Comments

[Hoover, Julie H. <Hoover@pbworld.com>]

I offer a few comments on the dialogues as follows.

* General.  Think EPA is to be greatly commended for this effort.
Wish USDOT would do the same.


* Day 2.  Identifying the Interested Publics.  I have found community
leader interviews at the very beginning of a process, combined with
the linked chain technique (where you ask everyone you talk to
initially to identify other potentially interested people and then
interview them) to be the best way of ferreting out the publics
that need to be involved.  This will sometimes involve meeting with
(or, less desirable, but still effective) telephoning 100 people
or more but it pays to do the initial homework well.

* Day 2.  How can EPA enable underserved populations to participate
more effectively?

See http://www.info-ren.org/network-democracy/epa-pip/bb/pdf/railvolutions.pdf

[Moderator's Note: I have added this paper to the Briefing Book
for the convenience of other participants - with due apologies
with respect to the point raised in the paragraphs below.  ...BC]


* Day 3.  National distribution of information.  I wholeheartedly
agree with the many partiipants who said that greater efforts need
to be made to make information more accessible to the public.

A very good example is the "Briefing Book" that was provided for
this Dialogue.  Being very busy, I e-mailed the web site to my
secretary and asked her to print out the Briefing Book for me so
I could read it on a plane trip.  She called me while I was on the
road practically in tears--said she had already used two packages
of paper and the end was nowhere in sight.  Did I really want her
to complete this job?  Of course I said no but wondered why in the
world EPA was loading all this stuff on us.  Much more effective
would have been, say, 20-30 pages of really relevant information
that we all could easily read.  By giving us so much material, I
fear most of us (like myself) will end up reading none of it.
We're not graduate students preparing a PhD dissertation here, but
rather busy people who want to be involved but don't have a great
deal of time.  A summary briefing book, perhaps with linked references
to the full documents for those who want them, would have been far
more effective.


Julie Hoover
Parsons Brinckerhoff, New York