Title:سری بررسی آزمون AICP مشارکت عمومی و عدالت اجتماعی

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قسمتي از متن فيلم: Okay i see I don’t see any problems with audio thank you for everyone who has responded to let me know that it is working for them if you do have problems continue letting me know if you are experiencing any problems otherwise i think we’re going to go ahead and begin i

I know that there’s several others are going to be joining the webinar fairly shortly so we’ll go ahead and start with basic introductions and some housekeeping this is the third session of the eight week long aicpa exam review session that a number of state and district chapters are sponsoring

This week’s session is going to topic the topic is on public participation and social justice we are i’m going to hear from glenn harbeck who is um with gwen harbik associates out of north carolina he has been working with the north carolina chapter for a number of years to help prepare

Planners um taking the exam and glenn as you can see a photo on my screen is a three decade three decades of experience with local government planning and consulting he’s worked with over 100 communities from all across the country his primary focus is on community visioning comprehensive planning neighborhood and special area planning

And multi-jurisdictional planning glenn has a master’s degree from the university of north carolina at chapel hill and a bachelor’s from state university of new york the college of environmental science and forestry at syracuse for nearly all of his career he has had a passion for engaging the public in the

Planning process his work was has won several state national planning awards and he passed the exam 30 years ago this month um which he says when it was no doubt much easier um i will say that the exam has had several changes over the last several decades

I audited it myself this past fall and i believe that this was discussed a couple weeks ago the exam itself has not changed dramatically in content over the last several years but they do expect to revise the questions probably in two or three years so this subject of public participation in

Social justice is a fairly significant part of the exam i think it’s probably one of the overlooked topics so i think it’s very important that we listen to what he’s got to share with us today i think it’s also very important to research other resources where information can be provided about

Various public participation techniques as there can very possibly be a number of questions on that topic and without any further ado um if people have questions ongoing please feel free to send me a chat i am the organizer for this um also ask questions we’re going to have a number of polls

Throughout the webinar i believe that um mr harbeck about halfway through will provide an opportunity for a quick stretch break um at that time i’ll probably spend that time answering most of the questions if they haven’t been answered already so feel free to ask away and with that i’m going to go

Ahead and turn it over to glenn and hope you all enjoy the webinar okay it’s me good morning everybody good morning all right um the title of today’s presentation or webinar is on principles and practice of community involvement based planning and i think i need to let you know that

You need to tolerate about 10 to 15 minutes of principles before i get into the practice the practice will be far and away the majority of today’s webinar with lots of examples of exercises and techniques that you can put to work right away in your in your your work but

If you don’t understand the principles you’ll be missing out on the why so please tolerate as we go through about 10 or 15 minutes of principles there’ll be more words there than probably pictures but then after that we’ll do a lot on practice so with that let’s get started

I wanted to start out first by commending everybody for even considering to sit for the icp exam i was told 30 years ago that you do take the exam for a couple reasons not the reasons you might expect the first thing that i found was that by having to study for the icp

Exam it just affirmed all the things that we learned in school and all the things we’ve been practicing in the field that we know that we’re doing the right thing and it’s just a real assurance that um there’s a reason why we do the things we do

But the more important thing i was told that you don’t really take the exam so much for yourself i mean yeah it’s great to have the four initials after your name but you’re really doing it for the professional planning we really want to have a very credible profession

And that’s what the icp is really all about so with that said i want to also say that i am not a public involvement specialist i’m a planner just like you are my main focus in work is to prepare plans i just happen to think that a plan without effective community involvement

As a driving force is a waste of everybody’s time they just don’t they never get any traction if you just prepare a plant in the ivory tower and i i know that none of you think that that’s the way to go either all right i want to start out with the premise

And again this is um a lot of words but this is this will be the one part of the webinar today where i will be reading some on the screen and please tolerate that as we advance in our careers our effectiveness requires more and more emphasis on the people

Or political side of planning most of us do a good job on the technical side but the people and political side often takes years to understand even longer to apply with success this webinar is intended to sharpen your skills on the people’s side of planning the following statements i’m going to

Read are things that i hear over and over and over again as i travel around the different communities these are the common threads that just about every planner faces on a day-to-day basis so see if these don’t sound familiar every time we hold a meeting it degenerates into a gripe session with a

Handful of people dominating the floor and there’s about seven of these i worked for months on a project all for a 15-minute presentation and no action on controversial issues it’s even worse i can almost feel the arrows coming in from behind and in front unless the project is in somebody’s

Backyard people won’t bother coming to the meeting we’ve gone through so many drafts of this plan people don’t know which way is up anymore our plan requires that other departments and agencies get involved in implementation but we can’t make them do it so important parts of the plan never happen

We’ve got too many committees and subcommittees as it is our staff is burned out and our committee members have lost interest i wish there were a way to move the process along without shortchanging important steps we’re getting near the end here special interests undermine the process by

Holding back until the eleventh hour and then wheeled their influence to gut the plan or the standards another plan sitting on the shelf there’s got to be a way to make the process work okay here’s an overview of what the webinar is going to cover today foster how to foster and sustain public

Interest during the process how to work effectively with your committee how to use principled negotiation to keep the process on track how to give an equal voice to the less vocal how to focus on critical issues thereby increasing plan impact how to organize constructive and enjoyable public meetings an emphasis on enjoyable

How to make it easy for your boards to adopt the plan and here are four bullet point characteristics of community involvement based planning that you want to keep in mind they kind of undergird everything first of all it needs to be steering committee driven if it’s a plan that’s been developed by

The staff for the staff it’s kind of dead on arrival so it must be driven by your steering committee secondly it must be front end loaded and i’m going to talk about what that means in a couple minutes thirdly it employs principled negotiation this goes back centuries

It’s just human nature it works but we always forget the second step of the three steps so we’re going to focus on that second step here in a couple minutes it does require skilled responsive facilitation and the only way to get that and know that is to do it and try it

And experiment and go to other meetings where there are skilled facilitators and watch what they do and observe what they do and see what works and what doesn’t work and it does use focused research as needed rather than just kind of shotgun style research that well we hope we find something

Interesting all right the basics and we’re still in the principles part of the presentation here i call these the three ahas they’re not original to me they’re things that i’ve just picked up on and heard over the course of the last several decades and i found them to be very true and

They’ve kind of slanted my whole approach to planning the first one is to be listened to you must first earn the right to be heard we’ll talk about this in greater depth later but the main point is you don’t want to go into a public meeting pounding your chest

With all kinds of wonderful gis generated maps and statistics and kind of the trust me approach i’m the professional planner therefore i know what’s best for you that’s not the way to go in today’s political climate the process is just as important as the product the point here

Is that you can have the best plan produced on desktop publishing with all the great graphics photographs three ring notebooks tab dividers online call it what you want but if you have not involved people along the way it’s really a hollow exercise and thirdly effective public meetings are an art and

A science that can be learned and mastered a public meeting is not setting up chairs and a podium and having a head table and calling that an effective public meeting that is anything but so we’ll talk about different ways of setting up meetings and floor plans

And sequences and the best way to to really have a good enjoyable effective public meeting then i do have a corollary a fourth point and that is that while you cannot predict the outcome eating you designed the point being there is that human nature is human nature and the techniques and the exercises

That we’ll be talking about today work just as well in um mississippi as they do in new hampshire as they do in the canadian rockies as they do in jamaica all those places have experienced this approach and people our people are people so the techniques that we’re going to

Learn today are just as applicable in any of those locations all right what is principled negotiation there are three steps and again the one we always forget is the second one so let’s talk about these i think we’re all familiar with the idea that when you’re starting out on any kind of a

Negotiated process you really want to encourage people to not stake out positions once somebody staked out a position then they have something they have to defend they’ve got their ego wrapped up in it so you must always always always try to get people to identify their issues and concerns basically their interests their

Interests but not their positions now the second one the one that people always forget and you’ll notice this whenever you have a committee for the first time or your steering committee is they immediately want to go from the problem to the solutions they want to go from what the issue is

To what the answers are and they always miss this important second step which is the common objectives and i’m going to have a story here in a second which will illustrate that but just keep in mind that if you’re missing those common objectives several bad things will happen if you go

Straight from problems to solutions you create a polarized committee because people will immediately start questioning other people’s motivations as to why people start owning their their recommendations thinking that they have the answer without first explaining why it’s an appropriate solution so you got to have those objectives and then thirdly you can find

Win-win solutions that satisfy the common objectives when i was in school a few years ago one of our professors named with maynard huffsmith was very deliberate in saying all the time the common objectives serve two purposes yes they set the direction for everything else that follows in the plan but just as importantly

They are the evaluation criteria that determine the the merits of different recommendations so without those common objectives you don’t have a common direction and you don’t have evaluation criteria now let’s pause here and i want to tell you a little story about how this happens in practice um a few years back

I was commissioned to head a fairly large consulting team to prepare a redevelopment plan for a very prominent inner city neighborhood that had fallen on hard times this was an area that at one time housed the most prestigious people in the community these were all the the ceos and the

Business owners the manufacturing plant owners this was a very prestigious neighborhood but as inner city neighborhoods are inclined to do sometimes this area fell on hard times it became cut up into boarding houses prostitution drug dealing and it happened to be right next door to the central business district of

A fairly large city so it was kind of an eyesore and a real problem for that community so the city went about the right way they um brought in some some folks that had had some experience in this before they had a very good steering committee appointed with some pretty good movers

And shakers in the community and the interesting thing about it was they advanced several million dollars five million dollars to be exact and put it in a capital reserve account specifically for this neighborhood and they said this was you know 15 20 years ago so 5 million dollars was this

Significant amount of money well the long and the short of it we went through a process of going through these three steps we got the community and all the various non-profit agencies that were interested in getting a piece of the five million dollars and we got them to identify their interests

We got them to agree on common objectives that were based on those interests and then we were able to frame some recommendations so it came down after about a nine month process it came down to the big meeting where we were going to present our recommendations and as was my habit

I sat down with the chairman of the steering committee for lunch and we talked about presenting the plan and the chairman said to me well glenn i know you have a lot of you place a lot of emphasis on common objectives but i really think people

Want to hear what we’re going to do for them they want to hear our recommendations they want to know how we’re going to spend the five million dollars i wasn’t thrilled about that but i also believe that the steering committee needs to be driving the bus

So i said okay we’ll we’ll we’ll do it that way we got into the meeting And almost as soon as we started presenting the recommendations i could see people tensing up their arms were folded tightly across their chest they were starting to sit up in their chair within a few minutes they were starting to question uh actually yell out well why do you

Want to spend the money that way you know what where’s that coming from why do you do that and so the meeting was about to fall apart the chairman thankfully stood up and said i think we’re forgetting something glenn why don’t you go over those common objectives so we went over the same

Presentation but this time we undergirded the recommendations with some common objectives like we’d like to leverage you know three private sector dollars for every one public sector dollar we’d like to not gentrify the neighborhood and push existing residents out we want to preserve as many historic structures in the

Neighborhood as possible and not tear them down and so on and so forth we made the same recommendations and people started relaxing they were comfortable they agreed with the plan it went on to city council it was approved and it eventually became the south side neighborhood of greensboro which has won

All kinds of awards for um the development that came in there and really has turned that whole area around and that never would have happened that whole process would have fallen apart if that final concluding community meeting had not been turned around on a dime because of our coverage of those common objectives

So there’s your story um moving on let’s talk about committees um and uh we’re gonna pause here for a second um lauren if you’re there let’s let’s do um one of the polling questions if we can the first one can we put that up you’ll have to let me know when you’re

Done with the poll because i’m not i’m not seeing it right um about 60 70 percent have voted um so far the responses are um 74-ish percent saying nicely marbled 16-15-ish percent is the next largest vote getter for front and loaded eight to seven to ten percent are

Responding on the answer of uses focused research as needed and then the least the answer receiving the fewest votes is steering committee driven so i’ll go ahead and close the poll now with about 80 responses all right and while we’re here uh lauren do you think we could do poll

Question number two as well sure all right thanks one second okay i have just launched the second poll question what are the three basic steps used in principled negotiation um yep okay so folks are starting to vote okay we’ve got about 70 percent response rate 78

Um are saying that they believe that you would should firstly focus on interests and then agree on common objectives and look for um and then look for can’t read the rest of the answer solutions um the next highest vote getter is 12 of the cha-cha foxtrot tango yeah um seven percent looking at

Analyzing the problem first then presenting findings and then asking for input and then the fewest vote giving for identify positions prepare a white paper and set recommendations all right i will go ahead and close that poll well thank everybody for participating in that and we’ll have a several hours later on

Let’s talk about committees and this is really a sidebar and it’s too much to get into in this webinar today but i just want to say um most of us i think are familiar with the four basic personality types um probably many of us have taken the myers-briggs testing

Where they try to put you in one of 16 boxes based upon your your you know whether you’re outgoing or an you know introvert extrovert whether you’re an analyzer whether you’re driving demanding so on and so forth the point is about this little sidebar is that in a public meeting or in

Working with our committees we’re not in a position to give somebody a test and say okay which of the 16 myers-briggs personality profiles are you but what you can do and you can do this you’ll get pretty good at it with practice is you can usually put somebody

In one of the four categories and and these are the four and it really comes in handy if you can do this the directors are the driving demanding determined doers in the lingo of some of the literature out there that’s the lion the relator which in the in the literature is

Oftentimes seen as like a retriever a very compliant supportive um sensitive peacemaker um very supportive of processes and wants to keep the peace the thinker is the is a is both an analytical person as well as a task very task oriented person so they the the animal there is is the beaver

And you’ll know the analyticals fairly quickly and then lastly the socializer the born salesman the life of the party the otter the playful type the person who can just win over people with with charm and enthusiasm those are the four basic personality types that you really need to be in tune with

When you’re working in the public arena if you know who you’re talking to and what their bent is you can present or respond to their questions or their statements much much more effectively so as ins as just as a little summary here i would i really would recommend that

Everybody get a hold of something either online or or buy a book but study these four personality types and get to the point where you can spot them in people very very quickly what do directors want generally they want challenges they want to be as direct sometimes as abrupt

You want they want you to be that with them as they are with other people and they’re not offended at all if you give them a good solid challenge if you do that with a relator they’ll shrink up like a like a violet a relator wants appreciation wants to

Say you know that’s a really good comment thank you for asking that question i’m really glad you spoke up and offered that insight that’s what a relator wants and try to picture this in the context of your committee meetings especially the thinker they want quality answers if you’re trying to can show quality

Mapping recognition so if you’re having a big large is a great person to go to you can have them at the registration table greeting people so each of these personality types whether you’re dealing with your fellow staff members your boss your committee members or with the general public

You really need to get to know these four personality types and employ them to your advantage all right enough said about the ideal committee size most people would not think that is the case um 9 to 15 is the answer and that you can say well

How in the world can somebody say with any kind of certainty that 9 to 15 is in general the best size for a steering committee well in my case it’s just by trial and error but i have to tell you that a few years back i was sitting in

An airport traveling to some project somewhere and i glanced over my left and somebody had left a journal of the american society of social whatever studies or social scientists and i picked up the magazine and lo and behold inside that magazine was this article that said ideal size for human interaction on

Working committees i said hmm so i opened up the book and sure enough they had come to the same conclusion for a variety of very intense psychological reasons i suppose that 9 to 15 is the ideal size for a steering committee now i want to offer to you some practical reasons that maybe

Wouldn’t necessarily be covered in that social science magazine but just things that i’ve found to be true over the years there are logistical reasons as to why 9-15 is a good number and then there are social psychology reasons which i’ll have very pragmatic way of describing number one

If you’ve ever met with your committee for the first time and you’ve tried to establish something as simple as a day of the month a time of day and a place for them to meet on a routine basis the level of difficulty in reaching agreement on something as simple as that

Does not rise linearly with the addition of each committee member it rises exponentially it becomes exponentially more difficult with each additional person over about 15 especially secondly this is something i call the manila envelope paperwork shuffle and i know that with the addition of email and email attachments that

Some of our committees receive their materials as email attachments i happen to think that when you have a volunteer committee it’s not really very nice to them to expect them to use their paper and ink at home to print out draft comprehensive plan chapters or draft ordinance articles or

Whatever the case might be so you still wind up having to print a fair amount of material i was brought into a project several years ago where they had already established the committee before i i joined the team and they had a committee of 72 people on that

On that project is for a comprehensive plan and i said to the planning director at the time i said you know i think it’s wonderful that you’ve identified 72 people to participate in this process but i can tell you that over the course of preparing the plan which is you know

To do a comp plan oftentimes takes anywhere from a year to 18 months even in a modest sized community i can tell you that the committee is going to shrivel down to about 12 to 15 people by this time this process is over and in fact it did and there’s good

Reasons for that we’ll talk about that in a second under social psychology if you have somebody in your front office who just likes to send out meeting reminders and postcards and emails and make phone calls that’s great in today’s modern planning agency we don’t often have that luxury so i just find that

To have an excessive number out of people on a committee is just a waste of staff time that you could be spending your time doing something more productive and am i saying by the way that we’re going to shortchange the process by having a smaller committee no

There are many many other ways to involve people in a planning process other than having them sit directly on your committee let’s talk about social psychology reasons now the reason why you want to have a minimum of nine is because statistically it is it has been shown that if you have

Fewer than nine people on a committee the probability of missing one of the four personality types is much much greater i don’t know the specific numbers i don’t remember what the social psychology magazine even said but i can tell you that the this number nine uh if you

If you pick people at random you’re you’re going to miss a thinker or you’re going to miss a relator or you’re going to miss a driving a director so and you need all four personality types to have all perspectives brought to bear on a project a maximum of 15 to ensure meaningful

Involvement and this is all can also be determined pretty well by math if you think about a typical committee meeting lasting about two hours i try to limit most meetings to do after two hours the quality of the meeting tends to spiral downward that’s 120 minutes

If you had for example that 72 person committee meeting for 120 minutes and you do the math how much time would each of those 72 people have to contribute in a meaningful way during a 120 minute it just is not a good thing to do so and then the third thing is

As your committees grow larger there’s a phenomenon that i call they won’t miss me if i’m not there and you’ll see this all the time and it’s really disheartening and it’s it drags the enthusiasm for the process downhill when other committee members see their fellow committee members not showing up

And it just takes the air out of the balloon and it also gives them reason to say okay well if they’re not going to the meeting then i won’t go to the one next month so it’s kind of a vicious cycle so again 9 to 15 do you always have a

Committee of 9 to 15 no there will be situations where you’re going to have to have a larger committee i did have to do a committee several years ago of 42 elected officials from 13 different local localities with like three elected representatives the mayor and the school board all sitting on on that

Joint multi-jurisdictional committee and there was no way to get around it so we had 42 people you just have to go to extra lengths and use special exercises and processes that break the group down to allow for me meaningful participation so but keep 9-15 in mind as a general rule

All right let’s talk about the flip side of committees and that’s committee composition And some of these will be apparent to you others may not be so much apparent here’s some principles you want to plant the seeds of plant approval what does that mean it means that if you were doing for example something that involved historic preservation issues in a comprehensive plan you’d

Certainly want to have somebody from your historic preservation commission perhaps serving on the committee if you had something that was very like a highway corridor plan where you’re asking businesses along a strip to consider enhancing their signage or their landscaping well you better well have representatives of the business

Community from that corridor on your plan it’s just good common sense but oftentimes we don’t always do that include both sides of the aisle this is something i learned the hard way once in my career when i was doing a comprehensive plan and there was a very

In this case i’m not judging whether liberal or conservative is good don’t get me wrong but there was a very liberal progressive type counsel that appointed a steering committee for a comprehensive plan that everybody on the committee was also of a of a liberal and progressive bent

Now here comes during the process of preparing this plan for a fairly large city that took between 18 months and two years to do the comprehensive plan there was a major election during that time the liberal progressives were voted out of office and a conservative bunch was voted in

And what do you think the new conservative council thought of the committee that had been appointed by the liberal council the plan died on the vine and that was the only time in my three decades plus career when i learned that lesson and now when i’m advising communities on appointing committees i

Make sure that i emphasize the importance of making sure that both sides of the island we don’t think about this often at the local government level we think that that the politics of progressivism and conservativism is more of a state or national issue but it has it has a bearing on local

Government issues as well all right co-op the opposition um i have a good friend who works for the chief of staff for the mayor of a very very large city here in the united states and one of his favorite expressions and i’ll paraphrase it somewhat

Is it’s better to have a skunk on the out on the inside of the tent um urinating out than it is to have a skunk on the outside of the tent urinating in it’s just if you if you know you have somebody in the community who is bent against the plan or

In some instances any kind of planning but you think that they’re not intractable you may consider actually applying them to your committee to to not only to get their perspective which is valid but also to possibly persuade them to soften their position and become a real advocate for uh for your plan

Uh pass over the inos well inos what’s that that’s in name only in every community you’ll find that there are a number of people that just seem to rise to the top of the list of everybody’s list when they’re thinking about appointing an important committee the the downside of that is is

That they’re involved in so many committees that when you actually meet you oftentimes find that you’ll have a very nice name placard there where they’re supposed to be sitting but there’ll be an empty chair behind the name placard they tend to bounce around to their various committees like a pinball

So it’s much better to go for people who you know can stay the course and stay involved in the process from being down don’t forget the old guard this is true in rural communities it’s true in resort communities it’s true in communities where you have the landed folks that

Maybe have been around for years but stay beneath the radar but you got to pull them in early because if you don’t they’ll come and bite you late in the process work for geographic distribution that’s pretty obvious make it easy for your board to choose appointees we’re going to illustrate

That here in a second all right here’s here’s one way that i’ve used over the years to help bring a fair-minded process of selecting a committee and i call it this committee selection matrix i’ve done a little blow up here across the top what this is is it’s a very

Large wall mounted sheet sometimes something on the order of four by six feet that you put on the wall in a conference room and you sit down with a perhaps a subcommittee of your elected body and you just start brainstorming either the names of possible candidates down the left side or you can

Brainstorm the categories of people that you believe need to be on the committee but at any event it’s a really useful exercise for if you if you have a committee of 9 to 15 and you can generate you know upwards of you know 20 to 30 names on a couple of these sheets

It really helps to fare it through and offer some very logical recommendations to your elected body here’s a picture of it in in action where you’ll have the the wall mounted sheet identifying the various characteristics and then you’ll also have a map of the community hanging on the wall

Next to the sheet where whenever you have a name and you know where that person lives or have a business you can put a appropriately colored star or dot on the map so that you get really good geographic distribution on your committee and this is very important later on when you’re

In the process of recruiting people to your town meetings if your committee is well balanced geographically then your attendance at your meetings is going to be more apt to be balanced if your committee is balanced demographically then the attendance at your meetings is more up to be balanced demographically and we’ll

Talk specifically about why that is a little bit later okay um something that i like to do it’s not unusual for me to be working with four or five communities at once and as many as even eight and i cannot my wife can keep track of names and faces so easily

And i just don’t have that gift so whenever i meet with a new committee i get out my digital camera and i take a quick snapshot i may you know tell a fib and say well we want i really want to have a shot of you to include in on the

Acknowledgements page for the plan or or whatever but this really is an invaluable tool for me when i’m traveling in my car or on a plane and i know i’m headed to a committee meeting i i pull out the appropriate photograph i have the names of my committee members written across their chest

And when i go into that committee meeting i can call my committee members by first name and it really i found it really makes a difference people are impressed if after just one meeting you’re already referring to them by their first name people love the sound of their name all right

We’ll do the committee handbook and then we’ll take a break after that a five minute stretch break committee handbook Why would you want to have something called a committee handbook let me tell you a story here i was brought into a county planning process where the committee had been meeting for and this is not unusual had been meeting for the better part of a year

And had gotten no traction had made no progress had really accomplished very little over the course of that year i was called by the planning director of that county and said glenn would you mind coming in and seeing if you could get this committee off and running a little bit here

Because we’re really not showing any progress i worked with a director before so i came in and we sat down around the conference table and they were a good group of folks and they were they fell within that range of 9-15 which is a great size

But i started out by asking them a series of questions uh the first question was i said what is your charge and somebody spoke up and said well we’ve been asked to prepare a comprehensive plan for the county and somebody else said no no it’s not really a comprehensive plan it’s a strategic

Plan we’re supposed to be focusing on just a few critical issues and not try to cover the whole the you know the whole board front and somebody else said no no no it’s not about strategic planning it’s about economic development in particular so right away i had a clue that they

Really didn’t even know why they had been formed The second question i asked was who do you report to and of course because of the differing natures of those charges one person said well we were appointed by the county commissioners we report back to the county commissioners the next person said no no we’ve been asked to run our

Recommendations through the planning board and then from the planning board onto the county commissioners the third person said no we’re not reporting to either of those bodies we’re supposed to report to the economic development commission so more confusion the third question i asked was when is

Is your work to be completed and nobody knew so the lesson learned there is if you can do a little committee handbook and i’m not talking about an enormous bound volume i’m talking about something in the order of eight to ten pages at most here’s why you do it

It creates clear expectations and prevents misunderstandings later on that’s very important it sets forth the roles of key players it makes clear who reports to who it summarizes the process and the schedule and it’s non-threatening it provides comfort to new committee members you’ll see people sitting in a committee

Meeting the very first time not really knowing why they’re there arms folded across their chest and so forth the committee by walking through a committee handbook you can really accomplish a lot in a very short space of time so okay what does a committee handbook look like

I’ll just give an example of a few pages from from one simple contents again eight to ten pages at most after the contents i usually start out with a contacts page where you have basic information about who sits on the committee their address their phone numbers email addresses you might also have down

At the bottom the staff and consultant team the beauty of this is by having this first in the handbook is you almost always get it wrong and that’s a good thing the if you can get your committee members to speak up right away and say well you’ve got the phone number

There but that’s not the one i want i’d rather not have my home number listed just cross that out just the work number or my email address has changed please insert this new email address so people are writing in their notebooks in their handbooks they’re making corrections and of course you can also

As a staff person you can make those changes and bring back to them a clean new sheet of paper at the very next meeting and be responsive and so forth all right so that’s just a good thing to have as your team roster the second thing i like to have is a page

Describing the role of the steering committee i talk about why they happen to have been appointed what is their perspective they each have their own unique reason for being there what is their role during plan development are they going to be expected to actually draft sections

Of the plan or draft sections of an ordinance no we want to make that clear that’s not typically the case networking and recruitment they’re not to be wallflowers public meetings facilitation and support they’re going to be out front they’re not going to be hiding in the in the

Back of the room they’re going to be running the meeting and then also when when it comes down to the end and it becomes time to present the plan back to the planning board or the elected body that they actually take a lead role in presenting the plan not the staff not

The consultant so those are some things i like to emphasize in my handbooks the next thing you might want to have is okay what is the relationship of the committee to other players in the game if you will during this process so you want to say well what is our role

Relative to city council what is our role relative to the planning board resource advisors is a great way to involve people in the process who you may want to have some really good input from but who you don’t want to add to your committee and bloat the numbers

But if you need people who have some really strong knowledge of water resources or transportation or greenways or whatever the case might be schools economic development you can bring those folks in just especially to be a guest presenter or a guest speaker at some of your committee meetings to share with the community

Their knowledge and their particular areas of expertise citizen advisors is just really anybody who participates comes to a meeting sends in a letter sends in an email participates in a monkey survey whatever the case might be that’s a citizen advisor we then talk about the role of the staff and consultant team and

Um their supporting role people sometimes ask me glenn should the staff or the consultant actually sit on the committee as a member i usually say no i think it’s much more effective it’s a much more effective role for the staff or the consultant to be in a support capacity i think you

Still have your opportunity to get in the information and the input that you want to but you’ll come across more as a very supportive and person and a technical advisor more so than trying to get into the political dynamics of debating various policies issues ordinance elements etc organization charts are highly highly underrated

The beauty of an organization chart is it clarifies without doubt who reports to who and it places people in the proper position relative to relative to each other in the example on the screen here i’ve shown again and emphasized that the staff consultant team acts at the bottom of the chart in

Support of the steering committee and you’ll notice the steering committee in this case is reporting directly back to the elected body that the city planning board does not intervene that there is not a situation where the committee has to pass their recommendations through the planning board before they

Go onto the city council does this mean you’re cutting the planning board out no but does it mean that the planning board has the ability to dramatically change the work that the steering committee has put into a plan perhaps for a year or more year and a half

It’s much better if the planning board provides input to the committee and does not usurp the committee’s recommendations that was in this case at least and then of course your citizen advisors and resource advisors are providing also input to the committee but not intervening all right um we’re almost to the end of

The handbook here again it’s no more than seven eight nine pages i like to have a really really broad brush simple graphic of the planning process and as you’re walking through the process with your committee you can make it clear what the steps are what they can expect to have and then

You can write over here in the margin and you can encourage them to write in the margin the target dates for trying to achieve each of those steps again the more you can get them to write in their handbook the more they’re gradually taking ownership of the process

And finally you probably can’t read these because there’s so many different ones out there but characteristics of an effective work team this usually puts people at ease i do not use robert’s rules of order in committees i know that we have to use them when we’re in a formal public setting

Formal public meeting making decisions that go on the public record rezonings whatever when you’re appearing before a formal body robert’s rules of order are a necessity but when you’re working with an advisory committee i strongly urge you to make decisions by consensus not by up or down voting when you do up

Or down voting in a steering committee you create factions almost instantly you create polarized views almost instantly you create winners and losers on every modest change that you might make to a plan or an ordinance you are causing people to confront each other and there’s just no

Need for that so make your decisions by consensus be informal get everyone to participate there are no bad ideas and so on and so forth this particular follow you can look them up online mcgregor he wrote these particular suggestions in 1960 i just found his to be

Standing the test of time so i just use mr mcgregor’s principles from 1960 and again you can find them online or you can use your own there are various people out there of their own suggestions for running committee meetings and group group dynamics all right

I think we’re going to pause now at this point um and take a no more no more than a five minute stretch break we will start in five minutes whether you are back in your seat or not but let’s take a five minute stretch break at this point and resume with some

Maybe if we’ve had any questions come in um we could address those questions right after the five minute stress break is that okay lauren sounds good to me all right okay hey glenn all right i’m in five minutes lauren okay um would you like me to review a

Couple of the questions that i think folks would like to learn more about or we let you go sure okay um there’s a few questions uh about the poll itself i’m not sure if we covered what the um answers were to the polls right um the first question was which of the following

Is not a characteristic of community involvement based planning said that the top vote getter was nicely marbled some folks asked what that means but i think i would more importantly like to know what is the right answer the right answer is nicely marbled that that’s a description

Of the ribeye steak i had last night the the first three a b and c steering committee driven front end loaded and used focus research uses focus research are correct okay and under the three basic steps um it’s uh the people got the people got the answer overwhelmingly so

I i didn’t see that i guess i should have mentioned that they got it right that it was focused on interest first agree on common objectives and look for win-win solutions gotcha i do appreciate the folks that chose cha-cha foxtrot and tango though yeah um

I think uh someone would like for you to explain what front and loaded means right good good point and we’re we’re um we’re going to cover that uh very soon here under getting the word out and getting people in but front end loading basically means that if you’re

Going to spend your time and resources and your energy on maximizing community engagement it’s far far better to do that on the front end of a process than on the back end if you do it on the front end it’s like preventative health care and you don’t have tomatoes coming at you

Later if you’re focused on back end loading that’s when people come out with pitchforks and torches and and tomatoes and they want to attack what you’ve done so it’s well worth well worth the effort to really focus on front end loading and maximize your turnout at your first couple town meetings and

That’s what we’re going to be talking about right that’s our next subject how do we get a huge turnout for our public meetings okay that’ll be our next subject sure the next question um was another terminology question what is old guard and um specifically the question is how

Can the committee come to a consensus if the opinion is split um okay first first question is old guard tends to be for example on the outer banks of north carolina without wanting to offend anybody the old guard tends to be the people that came off the boat from england

Two centuries ago and have never left the island they’re just the folks that have been around forever uh they’re not the newcomers by any means to an area you know it’s it’s easy it’s easy to get folks who have recently moved to an area i should say easier

To get people that have moved to the area to participate in planning um visioning community planning exercises people for whatever reason that have moved to an area tend to be maybe more motivated to want to participate than people who have been there forever so the old guard tend to be the landed gentry

The the farmers uh the fishermen if you’re in a resort water water-oriented community the the foresters if you’re in a more forested area uh the folks that just have been around forever and they’re the they’re the old families the well-known family names you go to the cemetery and

You’ll see their names all through the cemetery they’ve been there for centuries and unfortunately when you put out a call for people to serve on a committee they’re usually the last people that will ever step forward to say yeah i want to serve on a steering committee

But if you if you ignore them they have political pull and they will come out at the end of the process and talk to their buddies on the elected boards and make make it make you wish you had involved them early on uh the second question remind me of that one again

Call the consensus you’re talking about what to do when the committee is split the way in which consensus works is you’re looking for nodding heads you you as the as the staff person or the consultant or the facilitator you would float the balloon you’d float the idea the policy

And say okay how many people can agree generally with this policy and you look for nodding heads and if you go over here to joe and joe’s shaking his head then you go to joe and you say okay joe what it what is it about this particular recommendation or policy that you’re not

Comfortable with and you address his concern um you know individually and you do that in a round-robin fashion um looking for consensus modifying the proposal uh until everybody’s nodding their head now in on rare occasions rare occasions normally you can address almost any issue by that process but on

Rare occasions you will find a particular policy i know recently in one community i just had a committee that was absolutely divided over the issue of affordable housing in their in their community one side felt like we really need to have some sort of affordable housing the other side

Thought it was just you know letting the plague in um so in those rare instances we’ll put something on a back burner for a while and we’ll come back to it and hopefully over time and having the community work together uh over a period of many months

They’ll find a way to work through their differences and we we were able to overcome the issue of affordable housing just by modifying it to some extent to make it acceptable to everyone involved but that’s a rare occasion i i would say in in having prepared dozens and dozens of

Comprehensive plans for example i cannot think of perhaps more than a half dozen policies or a half dozen actions that the committee that i was working with reached some level of dissension over and usually of those six were able to resolve them so it’s probably too long an answer

Okay uh one more and i think we’ll be able to pick back up in just a minute um i think this is a very relevant question to today in particular is how to deal with folks who are not so supportive of government intervention in general and

I guess kind of using your analogy of you know keeping um the skunks in the tent um if there is that type of uh characteristic on the committee how do you deal with that um interest right um well number one you need to be somewhat discerning in terms of

Who’s on the committee because you can’t put somebody on your committee who is absolutely intractable it just it doesn’t work but you do want to have somebody on your committee who has somewhat of a bias in that direction you on a scale of 1 to 10 if if 10 being absolutely intractable

And one being fully supportive of good planning for example i have no problem with putting somebody on the committee who would be maybe a seven in terms of their opposition to planning but you can’t have somebody who’s a 10 in terms of their level of opposition on your committee because they’re just intractable

And you you want to have somebody who’s even-handed if you if you’ve ever read the book town planning in practice by sir raymond unwin it’s one of the best books i’ve ever read on planning and it was published in i think 1911 maybe 1909 town planning and practice sir raymond

On when it was out of out of print for a while but i think they brought it back he even talks in 1911 about the need to have people on your blue ribbon committee as they would call them back then that maybe may have opinions or perspectives that are just very contrary

To good planning but if they’re not totally intractable and if they’re well viewed in the community they can be an incredible asset to have on your committee so um and then later in our presentation we’re going to be talking about specifically how to deal with the disruptive critic and furthermore

Not how to deal just with one disruptive critic but if you have a situation where you’re holding a meeting and you’re talking about potentially having hundreds of disruptive critics over extremely controversial issues like annexations or hazardous waste sites or putting a highway through an area that is totally against that highway

Obviously and so on and so forth we’ll talk about some specific things that you can do to deal with disruptive critic situations i think i think you’ll find that very interesting it’s one of the more effective things i think can work for you okay i think some folks would like to get the

Name of the author you referenced just a moment ago again if you could say that the book is called town planning in practice and it was written by a fellow who was knighted he was a british guy his name was sir raymond unwin unwin is spelled u-n-w-i-n

And it’s it’s just a fascinating book in a little sidebar in one part of the book it shows all these little vehicles on a major major roadway um whether it be in paris or london or wherever and it shows turning lanes and it shows turning movements and safe movements

This way and traffic control that way i was studying this diagram one day and i looked at i said my goodness those are unusual vehicles there were horses and buggies so it just gives you an idea of how advanced this gentleman’s thinking was in terms of what where the future of planning was

Headed in in 1909. so that’s a sidebar sorry about that okay and um if it isn’t addressed later on in your webinar in your uh presentation uh folks do uh want to know more about historic figures and public presence public participation if you have any resource guides that they could

Reference i think they would like to know more about that so yeah i’ve got a few names i can drop a few names at the end of the presentation of some prominent prominent names in the history of of community activism and public participation that might help might come up on the exam

Sure that would be great i think let’s go ahead and go back into your presentations now and uh time permitting we may have a couple more questions at the end all right um i guess we have a starting off before we even go any farther we have a another polling question number three

Okay and number four for that matter we got number three and number four all right i’m launching question number three as a general rule is there an ideal size for a steering committee so about 70 percent have voted and overwhelming response is 9-15 so far and that is correct

That is we need to spend a lot of time on that yeah all right i’m going to close that poll and go to the next one which is which of the following is a reason for having a committee handbook i will launch that okay we’re at about 65

And um again an overwhelming response is for option b creates clear expectations prevents misunderstanding etc that’s correct and a little little story there too um i talked about doing a committee handbook with a community a few years ago and they really took it to heart the staff did and they said glenn we’ve

Prepared our committee handbook for our our new plan and we wanted to run it by you mind if we send you a copy of it and have you look at it and they sent it to me and it was 75 pages long and it included all kinds of material on

New urbanism and smart growth and tdm and just every imaginable rural agricultural land preservation and it just went on and on and i i had to call them back and say i appreciate you want to convey all this information but that’s not really what the purpose

Of a committee handbook is it needs to be eight to ten pages hard hitting just committee members don’t have time you know this you know this yourself you send them a package of information you’re lucky if you get them to read the information before the meeting

So whatever you send people it needs to be what i call pithy so all right let’s move on can we let’s talk about getting the word out and getting the people and this is a question that comes up quite often a quick story i was hired by a county in south florida to

Help them do a public engagement process for a major major county park this was going to be like a 15 million dollar park that was going to be really unusual it’s going to have water slides and miniature golf this was a public park but they were really taking on sort of a

Private sector perspective on it they were going to have user fees and things like that and so it was really quite a dynamic thing and so they they were going to bring me in just for the purpose of helping them do public input it’s not something i

Like to do i’d rather prepare a plan but in this case they wanted me to just help them with their public input so i talked to the parks director on the phone and i said he said well what should we be looking for as a place to hold a meeting

And i said well you want to have a a meeting site that’s on sort of neutral territory so like a community center or a school oftentimes works well a library any place where people feel comfortable not not like a private hotel or if you had to go to a church you could

But i try to stay with just public public facilities i said you need a place with movable chairs and tables a long wall to put a lot of flip charts up on the wall foot chart sheets needs to be handicapped accessible convenient parking and so on and so forth

Well i flew down to fort lauderdale and i got they met me at the plane got in the little recreation van and instead of heading west toward the park we started heading east toward downtown fort lauderdale because i had asked them to have the meeting as close as possible to the park site

But they they headed toward downtown so this does not sound promising and so we got downtown and we pulled into you know downtown fort lauderdale is quite quite the place these days it’s not not what you think of as the beach town that it was in the 60s and um

We pulled into this multi-story parking deck and went round and round and round and found a parking space and we walked down we walked down the block went to this big building where we went through the revolving doors and there was a security guard there with a sign-in pad and

You had to show your license and then you walked down an aisle down a hall and got an elevator rolled it up to the sixth floor then got off that elevator got another elevator right up to the 12th floor walked down a hall went into like a lecture room that was one of

These stair-stepped lecture halls with fixed seats and a whiteboard down across the front of the room well needless to say when the meeting time started there was a landscape contractor there there were two blue-haired ladies i don’t know how they got there and then about eight to ten parks and recreation staff and

It was so disappointing to me that they went to all this trouble to bring me down to fort lauderdale to help them with this public engagement process and the whole every every recommendation i’d give them given them in terms of the meeting room and it’s location and it’s

Set up everything was completely bass backwards so and so we went through the exercise that i had in mind for three people and after we were done the parks and recreation director came up to me said well gee if i had known it was going to be that non-threatening

I think we might have done things differently but it anyway that’s that’s the sidebar let’s talk about now why and the where’s and the hows of getting a lot of people to your meetings first of all uh well a little humor don’t ever either you or anybody that

Works for you don’t ever let them tell you that or make excuses as to why you have a poor turnout in my opinion if after hearing this material today if you can’t get a big turnout to your public meeting then you need to be in a different occupation

And if you have somebody working for you as a consultant and the consultant says well i don’t know how we can get people to come to the meeting they’re just not interested then they need to be in a different profession there’s no excuse for that let’s talk about it

Here’s a typical bad meeting announcement and we’re going to talk about the different methods of generating interest in meetings you notice at this top of this announcement it says it’s an informational workshop and yet everything about this notice says anything but it being a friendly informational workshop what this notice

Says is that this is a boring dry stale public hearing and if you look in there a little deeper you’ll see the date on it is 1996. remember that day because we’re going to come back to that now here’s a more simple announcement a little playful to the point um

It’s a special meeting 20 years have gone by there’s not a lot of verbiage covers the ground uh here’s a more detailed public meeting notice this happens to be for that that plan i mentioned um uh the south side area of greensboro where they had the five million dollars allocated ahead of time

This has the steering committee out in front it has a map of the study area it shows a location in the study area it has a plan logo just it’s it’s a marketing initiative you need a logo for your plan coke and pepsi have them there’s no

Reason why you can’t have them for your plan you use that same logo for every single meeting announcement in the paper every map that you produce every document you produce has a logo on it that immediately people associate it with that particular plan so here’s some ideas for scoring your

Flyer and by the way flyers are not the answer i’m just covering flyers because people are interested in how do i prepare an effective flyer the flyers don’t bring people to meetings okay score your next flyer you want to have a logo and decent graphics you want to make sure that the

Steering committee names are listed out front not the planning staff how many times do i see an announcement for a meeting come out and it shows the planning director as the most prominent or the project planner as the person who is listed first to contact about the meeting

What’s in it for me message if you’re if your announcements have more wees you know we are in the process of preparing a plan we would like to accomplish this if we have more ways than use then you need to turn it around that’s coming up

Next actually but what’s in it for me is why do i want to go to this meeting and not watch whatever the show happens to be that night why would i want to be at this meeting a map of the study area there’s the more used than we use in the text

When and where that’s a duh starting in any a lot of meetings don’t show ending times they’ll say we’re meeting at such and such a place at seven o’clock well the message being sent there is i don’t know why i’m going to get out of there i don’t know how long this meeting

Is going to go i don’t know if i’m going to be trapped in that meeting so to speak if people have a negative perception of what typical public meetings are like so you want to show your ending time and you want to stick to it

If you have a meeting and it’s it’s it’s intended to go from seven to nine put in your flyer that the meeting will end promptly at nine o’clock if you do that and you stick to your word the chances of people coming back for subsequent meetings is much much greater

So have your ending time shown you might have a theme developed and used a brief project background perhaps and then who to call locally for more information so 10 points nice okay now let’s get back to these meeting announcements transportation agencies in particular and it’s kind of like their required

Notices in the paper under state and federal laws unfortunately those same laws that limit their budgets also cause their announcements to be incredibly dry boring uninteresting and work just the opposite of bringing people out to meetings the only people that come through those meetings are the people

Whose oxes are going to get gourd so i do pick on them though because their meeting announcements are so bad usually here’s one that you’ll notice they’ve made an attempt to improve improve the the appearance of their announcement now if you look at the data on this the first one was 1996.

This is what 16 years later 16 years later and this is the improvement that they’ve made to the announcement so now we’re going to talk about a sampling of ways to get people to a town meeting from worst to best this used to be a lot easier to pin down honestly

If you had asked me 10 years ago the the sampling of ways to get people to a meeting from worst to best it was a no-brainer it was easy but now with the advent of social media and websites and facebook and all the options that the blogs all the options that people have

It’s not as easy but they’re still a clear winner but i’m telling you that these ideas on these these methods i’m going to show you right now can vary with the exception of the winner so let’s let’s go through them now notice a public hearing still in my mind continues to be the

Worst don’t use the word public hearing unless you have to how many times will do you have a member of your planning board or your city council or your county commission come up to you and as a staff person and say oh yeah aren’t we going to have a

Hearing on that aren’t we going to have a public hearing on that in the mind of the elected official or the advisory the board member they associate any public meeting as a hearing well a hearing is a bad word it connotes the spanish inquisition the judge and jury

The three minutes of the podium it’s just a very bad word to use don’t ever use it you know at the end of a process when you’re trying to get a plan adopted or an ordinance adopted yes you have to have a public hearing but all

The meetings leading up to that over a period of a year a year and a half two years whatever none of those need to be public hearings so let’s move on um minor news story in a paper you might get some people meeting announcement in a newspaper maybe a few more

Appearing on the morning show that just depends if you’re talking about agricultural preservation uh rural development um the morning farm reports show they’re not as common as they used to be but you’re hitting a target audience posting flyers for people who live in rural areas that are accustomed to going to the post

Office to pick up their mail yes posting a flyer at the post office uh can be effective or at the general store or whatever but in most instances it’s not it’s not really truly effective it could work for a neighborhood meeting perhaps um local government website it just

Depends websites are all over the map these days some are really good some are bad so it just depends a news story in a paper with a photograph this assumes that people are still subscribing to newspapers these days there’s a whole generation the generation why they don’t read newspapers anymore

Unless they’re online so again this one’s not as clear as it used to be radio television news exposure yes people are still getting a lot of their news easy quick effortless through radio and television news letters and postcards they can be quite effective especially if you’re doing a

Small area plan or a neighborhood plan or corridor plan or an area that applies to a distinct portion of your community a postcard is really good because they will read a postcard they may not open up an envelope that may get to file 13 real quickly but

They if the postcard is interesting has a photograph a few catch lines on it you’ll get people to read a postcard and again the wild card is the social media it just depends but now i’ve said all those things all those things none of them compares

With the tried and true number one best way unfailing to get a huge turnout for your meeting here comes okay it’s called the power of 10 and it always works here’s the way it goes if you have a steering committee of 9 to 15 people your steering committee is representative of your community

Demographically socio socially and geographically because you went through the leadership selection process and you did a great job of diversifying your committee in those dimensions your committee is charged with bringing no fewer than 10 people each to the meeting and they know this because this is part

Of their their duties that you described in the committee handbook and you assure them by showing them slides of previous meetings or whatever if you can you can assure them that the meeting is going to be positive it’s going to be constructive it’s going to be fun

And so they don’t need to have any reservations about inviting 10 of their business associates their neighbors their fellow church members whatever to these meetings because people are going to have a good time they’re going to be glad they came but if you do the numbers if you have a say a

۱۲-person committee and each committee member brings at least 12 10 people you have a baseline of baseline attendance of 120 people anything above that is just gravy and i’ve done this where we had i had a committee one time a little larger than i like it was like a 22 person committee but

They the committee took their job very seriously and at our first meeting for a comprehensive plan which is not controversial we had 325 people come to that meeting we’ve done it in in other communities that were quite small where we had um we had set up we’ll talk about setting

Up chairs later but we set up chairs for 150 we had 220 show up we were ready for them but we’ll talk about that later but this this strategy always works and and you can do it just just just try it once and um and have a good meeting and

You’ll get people coming back all right now we’re going to get to some nitty gritty tips on on public meetings um go through a few here choosing your meeting dates it’s always hard to avoid the annual chamber of commerce dinner things like that you want to avoid the

Holidays i’ve done some work in canada they don’t have the same holidays that we have in the united states so you gotta gauge your you know in in the in the caribbean they take easter weekend and easter week very very seriously so you don’t hold meetings during easter week in the caribbean

So you want to avoid holidays you want to avoid vacation periods i don’t usually hold public meetings during the summer months because people are just too busy that they they’re just not interested in spending time in a public meeting that they think may not be fun during that time

Of course you cross out your regular board meeting dates your commitments that you might have because you want your historic preservation people your planning board your city council your county commissioners you want them all to be able to attend and if you schedule a meeting in conflict with their meeting

Dates it can be considered upfront you avoid competing community events here in the carolinas we avoid atlantic coast conference basketball conference times basketball tournament times we avoid ncaa basketball tournaments in alabama you want to avoid the opening day of hunting season it sounds funny but it’s true um avoid competing entertainment sports

Events i just mentioned that it depends on the community but wednesdays in a small town can be a midweek church night and that can be taken as an offense in some small communities fridays and sundays no way but saturday morning can be okay sometimes particularly if you’re working in a

Community where people if it’s a resort community people are just coming there on the weekend saturday morning say from 8 30 to 10 can work pretty well what’s left the best months september october the first half of november and january through may right now we’re in a great

Great time to be starting a new planning process january and february are tremendous months to start especially january when you got that new year’s resolution can do spirit and then after labor day is the other the second best time of the year to start a new planning process

Days of the week monday tuesday thursday and saturday in the morning only when i teach this class i usually interact with my students and i say does anybody know what this is and what happened here this is the um this was the arrangement of the of the formation of the troops at the

Third day of gettysburg and i show this slide and if it’s one thing that you remember from his webinar today is remember gettysburg we’re coming up on the 150th anniversary of that by the way but this was set up for war this was set up for conflict this was set up for 40

Thousand casualties there’s no need for you to set up your your meetings for war if you don’t have to so we’ll talk about meeting room setups next um i saw this in a civil war book where it showed the typical formation of civil war troops and ranks and when i

Saw it remind me of folding chairs so whenever i go into a meeting room and i’ve come in you know a few hours before the meeting and the meeting room’s already been set up and if it’s set up with these rank and file or these these rows of

Folding chairs the immediate thing that comes to mind is gettysburg and i know that the room is set up for war so we immediately rearrange the room this is the kind of attitude if you have a head table people may say welcome we’re looking forward to working with you on this

Issue but the position of the of the dias and its height and its position relative to the folding chairs or the room in general it says we want to control intimidate confront and talk down to you um so that’s i’m going through my own notes here there are

There are many many different ways to set up a meeting room i’m going to go through about a half dozen these are the half dozen that i rely upon most often and they truly do have good purposes for them and we’ll i’ll show you the diagrams in a second

A scoping meeting is at the front end of a major planning process can be small a neighborhood meeting two but it’s usually a town meeting with breakouts a scoping mean for for a small meeting i use what’s called spokes on a half wheel and we’ll show you that diagram

The third type would be where you’re basically sharing information i don’t recommend this too often because you don’t want to pound your chest and act like you know it all in terms of speaking to the public but that’s a chevron format if you can picture what a chevron looks like on a sergeant’s

Shoulder plan development group action planning and we’ll show that in a second preliminary plan evaluation would be the open house a lot of different ways to do an open house a plan presentation a work session this is one you’re all familiar with the classic round or u-shaped table

And finally the plan presentation and only only would you consider this when you’re talking about a public hearing format you want to avoid that type of setup unless you have to and here’s the reminder again every meeting is not a public hearing do not use the h word unless required to do

So by law so here’s here’s the diagrams let’s um let’s go through these together Number one in the upper left-hand corner is the town meeting with breakout some people will tell you that you can have a plenary session with everybody in the same room but when it comes to your breakouts it’s best to go into breakout rooms i don’t agree with that um unless it’s a

Very controversial issue and you’re trying to break up the force of incredible opposition and you’re just trying to create a constructive environment where people can actually say something you may may need to go into separate breakout rooms but generally speaking i advise against it it’s it lends an air

Of secrecy to your process it takes the energy out of the room it takes away the buzz i happen to like having many many small groups operating in the same space provided the acoustics will allow it most of the times if you’re aware of your meeting room spaces and you’ve got

Decent acoustics there’s no reason in the world why you can’t have your small group breakouts in the same room i’ve done this with over 300 people in a gymnasium that had good acoustical uh tiles on the walls and modifications that we did to the floor a little bit with some carpeting

Number two is the classic u-shaped table i think you know that that’s great for joint work sessions at the beginning of a process and at the end of a process i like to have a steering committee perhaps the elected body and maybe the planning board on most planning processes

Sitting around the u-shaped shape table number three is what i call spokes on a half wheel that’s a very useful meeting room set up for no more than about 40 to 50 people and the advantage of it is is you can have flip charts set up at the outside arc

Of the half wheel but you can have focused attention on a common wall or a projection screen a powerpoint presentation at the inner side of the spokes on a half wheel at the same time you can operate in small groups during parts of the meeting and operate

As a plenary group during other parts of the meeting without ever having to shift it’s just a very useful setup number four is the open house the open house i call a standing cocktail party there are no tables there are no chairs one table in the middle of

The room is is the cocktail table it may have cokes and pepsis chips cookies whatever if you want to get elaborate i can show you one later we had a tent meeting where we had hot dogs and hamburgers you can do whatever you want to do but basically it’s a the

Stations are around the perimeter of the room and people walk from station to station to station uh commenting on the the results of the work later in the process when you’re ready to have an open house number five is the chevron the advantage of the chevron is that if you’re the presenter

That the people in the meeting who are listening to your presentation are also somewhat looking at each other so it’s not in a direct attack mode it’s not like a we they notice there’s no head table no judging jury it’s just um people set up to listen but also see

Each other during the question and answer period number six is small group action planning that’s where you’ll have small groups with maybe a flip shark pad a series of prescribed questions on large sheets we’re going through maybe subcommittees but i i strongly suggest you keep your subcommittees in a single room

On the same night there’s just lots of good things that happen by having people meeting at the same time in the same place in terms of pacing in terms of competitive instincts in terms of getting on with the process in terms of sharing information and staying coordinated

If you have small groups meeting in different meetings places on different nights it’s also a staff nightmare for you as a staff person to have to attend all those meetings number seven and number seven finally that is the public hearing you can see the head table the vias you can see the

Podium and you can see the audience not a good setup for most meetings so there they are all right um some some thoughts about uh meetings and you can see that meetings of of various types um these three photos that you see here are all of the

One on the upper right hand corner was for a watershed management plan that i i was involved in um the meeting in the lower left was for a comprehensive plan i prepared and the meeting in the center uh lower part was for historic preservation planning so these are not exactly controversial

Projects it’s not annexation it’s not hazardous waste facilities but you can still get people to come out to the meetings if you do it right this particular meeting here that’s shown on the left i mentioned it before we set up the room for 150 people and 220 showed up

One of the things i would urge you to do is to set up fewer chairs than the lowest number of people that you expect what happens when you set up a room for 250 chairs and 150 people show up the the perspective is oh well they were

Expecting more and they got a lousy turnout but if you’re expecting 150 people and you set up 125 chairs and you have to get more chairs and tables out as people are streaming into the room i just love the sound of squeaking table legs i love the sound of my committee

Members taking chairs off the pre-positioned stacks that have been strategically placed in the room and setting up those extra chairs and bouncing on the floor the message sent there is wow good turnout it’s just creating a positive environment for the meeting so set up fewer chairs

Than you think you’re going to need but have checkup tables and chairs standing at the ready to be set up in an instant notice conversely when you are dealing with a controversial issue if you’re dealing with that hazardous waste facility if you’re dealing with that new highway that

Is going to plow through several homes and people are very upset about it you want to set up many many more chairs in a cavernous space this is not to let me get this clear now this is not to change the input from the meeting it’s to allow the meeting to happen

In a constructive way so if you’re expecting 500 people that are going to show up in opposition to some very controversial project set up a thousand chairs it just takes the the antagonism out of the room and at least allows you to have the meeting and a story about that but it’s probably

Too much to go into right now on house something went very badly a meeting i i was not able to attend but they set up fewer chairs than they should have they had it in a very cramped space and the meeting never even convened As far as the mechanics of preparing for meetings i have two very critical sheets that i use one is called the working agenda and it spells out in rather exacting time frames what we hope to be doing during different parts of a two-hour meeting Don’t get me wrong if the meeting doesn’t adhere strictly to the particular five minute time frame that we identified at our working agenda i don’t get worried about that but it i’ve found that if you don’t have a target time to shoot for in your meetings then you’re surely not going to hit

Anything so do your working agenda in the first column have your time frames in the second column having you have your main activity and then your third column identify who’s doing what it’s just a simple thing it doesn’t need to be secretive you have a regular meeting agenda that’s much simpler than this

And if if somebody from the public wanted to see your working agenda they certainly could but it’s probably more detail than the average citizen needs to see and there’s some enlarged columns the second sheet i like to use is the meeting materials and equipment sheet in this case we have every single

Item that’s going to be needed during that meeting identified where it’s needed during the meeting the quantity who provided who provides it and any special notes so again it’s just it’s good common sense but it’s just a useful thing to do and if you do these kinds of meetings uh

Frequently it’s nice to have these seats to fall back on no meeting is quite exactly the same but it sure is nice not to have to reinvent the wheel every time you hold a meeting that is similar to a previous one okay a functional room layout diagram

This one happens to be spokes on a half wheel so this shows how the for the flip charts can be located it shows where a powerpoint projector might be a projection screen uh walls for posting sheets and so on and so forth uh the nice thing about

Doing a functional out for for what i do is i can send this to my client communities ahead of time and they know exactly what i’m looking for for various types of meetings i just have a bank of of some of these i can i can email ahead of me

And what they’ll do to help me out is they’ll take digital photos of a meeting space perhaps that i’ve not had the pleasure working in and they’ll send me digital photos so i know what i’m walking into and between the two of us we can really nail it down

Uh very nicely ahead of time all right as far as i mentioned previously my committee members are never wallflowers they get pre-meeting training on their roles during meetings the different things they can do with small group facilitation activity maps they they’re the people that greet their fellow citizens at the registration

Table and they might also be responsible for open and closing the meeting maybe summarizing key points in the meeting meetings need to be fun people need to come to the meeting and when they leave um feel like they’ve had a good time that there was some good constructive work done

Um that there were some fun interludes that there was maybe some food we might have a raffle we’ve raffled off bicycles for transportation plans for example just be creative food again is a nice thing we have this one watershed management plan where we had a tent meeting down by

By a major lake this was chautauqua lake up in new york state and we were trying to get people interested in coming to this meeting so our theme for the meeting was come grill us on your watershed and we had um fortunately uh hot dogs and hamburgers with the smoke wafting

Over this parking lot at a state park and we had little like burma shave type signs along the entryway into the park and so between the little signs and the smell of the hot dogs and hamburgers we had a great turnout for that tent meeting and really great citizen input

To some of the policies and recommendations we were making for addressing watershed concerns in that lake all right the thing that i uh would like to um really have as my final major section of the webinar today is dealing with the disruptive critics i don’t have to go into great detail on

This because i can point you to my website later where you can read all this in detail and have it all mapped out for you but just for the sake of discussion today i’ll go through some of these points this these are things you can do before meeting during meeting and after the

Meeting and they apply to both individual disruptive critics and they can also apply to where you have a whole bunch of them at once but we’ll focus on on the individual right now here’s some things you can do before the meeting if you happen to know who he is

And oftentimes that is the case you can pay him or her i’m going to use him in this case a visit and just listen sometimes people just want to know that they’ve had an opportunity to listen you can consider appointing that person to your committee if they’re not completely intractable

You can always always set the open dialogue for the end of the meeting never the beginning never ever have open dialogue at the beginning of a major public meeting and also watch out for this watch out for this if somebody stands up and says i just have a quick question

When you hear somebody say i just have a quick question there ought to be fire sirens going off in your brain and red flashing lights because that i have a quick question can quickly degenerate into the meeting going into collapse so be very very careful with that particular comment from from somebody

You you say we’re going to have plenty of opportunity for open dialogue a little later but we’ve got business to attend to right now you know is is your question something about the the agenda or is it something that’s more substantive if it’s something substantive save it for a little bit later

Work in small groups early on again don’t let the disruptive critic to command the floor and allow the meeting to be dragged down early on before people have a chance to to get their input in if many critics are expected pick a huge venue i mentioned that before don’t have a head table

Don’t present a target there’s no need for a head table unless you’re doing a public hearing and how many of our meetings need to be public hearings not very many okay what can you do during the meeting strike up a conversation during pre-meeting time i always like to have

Refreshments pretzels chips coke coffee chocolate whatever about 15 to 20 minutes before the official meeting time starts it gets people to the meeting on time it allows you to mix and mingle especially with people you may identify as disruptive critics and allow them to get to know you as

A real person not a faceless bureaucrat sit next to the critic if you ever try to argue with somebody when you’re sitting next to them rubbing shoulders doesn’t always lend itself to that but if you don’t have a head table you can oftentimes just sit down anywhere in the

In the seating and sit right next to the critic and strike up conversations limit comments to prescribed times write the name of each speaker on a flip chart don’t allow them to be anonymous if somebody has something to say say oh excuse me sir please tell me your name

And do that for everybody nip platitudes with specific questions of genuine interest you’d be surprised how people will say well everybody knows this or nobody believes that well when somebody says those kind of key words you need to be very genuinely interested in what the person is saying

And say well that sounds interesting could you tell me a little bit more about it and you asked a specific question that gets the person away from platitudes and and talks about examples where have you seen that how did that work um don’t argue with them

I had somebody say in a public meeting one time well you know we can’t allow any multi-family housing in our community because they’re all just drug addicts so you don’t argue with them but you have your flip chart there and you write on the flip chart the person’s name and

Next to the person’s name you write thinks that all multi-family housing occupants are drug addicts and you’d be surprised how putting it there on the sheet can kind of diminish the significance of the combat it actually looks kind of ridiculous offer concrete examples to contrast platitudes when you have an example and

We planners usually do uh refer to the common objectives remember we talked about the three steps interests objectives recommendations once you establish those common objectives put them on the wall on a large sheet and keep them on the wall and when you find yourself with a urge

To get in a disagreement with somebody or when two citizens might be disagreeing with one another redirect them to the common objectives and say these are something that came out of our first town meeting where we had 300 people there and these objectives are sort of our

Guiding influence how does how do your comments fit in with these objectives try to redirect don’t argue with them directly have them argue with the objectives agree where you can and if he or she has nothing but criticism say what do you suggest what’s your solution if you don’t think any of

Our ideas are appropriate what might you suggest so turn the tables on them and finally what you can do after the meeting i had a mayor come up to me one time this was on that 42 person body and this mayor was used to calling his own shots he was a

About a 40 year old multi-multi-millionaire and invented some software product and he came up to me after the first couple meetings and he said glenn he said i don’t like the way you’re running these meetings and i’m not coming back anymore and i say well i’m really sorry that

You’re not coming back we would miss you so after the meeting i sat down in my office and i wrote him a personal note and i said joe i really wish you’d reconsider coming back to the meeting you really got a lot of great ideas people look up to you

With some of the thoughts that you have please consider coming back he came back to every meeting after that and never missed a meeting what i found afterwards is he didn’t have any friends in the room even though i said that people looked up to him well the truth was

Nobody liked him because he was so abrasive and he really was brilliant but he just had a bad way of presenting his ideas he left people at dust all the time so you can you can sometimes i have a town manager i think the world of and whenever a disruptive critic would come

To a meeting and really dig in the town manager would lean over to me as we’d be standing there and say you know what that fellow is going to be my best friend in three weeks and he would do it so you can do it now for a conclude conclusion here i’m

Going to plan to try to wrap up by about 20 minutes after the hour but in the remaining 15 minutes that i have or so i just want to run through some methods so that you can have these in your toolbox they should be fairly self-evident activity maps

Are a great way to engage people in getting them to offer their input rather than you pounding your chest with predetermined gis maps you can put a blank map up on the wall and have people put a star on the map where they live you can have if it’s a neighborhood plan

It’s in the neighborhoods on tough times you can say where are the trouble spots these are a few of my favorite things in the neighborhood and so on for that you can make up any question you want that’s appropriate put it across the top of the map and get people

Oftentimes during the pre-meeting time especially when they got a coke in their hand to offer their input on the maps it’s just a great and you can have your committee members stationed at each map to help facilitate that process nominal group technique if you don’t know it you better get online and find

Out about it nominal group technique also known as democratic brainstorming is the workhorse of scoping meetings it appeals to all four personality types it’s a great way to get a lot of ideas up on the wall if you have say a meeting where you’ve got 200 people there you can generate

Normally three ideas per person 200 people you can generate over 600 ideas in a half hour and then you can vote on and rank those ideas but you need to get online and look up nominal group technique and try it or go somewhere where it’s being

Used many of you may already know it the desired future the unwanted future is important because oftentimes we forget about identifying the downside risk if we hold a meeting for a neighborhood plan or a comprehensive plan in particular and we only talk about what we want to be there’s some merit in that

But you also need to point out the downside risk what if we do nothing what’s going to happen to the traffic on main street out there on the strip if we do nothing what’s going to happen to our water supplies if we do nothing what’s going to happen to the natural resources in

The winter land around our community if we do nothing so the desired future and the unwanted teacher present a balanced approach to that and sometimes people will come to the table to identify the unwanted future when they won’t come to the table to talk about the desired future you have to

Give them a reason for wanting to be there what’s good and what’s not so good is just a variation on this i oftentimes use it with neighborhood planning notice i don’t say what’s good and what’s bad you don’t want to offend people about what’s bad with their

Neighborhood but you can say what’s not so good where can we make improvements and you use the same basic approach brain demograph democratic brainstorming you get people to identify on three by five cards the things they like about their neighborhood and on the flip side of the things they don’t like

Transfer it to the flip charts using nominal group technique put it on a common voting wall and identify priorities notice the three steps there in this slide it’s the same three steps that i’ve been talking about what’s good and what’s not so good is really talking about what are their interests

Number two what are their common objectives and number three what are the proposed actions we constantly come back to those three steps everybody’s a photographer this used to be a bigger challenge than it is today we used to you know hand out disposable cameras and send our committee members out to take pictures

Of things in the community that they like and they dislike nowadays everybody’s got a digital camera so it’s much easier the biggest challenge the biggest challenge of everybody’s a photographer is getting your committee members to write captions they you you got to pull teeth it’s like

Pulling teeth if if they take a picture of something that they like or they dislike but they don’t write a caption then you really don’t know and your fellow committee members don’t know what it is they like or they don’t like so really get them to work on that i had

A mayor who happened to be a pilot and he went up in his plane and took that picture in the upper left-hand corner in fact several pictures of the community about things he liked and didn’t like about that community everybody is an historian somewhat similar if you can get people from the community

To bring to a meeting or bring to the planning agency ahead of time some of their historic photos from an area that you’re considering for a historic district and if they’re willing to allow you to scan them and you can scan them on the spot they can take their pictures back home and

Then create a collage of historic photos they have available at the meeting during the pre-meeting time when people are standing around having a coke or a coffee or hot chocolate it’s just a great way to kick off an historic preservation type process so a few more methods uh for

Post town meeting i i do type up every single word or i have somebody type up every single word that’s put on a flip chart i sort them like a deck of cards and identify themes extremely useful in identifying once you’ve once you’ve documented all the

Input and you’ve sorted them like a deck of cards like recreation issues transportation issues economic development issues and you can then create themes themes lead directly into objectives so a good thing to do the vision i take visions maybe to a higher level or take them very seriously

To me a vision is not motherhood and apple pie statements they really need to be specific so for a plan i might have 12 vision statements here’s an example of one this happens to be a vision statement concerning a walkable and likable community and over here on the left hand side

I may extract from our town meeting many many key words that came from the citizens that express their particular slant on walkable and likable communities and i put that in prose that has a flow to it and then i use photographs from their community to illustrate the language of the vision statement

So it’s just a very powerful tool it can serve as those objectives that you’re looking for during the balance of the plan small group action planning the the key point i would make there is that when you break up in small groups and you’re and you’re focusing on sub sub questions

You really need to have pre-formatted question sheets so that everybody stays on the same basic flow and process if you just turn small groups loose and say okay i want you to use this flip chart pad and talk about the drug problem in your neighborhood that conversation will go all over

And there won’t be a real focus to it but if you have pre-prescribed questions that logically cause people to think through an issue it can be very very effective the open house and walk around survey i mentioned this in terms of the open house anyway but they hope the walk-around survey is a

Great tool for getting public input on a fairly complicated document for example if you’ve prepared a comprehensive plan it has lots of policies or it has lots of implementation actions and you can list those implementation actions or policies on in large wall mounted sheets and have a likert scale to the right of

Each statement you know strongly disagree disagree strong agree strongly agree no opinion and then have a place for comments it is a great way to get a lot of public input without standing at a podium and saying okay here’s peggy from our committee and she’s going to talk to you about transportation planning

It just doesn’t work this is a much better way to present a plan and get input i mentioned the tent meeting this was the functional room layout for the tent meeting with the the cocktail stuff in the middle so to speak the hot dogs the hamburgers the soft

Drinks the chips and we had our stations around the perimeter of the room we had a flow uh really nice turnout that day and really good input on that watershed management plan and finally coming down near the end here um signing ceremonies are are kind of nice of independence okay that’s john

Hancock yeah um anyway when you’re reaching the end of your process you can come up with your own signing ceremony where in this case it was a memorandum of understanding among many different localities within a region and they agreed on some common growth management principles

And so we had a signing ceremony we all had a chance to have a a photo op with the media there after they had done their work and signed off on the memorandum of understanding so now we’re really at the end here i think these things are not going to be

News to you they’re in your handout or in the handout that’s going to be posted i believe at the utah website in terms of positioning your plan for implementation i i think you can read these yourself i’d rather leave the remaining time that we have here for any final follow-up questions

Over the polling questions i will go through these quickly again they’re in your in your they will be in your handout and these are not critical these are this information is not nearly as critical as the other information that i provided earlier some executive summaries here’s the reminder that we’ll end up on

This remember the community of involvement-based planning is steering committee driven it’s front-end loaded it employs principal negotiation it does require skilled responsive facilitation that you need to learn how to do and it uses focused research this is a quote from the seven habits of highly effective people that i have on my all

My emails i send out that i really believe in if you don’t have involvement in your plans you’re wasting your time you need to mark it down because that’s what gives your commitment if you want more information on any of these topics i’ve got six or seven tip sheets i call

Them that are available on this website that you can print out you can look at in detail they talk about community committee composition committee size tips for dealing with a disruptive critic there’s also something material i didn’t cover about how to introduce change into your community where you

Have changed before which is a pretty good one so that’s it for today um lauren are you there i’m still here thank you glenn um i think we’re going to have to go ahead and wrap it up several people have got some other commitments

Um maybe what we can do is end with one poll and i thought maybe we could ask the question about which of the following is not a useful meeting room set up okay kind of refreshed i’m going to go ahead and launch that poll for those who are still out there please

Go ahead and vote okay we’ve got about 60 something percent have reported and um the consensus seems to be around a shotgun with a slot back that’s great not a useful meeting room so um and you said that was the correct answer that’s a football formation as best i know

Yeah obviously i was not familiar with that so um anyways thank you everyone for all of your participation um when you did reference that’s going to be on the utah site at some point i’m still trying to follow up several people asked a question about that so i’m going to

Follow up with them to find out exactly where on their website the webcast will be recorded and posted i think we’re also going to ask you if you can look to creating a new pdf format of your slides some people are having trouble reading the words with the notes on the pdf

And then also if we can get a few of the there are a few questions that i’ll record and maybe you and i can work together to get a few answers maybe composed in a brief handout or something to post on various chapter websites okay yeah the question content related

So um do you have anything else you’d like to add uh i did have these names of these uh folks that they they could mention i could mention these names they’re in the green book by the way if everybody has a copy of the green book um some things that you might not

Be aware of are sherry arnstein’s ladder of public participation paul davidoff’s advocacy planning saul alinsky’s guerrilla tactics this is all if you go to the public participation section of the green book they’re all covered in there but i’m just mentioning these names so that you might be aware of them the model cities

Program of the 1960s was the first time that public participation was really identified as a necessary ingredient of major public initiatives um nolan versus dolan it was is a case you might want to pay attention to another things that that i have seen as sort of benchmark names and

Things you might want to remember okay thank you glenn for several people are asking what is the green book and where do you find this this is a commonly referenced material for review for the exam you all go to the apa website under aicp exam they usually list this as one of the

Many literature resources it’s probably the best one to review and we’ll try to get some more information about that out so and we’ll also list the names that mr harpec just listed in some material that we’ll send out very soon thank you all and we’ll see you next friday thank you thank you

ID: pwKOG-tRyH0
Time: 1375236437
Date: 2013-07-31 06:37:17
Duration: 02:13:09

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