Public participation in local decision-making

Local Officials: why engage citizens in participatory decision-making?

• To develop a richer information base. Local citizens know the local needs and issues best.
• To educate both citizens and policy makers about the many dimensions of an issue or decision.
• To allow discussion of many points of view on the issue and give each citizen a voice.
• To make it easier to implement decision or policy easier.
• To help build accountability for public officials and citizen.

Public notice requirements
By law, public officials must notify the public of community-level public meetings by posting notices before the meeting. All meetings must take place in locations accessible to the public. These legal safeguards ensure that citizens have an opportunity to speak up about local decisions before they go into effect.

In spite of this public notice requirement, some municipal boards and committees still conduct policy-making without full disclosure to the public. In some instances, time constraints or lack of understanding of the public's role in the decision-making process leave the public out of decision-making sessions. In other cases, public officials intentionally neglect to engage the public, for fear that public input might derail their agenda.

Tools for encouraging citizen participation in local decision-making
For every issue before them, public officials have a variety of tools available to engage citizens in decision-making. Among them:

Citizen advisory committees
Citizen advisors help enrich the discussion with diverse perspectives on policy or program development that foster positive relations with the community. Here's an example of citizen participation in Department of Transportation projects.

Community surveys & questionnaires
Community surveys help public officials gather data about local attitudes regarding well-defined issues, problems or opportunities. The University of Kansas Community Toolbox project offers some wonderful tools for conducting community surveys.

Focus groups
The focus group is a roundtable discussion aimed at gathering ideas and opinions from a targeted group of citizens. Focus groups help build a synergy of thoughts and ideas.The U. Kansas Community Toolbox offers resources for conducting focus groups.

Public hearings
Hearings are public meetings that enable residents to express their concerns about public plans, decisions, or issues. Click here or information on public hearings.

NH Public Notices contains a wealth of information about "the relationship between public notice advertisements and 'active citizenship,' an American ideal holding that the collective good works of individual citizens make society stronger and benefit all the people."

Periods for Public Review and Comment
Public review and comment refers to a formal process that provides a window of time within which the public may review proposed public plans or policies and comment before the plan or policy becomes law. Your local newspaper the Federal Register usually print notices of notice of upcoming hearings.

Community Forums
A community forum is a public meeting intended to bring together a variety of community perspectives to discuss salient issues, visions, problems, or concerns that the community is facing. The University of Kansas Community toolkit offers good information on community forums.

UNH Cooperative Extension engages communities in an expended community forum process called a Community Profile , during which a community takes stock of where it is today and develops an action plan for how it wants to operate in the future

Public officials: before you decide which tools to use, ask yourself

• How do you want to involve the public?
• At what point in the decision-making process should you involve the public?
• How will you get the public engaged in the process, given that most citizens live busy lives?

Whichever tools you use, an effective public participation process requires public officials to:

• Collect public input at various (or all) stages of the process, not merely to validate an existing plan.
• Provide citizens enough information, education, and/or training to play a meaningful role in the decision-making process.
• Give all stakeholders affected by a particular decision or policy an equal opportunity to participate in the process.
• Facilitate the public participation process, but refrain from "leading" inways designed to elicit specific participant or group responses.

Citizens have a role, too
While much of the responsibility for engaging citizens in local decision-making falls upon public officials, citizens also need to become actively engaged. This could entail:

• Periodically visiting the Town Hall or other public buildings where meeting notices are posted to keep informed of local decision-making
• Writing letters to public officials to keep them accountable
• Asking key questions at town meetings
• Encouraging officials to develop an effective process to engage local citizens
• Turning to the various state and Federal regulatory agencies to ensure that public officials abide by state laws and regulations.

Finally, citizens have the right to enact a citizen initiative - if enough signatures are garnered, public officials may be forced to put an issue up for referendum.

Participatory decision-making requires energy, time and resources. Yet if cities and towns want to respond effectively to citizen needs, local officials need to start listening to citizens and recruiting their help in crafting the policies and decisions that will shape the future of their community.