Abstract:
It is no longer the job of the planner just to get input from the public on their reactions to work done by technical staffs. Instead the public must be involved at the earliest stages of a project or study and the involvement must be meaningful. This paper describes how an extensive list of questions was developed and presented to members of the public to get their input into the development of measures of effectiveness for use on four planning studies conducted in rural and small communities. The list of questions was originally developed from a longer list of MOEs used in urban planning studies and was reduced in size to leave only those MOEs that were applicable to rural and small communities. The MOEs are classified into five categories, transportation performance, financial/economic performance, social impacts, land use/economic development impacts, and environmental impacts. The paper will describe how the list of questions was modified during subsequent applications, how input from the public was merged with input from public officials, and how the MOEs were used in distinctly different studies. Those studies include a corridor study on an Interstate, a national pilot project for merging NEPA and planning, a feasibility study, and a regional plan update. The use of this method of developing MOEs will be compared with other methods. Those filling out the questionnaire included local and state elected officials. Many people expressed appreciation for being asked what their 'values' were at the beginning of the studies. The reader of this paper will benefit by learning of what kinds of MOEs are appropriate for studies in rural and small urban communities, how public input can be collected at an early stage in the study to help develop study criteria, and how this information can be applied in a variety of situations.
