think through very carefully how they can use the information people provide. They look hard for ways to organize the technical analysis and expand upon their planning tools and models so they consider the kinds of questions, concerns, and qualitative goals people may bring to the table. It’s been said that “to a man with only a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” These planners make sure their planning toolbox includes more than a hammer – e.g. a traditional four-step traffic model - by seeking out and even inventing new tools. For example, lots of people say they want their communities to be more walkable, and they want their kids to be able to ride bikes to school. To meet this goal, it might be necessary to take out traffic lanes on some streets in order to widen sidewalks or put in bike lanes. A regional traffic model isn’t well suited to analyze trips at this fine grain. It would likely identify a degraded vehicle LOS in that situation without providing useful data about upgraded pedestrian or bicycle mobility. In response to this limitation, planners are developing an array of tools to define and measure pedestrian and bicycle level of service, which can take into account the quality of the walking and biking experience as well as simple accessibility measures such as miles of sidewalk. Many communities have developed broad visions for sustainability that include policies to balance environmental health with economic vitality. This means transportation planners have to consider the ways in which new road and transit access could influence development patterns. Again, a traditional four-step traffic model isn’t the best tool for examining this kind of question. But an evolving host of scenario planning tools is helping planners examine the relationships between land use and transportation, and to better predict potential economic and environmental impacts of different strategies. Validate: Just as it’s important to consider people’s questions and ideas, it’s equally important to make sure people know their concerns are being addressed. Too often people tell us they don’t have any idea how, or even if, their ideas made any difference in the plan. If the MPO launches a plan with a big public involvement blitz, but then hunkers down to develop it without regularly checking back, people wonder why they bothered to give their opinion. If community meetings are held in a disconnected fashion with long periods of silence in between, people get confused or lose interest. Meanwhile, business leaders and freight haulers are unlikely to want to participate in sustained, frequent meetings, and are usually so busy focusing on the coming six months that a 20-year plan may seem to be nothing more than a bureaucratic exercise. “Checking-back” discussions with them need to be short, to the point, and relevant to their concerns. Again, this requires thinking through the process ahead of time. Planners need to have a strategy for involving people each time they are ready to take an important step, and for making sure the time frame between steps is reasonably regular. This helps people stay tuned into the process rather than drifting away when nothing appears to happen for months. At each of those milestone events, the planners provide people with an explanation of what was said at the last meeting, what’s been done since then, and how the ideas and concerns they shared have been put to use. And – importantly – they take time to ask people if there are key issues that haven’t been considered before fully moving forward into the next phase. To be effective at this point, planners need to have a clear understanding of what types of issues are appropriate for each stage of the process, as well as an ability to handle concerns diplomatically. The facilitator in this type of discussion must be ready to help the group discern the right way to address a new issue that is raised. In some cases, the concern may truly need to be resolved at that moment before the process moves on. But in other cases it may be more appropriate to plan the discussion of that issue for a later phase or a different forum, and move ahead. Engage: Public participation doesn’t end once the plan is adopted. When projects click into gear, planners need encourage the public to be as engaged in the implementation of the plan as they were in creating it. This means formatting the plan and the TIP so it’s easy to find out what’s happening with each project, and providing regular progress reports to the community. It also means continuing to meet with people through a blend of venues such as standing advisory councils, periodic rounds of focus groups, a speakers’ bureau for community presentations, and well-publicized annual meetings. Building this kind of sustained relationship with the community can help the MPO deal with the issues that inevitably pop up when they are programming funds for projects. For example, in fast-growing areas, hundreds or thousands of new people and companies are arriving every year, none of whom are likely to know anything about the transportation plan. Good venues for regular public dialogue can help new residents and businesses learn about projects that may affect them and discuss their concerns with the MPO effectively, rather than storming in at the public hearing and calling to stop a project because it’s the first they’ve heard of it. Active relationships with a wide spectrum of community members can also spark new partnerships to help fund projects. In many communities, public health officials and advocates are joining with the MPO to apply for neighborhood improvement grants from the Active Living by Design program (/www.activelivingbydesign.org) that include sidewalks, bike lanes, and transit improvements. PTO’s and teachers can sponsor bicycle and pedestrian education programs and urge local and state legislators to fund safety and enhancement projects that provide safe routes to school. Business associations can sponsor local transit shuttles and support Job Access grants to get their employees to work. In each of these types of cases, and more, the MPO is an ideal champion to facilitate and sustain productive relationships. Finally, when it comes time to update the long range plan again, an educated, committed body of community members will be ready to participate. Not only will their continued involvement enrich the plan with valuable experience and perspective, they can encourage their neighbors, civic groups, and colleagues to get involved in the process, thus expanding the effectiveness of the MPO’s outreach. With a foundation of effective, thoughtful public participation, the planning process becomes something dynamic that evolves and changes over time in sync with the growth and development of the community. In short -- it’s ALIVE! Hannah Twaddell is a Senior Planner and Public Involvement Specialist for Renaissance Planning Group. She has more than 17 years of experience in urban and regional planning for land use, transportation and human services, as well as managing public participation programs. Prior to joining RPG, she served for several years as Assistant Director of the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission and for more than a decade as chief staff to the Charlottesville-Albemarle Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) in Charlottesville, Virginia. She can be reached at 434-296-3025; HTwaddell@CitiesThatWork.com |