Policy Consensus E-News — February 2007

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See Video of Legislator Chris Rector Describing How to Convene

State Representative Chris Rector of Maine is featured describing the role legislators can play as conveners in the first video interview on PCI’s website. PCI is expanding its website to include a series of tools and resources for legislators and other leaders.

“Maine’s Many Flags, One Campus” presents Rector describing how he convened a process to create new educational opportunities in his district.   While in the middle of this project, Rector attended a PCI training for legislators and at that workshop “named collaboration as being what I was doing and convening as the role I was playing.” 

For Rector, this realization was “transformational” in how he views himself as a legislator.  Before coming to this understanding, Rector had considered himself strictly as a lawmaker, someone who worked on bills and committees and represented the people in his district. 

“I didn’t realize the importance of identifying issues and taking a different role from state lawmaker,” he said.  “I was already involved in the “Many Flags” project, but I hadn’t figured out the importance of it.”

In an August 2006 profile of Rector on the website for Public Campaign, a group supporting clean elections, Rector is quoted as saying, “I’ve found that my principal role is that I’m a convener. I can bring people to the table who wouldn’t come unless I brought them, such as the university and the community college, which tend to compete with each other.  I can do this because the legislature holds the purse strings, which gives me a certain level of influence.”

Rector, the ranking minority member on the Business, Research and Economic Development Committee, recently took part in another PCI workshop for Maine state legislators in January.  “This training session was helpful for us to think about our roles differently and refresh our thinking about keeping the lines of communication open,” he said.  He added that those legislators who were unable to attend expressed interest in further workshops. 

PCI will continue to conduct interviews and post videos.  Watch the website for an interview with Oregon State Senator Betsy Johnson, who served as convener in the construction of a trail commemorating the historic route Lewis and Clark took to reach the ocean from their shelter at Fort Clatsop. See the video of Chris Rector on PCI's website here.

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PCI Hosts Workshops for University Centers

West Coast

PCI’s workshop is April 26th and 27th in Seattle.  The meeting will begin at 8:30 AM on Thursday, April 26th and continue Friday, April 27th from 8:30 AM to 2:00 PM.  The workshop is being cosponsored by the William D. Ruckelshaus Center, a joint program of Washington State University and the University of Washington .

An opening reception will be held the evening of Wednesday, April 25th at 5:30 PM.  The featured speaker for the reception is Bill Ruckelshaus.  Long an advocate for cooperation and collaboration, Ruckelshaus was the first and fifth director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, deputy U.S. Attorney General, and Acting Director of the FBI. He was also a senior vice president at Weyerhaeuser and chairman and CEO of Browning Ferris Industries and is currently with Madrona Venture Group. He initiated Shared Strategy, a regional collaborative initiative to save salmon in Puget Sound. (See PCI E-News March 2006)

Panelists and presenters will include Matt Leighninger, Executive Director, Deliberative Democracy Consortium; John Gastil, Co-Author, The Deliberative Democracy Handbook; Terry Amsler, Institute for Local Governance at the California League of Cities: Dr. Jill Purdy, University of Washington at Tacoma, who studies the evolution of public policy dispute resolution in states; and Dr. Stephen Page, Evans School, University of Washington who studies state-level collaboration for human service delivery. 

There will be a mix of plenary and concurrent sessions and roundtable discussions on the following topics:

• A comparison of three different institutional models for university centers
• Developments in the field - deliberative democracy to collaborative governance
• Lessons about working with public leaders, assisting them to serve as conveners
• Emerging issues around universities as neutral forums

There will also be sessions on certificate programs; research; and other topics. And there will be time to pursue topics of mutual interest with colleagues from university centers around the west.  For details about the workshop agenda, log on to the University Bulletin Board on the PCI Forum. 

To register, download the registration form. 

East Coast

PCI will hold a workshop for university centers and other state programs, June 6th through June 7th at the Florida Atlantic University’s John D. MacArthur campus in Jupiter, Florida.  PCI’s workshop will begin Wednesday morning June 6th and end at noon Thursday June 7th.  Watch the March E-News for more information.

The workshop precedes the Association for Conflict Resolution’s Environment and Public Policy Sector Conference, which begins Thursday afternoon, June 7th, and ends Saturday, June 9th. 

The Florida workshop is being co-sponsored by the Florida Conflict Resolution Consortium, Florida State University and Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions at Florida Atlantic University.

Contact PCI  or check the website for more information.

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Three New Guides for Leaders: On Public Hearings, Public Forums, and Civic Engagement

We want to call your attention to three excellent resources, available on line:

Getting The Most Out Of Public Hearings: Ideas To Improve Public Involvement

• How can local officials ensure the fullest participation and opportunity for expression at public hearings?
• How can other public forums supplement the public hearing process?
• How can local officials effectively inform participants and the broader community about the issues at hand?
• How can public hearings provide more useful feedback that takes into account hard choices and trade-offs?
• How can local officials encourage clear, civil, and reasoned presentations and informed exchanges of views at the hearing?
• How can decision-makers ensure and demonstrate that public ideas and recommendations are taken seriously?

This pamphlet explores these questions and offers practical ideas to maximize the effectiveness of public hearings. It is not a sequential “how-to” list of steps for planning and holding public hearings. It is an inventory of ideas for improving public involvement, each of which may be useful for some public hearings and inappropriate for others.

Download the guide here.

Planning Public Forums: Questions to Guide Local Officials

Each of the following situations presents unique challenges. Increasingly, local officials are organizing and supporting public forums to help inform their decision-making in these and other areas.

1. A local agency in a high-growth area faces the daunting task of updating its out-of-date general plan. Community members disagree over the extent to which growth benefits the area’s quality of life, as well as over the degree to which other values (such as recreation, open space and agriculture) ought to be preserved and pursued.
2. Officials and the public are concerned about rising crime rates involving youth in a particular neighborhood. Parents believe a youth center will help; others demand more law enforcement activity.
3. A group home opens in a neighborhood of politically well-connected residents. They believe the facility does not belong in their neighborhood and demand that local officials shut it down.
4. The costs of government services exceed the revenues for the next fiscal year and, unless something changes, the situation will not improve in the future. Residents seem to want the services, but not the taxes or fees to pay for them.

This pamphlet provides practical steps to help local leaders build their capacity to use public forums effectively. Download the pamphlet here.

Both of the above were published by the Institute for Local Government, California League of Cities.

Civic Engagement: A Guide for Communities

This guide, published by Arlington Forum, makes the case that civic engagement is a healthy way to solve problems by using the metaphor of civic engagement as a practice that a community does to improve its health. The authors, Palma J. Strand and Melinda D. Patrician, co-founded the Arlington Forum, a local initiative of the Civic Organizing Foundation, in 1999.

The theme throughout the guide is that civic engagement is not the sole property of government or community members or community institutions — it is everyone’s responsibility. The target audience of the guide, therefore, is broad — basically anyone who wants to make a change in the way his/her community solves problems.

The authors caution that the shift in communities toward civic governance doesn’t happen overnight, and it isn’t easy, but that, if done right, it ends up supporting both government and its constituents. The guide is peppered with sidebar examples in communities around the country that, while not providing much detail on civic engagement process, gives a taste of how civic engagement can be useful, and provides some quotes from real people. Download the guide here.

Excerpted from a review by Malka Kopell for the February 2006 E-newsletter of the Alliance for Regional Stewardship

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Practical Guide to Consensus

This 75-page step-by-step handbook walks readers through the stages of sponsoring, organizing, and participating in a public policy consensus process. Designed primarily for government agencies or departments, the guide also is useful for any sponsor of, or participant in, a consensus building process.

The Practical Guide to Consensus will help civic leaders, officials and agencies design the most appropriate, and effective, uses of consensus processes, with "Before, During, and After" instructions on how to:

• Assess whether a situation is appropriate for a consensus process
• Select a facilitator or mediator to manage the process
• Plan and organize the process
• Write ground rules
• Negotiate issues and reach agreements
• Formalize and implement agreements

Learn more about the Practical Guide

Order the Practical Guide

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