 Effective Use of Citizen Committees
Sometimes, citizen committees do not provide the kind of
assistance needed by a project team. A case study of how citizen
committees can be effectively used in a water project is presented
below.
In this case, an ad hoc committee was formed to provide input
on a brackish water desalination project in the Tampa Bay
region.
This project had been successfully killed about a year before,
when a local government had engaged a developer to build a
facility. The developer attempted to "sell" an almost
fully formed project to the public, rather than take public
input. The project was designed to be a research and development
facility for the private developer, who would then sell water
to the county. The facility was sited at a local community
park, without the public’s consent. The plan also called
for installing wells along stretches of a community recreational
trail, which runs through residential areas. As a selling
point to the community, the private developer and county offered
to build a desalination museum on the site.
Citizens were angered by the county’s use of public
property without community input. They also had concerns about
how the wells would affect homeowners, how the community park
would be affected, how the byproduct would be disposed of
and how the project might impact existing legal water users.
The result was a hostile environment. Citizens in the neighborhood
mobilized against the project by organizing a formal citizens’
group. They picketed, took over public meetings, got extensive
media coverage, and the project was canceled.
The following year, Tampa Bay Water was asked to take on
a similar project. The public involvement professionals knew
that success was not possible without involving the citizens’
group early in the process. After all, they were already organized
around the issue.
So, before the project team even began to take broad public
input, they invited the four leaders of the group to meet.
The goal was to initiate a dialogue and to build trust that
Tampa Bay Water desired their input and would, in fact, consider
it. Two of these small group meetings were held.
Then, an ad hoc committee was formed, including the four
leaders, as well as municipal planners and water professionals
who would also be involved in the project. The purpose of
the ad hoc committee was to develop siting criteria that would
be presented at a public open house for citizen comment. Two
facilitated sessions were held and a consensus-building methodology
was used to get quantified input.
As a result:
- The stakeholders took some ownership of the project in its
current form.
- When interviewed for a newspaper story, citizen group leaders
had positive things to say about the agency and the way the
project was being approached.
- The project team was able to present criteria to the public
that had been developed by fellow citizens.
- A more positive environment was created.
However, the results weren’t unequivocably positive:
At the second facilitated meeting, one of the citizens attending
refused to participate. Her body language was hostile and
she offered no explanation until discussion late in the meeting.
It turned out that a public records request she conducted
had turned up a letter written by the consulting engineer
on the project. The letter was not written with the public’s
review in mind, so it contained information that could be
easily misinterpreted as harmful to the community. This was,
in fact, her interpretation. It took some discussion to satisfy
the citizen that the project team wasn’t attempting
to secretly harm citizens.
The project team was privately criticized by an elected official
for not including a broader range of citizens on the committee
for balance. In retrospect, the team agrees it should have
included citizens not affiliated with the citizens’
group.
And, the same citizen concerns about the disposal of the byproduct
existed at the end of the process. They were just not as stridently
expressed.
But the project team strongly believes this version of the
project was able to move further along because they had taken
the time to build trust among stakeholders and to build their
input into the project during the feasibility and siting stages.
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