08/20/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 08/20/2024 05:12
What words or feelings immediately come to mind when you think of a public meeting?
If words like long, confusing, or inaccessible rise to the top, you're not alone. As graduate students pursuing degrees in planning, we're all too aware of the challenges associated with public engagement processes. Sometimes it can feel like the meeting is simply checking a box, and not truly engaging the community in which the proposed idea or plan is going to impact.
We sought out to really dig into this process in Massachusetts-looking carefully about how the Commonwealth incorporates (or not) meaningful community engagement into transportation planning and policy.
The US Department of Transportation defines meaningful community engagement as, "A process that proactively seeks full representation from the community, considers public comments and feedback, and incorporates that feedback into a project, program, or plan when possible."
Conducting meaningful community engagement processes within transportation projects and plans is vital for fostering inclusive decisionmaking and promoting connected communities. Environmental justice populations, including low-income communities and communities of color, have been historically excluded from decisionmaking processes, resulting in their needs not being met or prioritized.
With new federal funding opportunities for infrastructure projects, we are in an ideal time for transportation agencies, state Departments of Transportation (DOTs), municipalities, and Metropolitan Planning Organizations to correct historic wrongs and implement more meaningful community engagement practices.
Working with the Union of Concerned Scientists, our goal as a Tufts University Urban and Environmental Planning Field Projects team was to identify best practices for community engagement that can reasonably be applied within Massachusetts transportation planning agencies, and develop a pilot tool that can be used by advocates and agencies to evaluate the impact and equity of current community engagement processes within the Commonwealth.
We identified three major ways to help agencies conduct more meaningful community engagement:
Our methods included conducting a comprehensive literature review to identify current requirements and processes used by Massachusetts transportation agencies, collect best practices for meaningful community engagement, select notable recent examples of transportation projects with replicable and effective community engagement processes, and review existing advocacy scorecards.
We also attended a total of seven public meetings held by MassDOT and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) to observe and collect data. For all of the meetings, less than half of the time was dedicated to public comment and only three out of the seven meetings had community groups present at these meetings.
During a MBTA public meeting held on February 27th of this year regarding the Alewife Brook Parkway over MBTA Redline Tunnel Bridge Superstructure Replacement in Cambridge, one public commenter expressed their opinion: "I don't see any genuine community groups on your list! ASG? Friends of Jerry's Pond? North Cambridge Stabilization Committee? Please don't tout 'outreach to community groups' when you don't seem to be able to identify a single one!"
Interestingly, the meeting minutes were not posted following this community engagement event.
Additionally, we conducted interviews with transportation advocates, CBOs, and MassDOT representatives. Their perspectives matched what research has called for decades, such as the need to move beyond the legally required public meetings to methods that are more meaningful and participatory. The need for a report back feature from these agencies was echoed across multiple interview participants.
Another transportation advocate at the meeting said, "Communities are specifically impacted by government action, so they should be updated with respect to how that government action was changed as a result of them speaking out. It would encourage communities to feel more empowered to speak up and submit comments instead of just feeling like it's going into the black hole of government work."
Our research culminated in the development of our tool, Checking the Box and Beyond: A Tool for Meaningful Community Engagement, designed for use by CBOs, advocates, and agencies. The tool includes a guiding questions page to assist the user, while the scorecard rates community engagement based on the criteria identified below. The tool ultimately gives the community engagement effort a score from 1 to 5. This tool could also be adapted to meet the needs of other types of planning projects in outside of Massachusetts.
We identified the following categories for evaluation consideration:
View our full report and get a PDF or GoogleSheets version of the scorecard.