Can the Tea Party, Property Rights Activists, and Planners Find Common Ground?

In a guest commentary for the California Planning & Development Report, Dr. Karen Trapenberg Frick offers some thoughts drawn from her research on public participation processes in planning:

"This fall, California’s Strategic Growth Council will release a preliminary assessment about SB 375’s implementation to date. So now is a good time to step back and deeply reflect on how we are running public participation processes in this state, especially legislatively mandated ones. We need to consider how legislative requirements like those for the SB 375 regional planning process may help or hinder meaningful public engagement.

Public process design is critical when participants are ideologically divided and do not trust each other or the public agencies in charge. It can be important to seek out areas of common ground..."