A certified professional facilitator is working out a plan for a public consultation process about sewage treatment.
The City of Powell River has contracted Geoff Allan, of InFocus Facilitation, to revise the consultation plan. Allan facilitated two public consultation events for the city in 2009.
Allan provided an overview of public consultation at the February 15 liquid waste management advisory committee meeting. He said there are three key elements to public consultation: information exchange; dialogue exchange; and closure.
Allan said the public consultation plan which city staff had developed was missing the second component. “If you omit that middle stage, you’re really not consulting with anybody,” he said.
The proposed plan included the “ubiquitous town hall meeting, where you assemble the victims on the stage and you assemble the assailants in the crowd standing at the microphone prepared to tell you what they think about what you have done.”
A decision has usually been made at that point, Allan said, and there isn’t an opportunity for the public to influence that decision.
An open house is an acceptable way to provide information, Allan said, and he could offer different scenarios for the dialogue exchange. A town hall meeting is appropriate once a decision has been made, he said.
Richard Stogre, the city’s manager of engineering services, said once Allan has submitted his plan, it will come to the advisory committee for review, then to the steering committee. “My hope is that we would have an open house probably at the end of March, or maybe April, in that range,” he said.
Marie Claxton, city clerk, said the city doesn’t want to rush public consultation. “We want to make sure that the community has a reasonable opportunity to get their information, to digest it and have that opportunity to sit and talk about it,” she said. “I’ve heard some comment out and about that ‘this is just being rammed down our throats.’ We won’t get community consultation that’s meaningful because people’s backs are going to be up. We can take the time to do it.”
