Utah Sponsors State Agency DR Training
And Hires Full-Time DR Coordinator
The training was developed and presented by ADR Council consultants, Michele Straube of CommUnity Resolution, Inc., and James Holbrook of the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law. The course and its continued presentation by agency trainers to all levels of agency staff meets one of the primary goals of the Executive Order to change the culture of how Utah state agencies do business.
In December the ADR Council hired Susan Bradshaw as its first full-time coordinator. Bradshaw is a Utah mediator and attorney who currently is Director of the Schooley Mediation Center at the J. Ruben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University. She will leave the Director’s position in April to serve full time as ADR Coordinator for the State of Utah, and continue as part-time faculty at the BYU Law School.
Bradshaw said her immediate focus for the Council is to begin collecting success measures from Utah’s various pilot projects and state agencies that currently use consensus processes. The Council plans to use the data to help support its quest for legislative funding during the 2006 Session. In addition, Bradshaw said she is pursuing private foundation grants to help sustain the program through 2006.
The Utah ADR Council has been evolving since 2001, when the Legislature passed HB 132 (sponsored by Rep. Ralph Becker, a PCI/NPCC Board member) that created the Governmental Dispute Resolution Act. The following year, the state of Utah received a grant from the Hewlett Foundation to assist in establishing a state-level dispute resolution program for government agencies. In the spring of 2003, then Governor Leavitt issued the Executive Order endorsing DR and creating the ADR Council.