"The city rammed that rezoning through without listening to the citizens!" "We tried to get citizens involved, but nobody came to the hearings!" "That citizens' group had no right to oppose my subdivision!" "The planning commission had their minds made up before anybody began to testify!"
Such complaints are common. Sometimes they are justified, sometimes not. Either way, they offer dramatic evidence that citizen involvement in planning often is controversial. The main issues that underlie such controversy are described in this chapter. Every citizen involvement program is likely to encounter them. Good programs will anticipate them, using approaches such as those suggested below and the tools in Chapter 6.
One funding problem is that some people see the citizen involvement program as a frill. As a result, that program may be the first to get cut when budget problems arise. That is often penny-wise but pound-foolish: weakening the citizen involvement program may lead to costly litigation and plan revisions.
Another problem is that local budgets may not earmark funds specifically for citizen involvement. Rather than having a line item in the budget, citizen involvement gets buried in some larger category--"Long-Range Planning," for example. That makes it impossible to determine whether the funding for citizen involvement is adequate. That also makes it all too easy to siphon funds away from citizen involvement for use in other programs.
SUGGESTIONS: Clearly identify citizen involvement activities in the budget. Specify dollar amounts for the projected costs of mailing notices, printing documents, holding public hearings, distributing a newsletter, and other activities related to citizen involvement.
Just as it takes money, it also takes people to run a citizen involvement program: planners to attend meetings, clerical staff to mail notices, and so on. An extensive citizen involvement effort for overhauling the local plan, for example, might generate hundreds of letters. Reviewing and replying to those letters could take hundreds of hours of staff time.
Unfortunately, some planning agencies do not have detailed work programs. And where such work programs do exist, citizen involvement tasks may not be mentioned. Rather, they are hidden in some larger category, such as "Planning Coordination."
This failure to specify citizen involvement in the work program causes three problems. First, citizen involvement work continually gets set aside as staff members work on more clearly defined tasks. Second, managers remain uninformed about the staffing needed for citizen involvement activities. They thus cannot plan for or manage such activities effectively. Third, managers and staff lack measurable standards and objectives. They therefore cannot evaluate their citizen involvement program nor meet its objectives.
SUGGESTIONS: Recognize that citizen involvement requires a significant commitment of agency staff. Develop and maintain a work program for citizen involvement. Such a work program should identify tasks; project person-hours needed for those tasks; lay out a schedule; and assign to specific staff persons the responsibility for those tasks. Explore alternatives: the use of volunteer groups; hiring of consultants to manage large citizen involvement efforts; soliciting money or labor from businesses and service organizations.
Concern about time is one of the most potent forces working against citizen involvement. Developers want to get their permits fast. Planners want to keep their projects on schedule. Decision makers want to make decisions and get on with other business. Such wants create strong and never-ending pressures to shorten appeal periods, limit standing, reduce the extent of notification, and so on.
SUGGESTIONS: Allocate adequate time for notice, hearings, appeals, and other citizen involvement activities in the agency work program. Inform permit applicants, citizen groups, managers, and elected officials about state and local time limits and deadlines. Remind managers and decision makers that inadequate citizen involvement is likely to lead to litigation, opposition to or misunderstanding of the plan, and bad planning decisions. Those problems may cost a great deal more time and money than would a strong citizen involvement effort.
Both extremes would be unfair and ineffective. The closed system gives citizens no voice in decisions that will affect them, and it leads to short-sighted planning and decision making. The wide-open system fails to protect the rights of land owners and developers. It leads to paralysis in planning and decision making, as there is always one more hearing, appeal, or citizen to be heard.
In trying to maintain an appropriate balance between the extremes described above, the State of Oregon has adopted laws on hearings, notice, appeals, and other aspects of planning and citizen involvement. The number of those laws and their complexity are greater today than ever before. The citizen who wants access to the planning process in the 1990s faces a more complex set of rules.
Ten years ago, for example, a citizen could appeal a local land use decision to LUBA simply by showing that she would be affected by that decision in some way. Today, that same citizen would have to demonstrate that she participated in the local land use decision. If she did not oppose it locally, she would have no standing to appeal to LUBA. A person unaware of that "raise it or waive it" requirement loses the opportunity to be involved in one important phase of the planning process.
SUGGESTIONS: Inform citizens of their rights and obligations through workshops, flyers, newsletter articles, and other means. Train staff so that they know about these rights and obligations and can communicate them to citizens.
It's true that many citizens regard planning as a dull topic. They may not see how an abstract planning policy or issue could affect them. They therefore have little interest in attending a hearing, serving on a committee, or otherwise getting involved -- until they hear a bulldozer start to work in the vacant lot next door. By then, it may be too late to get involved.
But officials sometimes blame "apathy" for the failures of a citizen involvement program when the real cause is inadequate funding or management of the program. Citizens will not participate in the planning process if they lack access to it.
SUGGESTIONS: Maintain an effective citizen involvement program, one that communicates issues and information clearly to all interested persons and groups. Develop educational programs and workshops to inform citizens about policies and issues. Encourage citizens to get into the planning process early.
By their actions at the permit counter, in public meetings, and elsewhere, planners can ease such fears -- or heighten them. Most planners intend to be helpful and want to put the citizen at ease. But sometimes the citizen still feels intimidated. Such intimidation usually grows out of three problems.
The first problem is simply poor communication -- a failure by the planner to communicate complex ideas and information clearly. The second is paternalism -- an assumption that the planner knows all the answers. The third is impatience, often brought on by inadequate staffing. Planners who are being deluged by permit applications are less likely to be patient and diplomatic with every citizen who comes to the permit counter.
Planners do not purposely try to communicate badly or to be paternalistic. They don't mean to be impatient. That absence of malice, however, doesn't make the problem of intimidation any less real.
SUGGESTIONS: Give staff members training in effective oral and written communications. Develop and maintain programs to streamline permit processing. Use role-playing exercises to help staff better understand the lay person's view. Maintain adequate levels of staffing at key points of contact with the public, especially the permit counter. Establish a customer service program in which the citizen is the customer and the service is access to all phases of the planning process.
The extent to which developers, land owners, utility firms, and other members of the community can rely on a plan's decisions is generally referred to as predictability. Without it, a comprehensive plan has little or no value. But the need for predictability and the need for citizen involvement sometimes clash.
Suppose, for example, that a city is considering rezoning an area from single-family residential to multifamily residential. City officials work hard to get the public involved. They send out mailings and run newspaper ads to explain how the rezoning will allow apartments in the area. They conduct several workshops and public hearings. They receive a great deal of testimony, most of it favorable, and they proceed to rezone the area.
A year later, a developer proposes a new apartment complex in that area. Several neighbors object, but the city rejects their complaints. City officials tell them, "This area has been zoned for multifamily dwellings; the builder is completely within his rights to build apartments there."
The concerned neighbors might argue that the city is failing to provide for adequate citizen involvement. But the city has already had extensive public participation. Now city officials are simply standing by the decisions that grew out of that earlier involvement.
The need for predictability doesn't mean that a plan can never be changed or that a decision should never be reconsidered. But the whole idea behind planning is to have the community agree on where certain types of land uses and public facilities like streets and sewers should go. Once such agreements have been reached and adopted in the plan, the plan cannot be reopened every time someone objects.
SUGGESTIONS: Emphasize the need for citizen participation early, when the plans and policies are being developed, not after they are being applied. Document the citizen involvement that occurred during the plan's development, so that citizens will know that its policies are based on extensive citizen input.
SUGGESTIONS: Inform citizens about state and federal laws that compel certain policies or actions. Provide information that describes not only the requirements of the law but also its purposes. In other words, explain not only what the law requires but also why the law requires it.
Many cities and counties have few staff for zoning enforcement. Local district attorneys often are reluctant to prosecute land use cases, given the large number of criminal cases they face. The state does not hear about many local decisions: many need not be reported to any state agency. And the state does not have as much power to intervene as many people think. For example, the Department of Land Conservation and Development cannot overturn a local land use decision. DLCD can only appeal such a decision to LUBA, just as a citizen could.
The result of all this is that much of the burden for enforcing Oregon's planning laws falls on the shoulders of everyday citizens. The citizen who objects to a local decision may have no recourse but to file an appeal to LUBA. Such an appeal is likely to take about four months and cost several thousand dollars.
A second and related problem is that local government in general and planning in particular depend on the work of lay citizens in a multitude of committees and groups such as planning commissions. Smaller communities often cannot find enough civic-minded volunteers to fill all the positions on the planning commission, CCI, parks committee, landmarks committee, and other lay groups. Serving on such committees takes time away from families and jobs. It is often boring or stressful or both, and the "pay" -- perhaps two bits a mile for travel to meetings and a certificate of appreciation when one leaves the committee -- is hardly attractive.
SUGGESTIONS: Work to empower Oregon's citizens. Strive to give them easy access to all aspects of planning. Provide information, training, and incentives for them to serve on committees and commissions. The success of planning in Oregon's 277 cities and counties depends on the work of such citizens.