public participation in Comprehensive Plan review

July 21, 2017 8:06 PM

Our small town will be undertaking a 10th-year update of its comprehensive plan. What are some best practices, or strategies, for such a review, and particularly for gathering public input? Can you recommend a town or small city that has done this particularly well, given results? "Town hall" type meetings have not worked well in the past.
posted by mmiddle to Law & Government (5 answers total)

Best answer: Use a digital platform - even a SurveyMonkey or open comment website. Meetings are not inclusive for working people. shift workers, parents, etc. There are firms you can engage to structure a digital public input process - or you can just set one up and develop a campaign to let people know where to find it, and when it's open.
posted by Miko at 8:28 PM on July 21, 2017

Best answer: As Mijo says digital platforms can be a great way to reach lots of people. Be sure not to rely just on digital though, as some people are not digitally inclined. Do some pop up engagement as well (go where the people are). Grocery store, library, festivals, whatever. Have swag if possible to draw people in.

Promote the engagement and frame it around what people care about & show how the official plan affects those things to generate interest.

Be clear about how their feedback will be used and be sure to report back what you heard, how it was used & why some things were not used. That last bit is often missed.

The International Association of Public Participation (IAP2) has a framework & tools which may be helpful. I'm not sure how much is available online to non-members though.
posted by My Kryptonite is Worry at 10:14 PM on July 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

Best answer: There is a model that has been used successfully for community health planning by the Centers for Disease Control. It's been extensively used for creating and implementing public health campaigns, is research-based, and tries to move from mere outreach to true shared community leadership and involvement.

Here's a download of the document and you can find out more by searching for principles of community engagement and CDC or one of its subunits like ASTDR.
posted by jasper411 at 8:52 AM on July 22, 2017

Civic engagement in urban planning is one of my areas of research! If you memail me with an email address, I can send you a draft version of a (academic but hopefully still readable!) paper that discusses our "public planning academy" as a strategy for increasing effective participation in planning processes. In a nutshell, we argue that simply asking for input is insufficient if you don't level the playing field of knowledge first and that civic knowledge requires more than just technical knowledge. We also tried to address the tendency for townhall meetings to devolve into acrimonious verbal sparring.

Public participation is a thing that other researchers have been working on for a long time. See (linked pdfs of articles) "Reframing Public Participation: Strategies for the 21st Century" and "Public participation in local environmental planning." In many ways, I think knowing how things can go off the rails is as important as "best practices" because overly optimistic efforts can also alienate the public who ends up wondering where all their input went.

p.s. Boston is not a small city, but I think their ongoing efforts to engage the public are worth taking a look at.
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:23 PM on July 23, 2017 [2 favorites]

(This is the better link for the Boston planning department's engagement efforts)
posted by spamandkimchi at 2:28 PM on July 23, 2017