Public Attitudes Toward Urban Infrastructure:

The Northeast Ohio Experience

Table of Contents

Public Attitudes Toward Urban Infrastructure:

Urban infrastructure is typically invisible to the public eye although resource- and labor-intensive and rendering services indispensable to daily life. Some facilities appear to provide individually consumable benefits at little individual cost. Therefore, it is difficult to rally public support behind changes in the level and nature of infrastructure investments. Consequently, infrastructure decisions tend to be reactive to crises and political pressures, not proactive and strategic. After proposing reasons why reactive decisions have undesirable long-range consequences, we describe a participatory process used in 1994-1995 to elicit northeast Ohio’s environmental priorities. Surprisingly, urban out-migration emerged as the region’s top priority. The key underlying dimension of this choice was concern with the efficient provision, wise management, and quality of the infrastructure. We analyze the participatory mechanisms that rendered infrastructure visible to the lay public, and some strategies for sustaining public interest and enabling it to guide political decisions affecting the environment.

Infrastructure, a subset of public works, comprises "the permanent physical installations and facilities supporting socioeconomic activities in a community, region, or nation" (Hite, 1989). Despite its centrality in maintaining and enhancing the quality of the natural and urban environment, infrastructure is debated in the public arena often in superficial terms only. Infrastructure components remain largely invisible to the voting public. This invisibility in the eye of the lay public is one of the factors that keep political concern limited to the short term, mostly reactive to crises and to special interest demands, with possibly dire consequences for regional environmental quality. The general lack of political and public concern for long-term regional interests prompts the necessity to "surface" the infrastructure in the public eye. That means rendering visible to those who eventually bear the consequences the likely long-term costs of today’s infrastructure construction and maintenance decisions.

Current political discourse reinforces infrastructure invisibility to the lay public by its choice of issues and of their framing, which further hampers meaningful public debate over policy decisions. In recent efforts to pass infrastructure levies in northeast Ohio, campaign messages focused on maintaining the momentum of economic revitalization. Neither the full "life-cycle" costs of revitalization investments nor their other impacts on the region were mentioned. Instead, the debate centered on benefits accruing to the individual citizen from infrastructure investments directly, through less traffic congestion, or indirectly, through more jobs at specific locations in the region (e.g., "Citizens’ League", 1994, and "Montville Township Landfill", 1994). To win support for a tax levy increase or permission for bonding authority, public officials in effect "sold" their issue by touting the public’s increased ability to "consume" infrastructure. In general, not only are the alleged benefits of consumption used to justify the cost of this infrastructure, but the long-term financing instruments--levies and bonds--also make these costs appear less burdensome in the near future.

Individual cognitive barriers further detract from meaningful public participation in infrastructure decisions. The long time it takes for choice consequences to accrue contributes to invisibility, while the scientific nature of information undergirding the infrastructure-environment link discourages lay involvement. The complexity of infrastructure information further deters the public’s intervention, leaving political and technical decision makers to act rather free from lay public scrutiny and to respond to incentives and constraints of the moment (Nelkin, 1979). Not surprisingly, the resulting pattern of infrastructure choices has contributed to the decline of natural and urban environments (see, for example, Commoner, 1990). If the public, when made aware of the full spectrum of infrastructure decision consequences, would still prefer the immediate benefits of direct consumption and of economic development, then politicians and bureaucrats arguably act consistently with public informed preferences. However, if an informed lay public would prefer decisions that value both short- and long-term consequences, then information and public input in decisions can affect the environmental health of a region.

Can the hidden facets of infrastructure become visible to the public? Would public scrutiny of infrastructure decisions ensue, and would it necessarily affect regional environmental quality? In 1994 and 1995, community representatives from four adjacent northeast Ohio counties participated in the Regional Environmental Priorities Project (REPP), whose outcome begins to shed light on some of these dilemmas. The REPP aimed to elicit the public’s ranking of the region’s environmental problems in a way that could compellingly guide public policy and public and private investment strategies. Its outcome suggests that an informed lay public can come to see the key role infrastructure decisions play in long-term environmental quality.

We present first some reasons why urban infrastructure seems invisible to the lay public, and we discuss environmental consequences of this public blind spot. Then we describe the participatory process that elicited the environmental priorities of northeast Ohio communities. The REPP is notable for leading to infrastructure visibility and public resolve to make the difficult infrastructure choices that would ensure regional environmental quality. We identify features of the participatory mechanisms that led to this rather surprising outcome and discuss strategies for communicating with the lay public in ways likely to lead to informed decisions about environmental issues. Throughout, we attempt to draw on several fields of study such as urban infrastructure, community participation and cognitive psychology, each relevant to some aspects of the reality of joint decision-making processes. While we hardly do complete justice to any of these fields, we find value in bringing them to bear together on a real case, to paint a more complete picture of reality, and to encourage such intersections whose value seems to exceed the sum of the parts.

The invisible infrastructure: A decision-making perspective

Urban infrastructure includes physical supply and linkage systems such as transportation, electricity, natural gas, water and sewer networks, as well as services such as water, sewage and waste treatment. Systems and services alike require highly technical operation and maintenance, which are relatively costly compared to other urban amenities such as cultural services, parks and education. For example, transportation or sewage projects typically exceed the funding capability of most communities, except those willing to incur significant amounts of long-term debt and to impose added costs on their residents. In contrast, museums, parks and libraries are routinely funded out of the locality's operating budget, though the philanthropic community often shares the burden of their capital costs.

Modern living is so intertwined with the availability and smooth operation of infrastructure that one comes to expect it and to rely heavily on it. A decaying or collapsing bridge, a bursting water main that suddenly and sharply increases commuting time and traffic congestion, or disruptions in the electricity supply or waste collection are, however, memorable events upsetting to the public. This observation led Felbinger (1992, p. 33) to note that "public works do not become issues until they do not (work)." When such failures occur because of either system collapse or the need to expand capacity to meet demand, infrastructure and its (re)construction costs get debated. The lay public is often willing to be persuaded to bear the costs of solving problems, especially in cases where the nature of the service disruption is of the memorable kind or when the debated issue touches on current public concerns. For example, the state of Ohio convinced voters repeatedly that generic bonding authority for infrastructure investment is required to promote economic development, a subject currently in the forefront of community concerns. Since long-term maintenance costs and environmental impacts were not mentioned, and details were omitted, the public essentially granted the authority "blind," prior to the specification of any projects.

Does infrastructure visibility in the lay public's eye matter? It does if public awareness of decisions affects the content and quality of those decisions. At the very least, public interest in issues or the possibility of public scrutiny of outcomes may lead decision makers, whether politicians, bureaucrats, or technocrats, to strive for:

• basing their decisions, to the extent possible, on complete information regarding costs, benefits, and consequences of infrastructure choices affecting supply levels, design, technology, quality, and maintenance; and
• explaining their decision to the public in terms of such information.

Montgomery and Nunn (1996) observed that, in general, infrastructure public administrators and planners view public input as an obstacle over which they have to prevail. In part, that may be because in areas sheltered from public attention, concerns other than service costs and quality, including personal, economic, and political interests of bureaucrats and politicians, can more safely drive decisions. For the decision makers who operate "in the shade", A key to maintaining the freedom to engage such a sheltered decision style is to avoid crises that tend to dispel the protecting cloak, if only for brief moments. Therefore, decisions shielded from public scrutiny tend to be reactive, focused as they must be on crisis avoidance and damage control when a crisis does occur. Since sheltered decision making can be detrimental to the public interest, public scrutiny of infrastructure decisions is desirable. Why then is it not pervasive? We propose two main reasons: barriers to lay public awareness (Kaufman, 1995) and the fact that lack of this awareness is in the short-term interest of political decision makers (Felbinger, 1995).

Barriers to public awareness of the infrastructure

Several barriers prevent lay public awareness of all facets of infrastructure issues and of consequences of the current frequently reactive decision mode. They include cognitive difficulties of dealing with numerous and complex issues and their uncertain consequences, which require understanding of highly technical information; prevailing attitudes about short- versus long-term costs and benefits of choices and about trade-offs between individual and collective interests; and mental models about how decisions are made that often neglect, minimize, or exclude public input (Gillroy & Wade, 1992).

The sheer complexity and volume of information a lay person would need to master in order to evaluate the status of infrastructure and the quality of building, delivery and maintenance decisions are effective barriers to awareness (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981), though not consciously raised by any entity. Many of the effects of decaying physical plant, such as poor drinking water quality, cannot be detected by casual visual inspection of system components or products. The lay public has no easy access to evaluation reports, plans, and financial decisions. Were such access possible, only precious few would have the specialized knowledge required to understand the information. And in the absence of some special event (e.g., accident or disruption), such access is usually not sought in the first place. One relatively recent addition to the complexity barrier is the trend toward privatization of services delivery (Montgomery & Nunn, 1996), which removes from the public the clear knowledge of the locus of responsibility for infrastructure decisions, previously governmental (Jacobson & Tarr, 1996).

As if the information and complexity barriers were not sufficiently daunting, there is added public indifference bred by familiarity. Roads, for instance, are seen as a daily presence carrying the flow of people and goods. As people contend with various challenges and demands on their time, anything that appears to function well is a welcome respite. Therefore a county engineer's assurance that an added highway lane will relieve the congestion of the morning commute is accepted with little thought to longer-term consequences beyond the relief of immediate traffic jams. Thus, the infrastructure's very ubiquitousness makes it invisible, although in its absence urban life and economic activities would be impossible (Eberts, 1990).

Time adds another layer of complexity to infrastructure issues. Typically, consequences of both sound infrastructure decisions and neglectful ones are far from immediate. As these consequences become evident with time, it is very difficult to trace them to their precise causes and assign responsibility--a fact not lost on those who make such decisions. However, the time obstacle inflicts most of its damage at the decision end: people tend to have great difficulty imagining and valuing correctly risk (Slovic, Fischoff & Lichtenstein, 1980) and outcomes that materialize far in the future (Lowenstein, 1992). A telling example of failure to factor sufficiently future outcomes in present decisions is sensible people's inability to value their future health sufficiently to quit smoking. If such a decision with highly likely dire personal implications is beyond many individuals' resolve, it should not be surprising that uncertain consequences of someone else's decisions about unfamiliar and hard-to-understand systems accruing at an indefinite future time become less than worrisome to most.

Even if the long-term consequences of infrastructure decisions were briefly entertained possibly because of debate in the public domain, the immediate benefit of consuming the infrastructure improvements would outweigh the dim long-term costs of maintenance or environmental damage. For example, arguments against urban out-migration that use pessimistic predictions for the urban core's future, even when they convincingly link a whole region's quality of life to that of the core, are easily displaced by people's desire to move outward now to a suburban location for perceived immediate advantages in life-style. Northeast Ohio trends are consistent with this observation: since the 1950s, the region's population has been stable, but not its spatial distribution: The urban core lost population while the rural fringe is being pushed further and further outward (Housing Policy Research Program, 1993, 1994).

Ironically, for members of the very public on whose behalf decision makers are expected to act wisely with the long term in mindeven if it is not in their personal interest, it makes short-term sense not to probe the long-range implications and to clamor instead for politically expedient but costly decisions. People considering infrastructure decisions face an incentive structure resembling the Tragedy of the Commons (Hardin, 1963). Support for new infrastructure investment rests on whether an individual expects to consume the product immediately. Then the individual's marginal cost of a 30-year bond is more than offset by the immediate, direct benefit. Long-term maintenance and mitigation costs, shouldered by all, appear dismal compared to very immediate personal benefits expected from the investment. As in the Tragedy of the Commons, the individually advantageous decisions aggregate to a collectively unwise outcome in the long run.

While the lay public faces great difficulties in appreciating all dimensions of infrastructure, decision makers also encounter systemic and perceptual barriers to long-range infrastructure strategies. One systemic barrier is political fragmentation: Regions are collections of political subdivisions, while infrastructure runs across the regional space. Regional coordination of infrastructure investments could avoid costly duplication and make the best of available resources. However, such coordination is difficult in general. Special regional agencies and districts have mandates often limited to only one infrastructure system. For example, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District is not directly connected to the Northeast Ohio Area Coordinating Agency (NOACA), which manages some of the regional transportation infrastructure investment, while the Ohio Department of Transportation manages another pool of such funds overlapping with NOACA’s. County-wide agencies such as planning commissions stop at the county boundary, although consequences of their decisions are bound to spill over those boundaries in function, costs, and benefits.

Political boundaries induce in politicians perceptions detrimental to regional coordination of infrastructure decisions. As Peterson (1980) has argued, communities in a region perceive themselves in a zero-sum economic competition over a declining tax base. As a result, region-wide political action is often hardly thinkable to politicians. As the zero-sum perception sets in, each community seeks to attract mobile capital to increase its tax base and acquire the attendant benefits of jobs for its residents (voters) (Peterson, 1980). As Tiebout (1956) has noted, residents compare communities of the region in terms of their services and costs, seeking to relocate where they can maximize their benefits. This constitutes an incentive for communities to seek infrastructure investment as a means of improving the "package" of goods and services they offer private capital investment. From this competitive political/economic perspective, the short-term benefit a community expects in terms of jobs and tax base far outweighs its concern for long-term regional environmental damage, budgetary impacts of maintenance commitments, or the cost of infrastructure duplication.

Strategies for "Surfacing" infrastructure

We have discussed the reasons why significant facets of infrastructure are largely invisible to lay communities, resulting in a reactive pattern of decisions aimed at controlling current crises with general disregard for long-term costs and negative effects on the environment of regions. The status quo in infrastructure decision making is destined to continue because, as we have argued, its robustness is rooted in its insulation from detailed public scrutiny. Although in the long run change might benefit most if not all stakeholders in infrastructure decisions, it requires the public to engage and arrive at broad consensus and to communicate its priorities firmly, on an ongoing basis.

Underlying our argument is the hypothesis that the key to change is information: An informed lay public can overcome barriers to long-range thinking and is more likely to set value on long-range consequences of infrastructure decisions (Hartig, 1992). We further hypothesize that if the lay public does indeed set value on the more distant future, the decision makers' incentive structure would change and they would respond to expressed public priorities. Public micro-management of every decision is not required for such change. Rather, since decision makers currently justify choices in terms of broad public consensus that short-range benefits are always desirable, we propose that altering the content of this consensus and refocusing on the longer-range outcomes, can change the current pattern of infrastructure decisions. This is a tall-order agenda, requiring mechanisms for broad representation of interests and a relatively high level of organization to bridge the current political fragmentation of regions and to enable the emergence of unusual partnerships between entities typically found in separate decision loops.

What change strategies could overcome the barriers to lay public participation in infrastructure decisions? Who can or should initiate and implement the strategies? The past holds few examples of regional-scale attempts in the area of the infrastructure-environment link. Change strategies would have to rely on a correct diagnosis of barriers and strive to:

• render visible the intricacies of infrastructure decisions and
• persuade decision makers that public input in the decision process benefits all stakeholders.

The project we describe in the next section is an attempt to develop just such a strategy.

The REPP--A participatory process

The Regional Environmental Priorities Project (REPP) presents several points of interest for the debate about infrastructure decisions and their long-term impact on the environment of regions. Our experience with this case suggests cautious optimism in attempts to foster public consensus on a sufficiently broad set of environmental priorities to guide infrastructure-related decisions in the public and private sector.

The REPP has already accomplished the first of the two goals proposed in the previous section: It has implemented a process of informing a group of lay public representatives, empowering them to articulate consensually a set of environmental priorities for a four-county region in northeast Ohio. It has achieved community participation and consensus in ranking the region's environmental priorities (John Carroll University 1995). During the process of analyzing and debating the region's environmental concerns, infrastructure became visible and got "star culprit" billing in the top regional priority--out-migration from the urban core. The extent to which this process can achieve the second goal--showing the benefits to all of sustained public participation--can only be evaluated at a later stage.

To date, several projects around the country have attempted with varying degrees of success to produce by community consensus rankings of environmental priorities for regions varying in size from a city (Seattle, OR and Columbus, OH) to a region (Houston, TX and Atlanta, GA metropolitan areas) to a state (Vermont, Ohio, and California). Why has the REPP succeeded at this time in northeast Ohio? There are political and economic reasons, but it cannot be said that there was any notable event or change in climate at the time when the REPP unfolded. The other reasons for the REPP’s success relate to the design and implementation of the process of reaching consensus on regional environmental priorities. This process was an attempt to dismantle the barriers to public infrastructure visibility discussed in the previous section: the many issues with their uncertain consequences; lack of understanding of complex and highly technical information; a tendency to prefer short-term benefits, ignoring long-term costs of choices; a focus on individual interests to the exclusion of collective ones; and mental models about how decisions are made which often neglect, minimize, or exclude public input.

We describe the REPP process to show how community members representing various, at times divergent, interests combined technical information with values and arrived consensually at their top priority--urban out-migration, which explicitly subsumes urban infrastructure. One major challenge was to design a mechanism for making the infrastructure visible and putting it on the political agenda. The REPP identified a set of long-delayed/denied public policy investments in infrastructure as driving expensive land use decisions that are increasingly politically unpalatable. Infrastructure emerged as a dominant concern when people were provided with adequate information and a process for debating and reconciling some of their values.

In the past 40 years, the northeast Ohio region has seen economic decline, loss of jobs (especially high-wage ones in the industrial sector), a stable regional population with a consistently declining central city population, and a sharp increase in the level of competition among local communities for the remaining job and tax base (United Church of Christ, 1992). Northeast Ohio's small political communities have historically protected their autonomy fiercely through use of the state’s Home Rule charter. The net result has been fragmentation of decision mandates and jurisdictions while effects of single-community decisions accrued to the entire region.

The region has not been unaware that many of the environmental and economic problems facing it were effects of the political fragmentation. A tacit agreement that problems were shared and that solutions may well require a common approach created the climate for an attempt to engage in a regional dialogue to craft a set of goals that all the contending jurisdictions would find acceptable. In the Spring of 1993, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland hosted a multi-county forum with the purpose of identifying viable strategies for coordinated environmental regional action. The forum produced three goals:

1. To let the environmental policy agenda emerge from a consensus-based process. Given the history of conflict and distrust in the region, all parties to such a process--governmental agencies, environmental groups, the business community and neighborhood activists--agreed that anything less than consensus would merely result in another round of conflict, paralyzing the policy process.
1. To base any project outcome on "good science." A methodology would have to be devised and used to develop and compare risks facing the community. This would provide the various regional decision makers, whether politicians, private parties or community activists, an information-based tool for evaluating decisions and policies affecting the environment.
1. To obtain consensus from the fusion of science-based technical analysis with a public-based process of identifying the community's values. Any decisions and policies emerging from the process would be rooted in genuine community-based debate over issues, informed analysis of consequences, and community aspirations.

The REPP sprang from subsequent efforts of Case Western Reserve University’s Center for the Environment. Based on the three goals, it brought together a planning committee of regional leaders who expressed interest in the multi-county forum. The planning committee, with assistance from the center’s staff, developed a structure and a process for the REPP.

Development of the REPP

1. community values and aspirations consensually aggregated from the preferences of the various participating interest groups; and
2. technical information about regional environmental risks and their causes.

Accordingly, beginning in the Fall of 1993, REPP staff facilitating the process began preparing two parallel tracks. In the "values" track, it recruited broad volunteer community representation, surfacing its preferences and values and assisting it in the design of a consensus decision process for ranking regional environmental priorities. The formal locus of this activity was a Public Committee, composed of 30 stakeholders selected for regional representation balance in terms of subpopulations, geography, and interests. The REPP staff polled the public in 1994 through 150 meetings with various interest groups and public organizations throughout the Northeast Ohio region to produce a list of environmental issues and concerns. Participants in these meetings were asked to submit their lists of environmental concerns, reflecting their own or their constituencies’ preferences and experience. In conjunction with the Federation for Community Planning, the staff also surveyed poor and minority communities (not represented by other organized groups) about their environmental concerns. Results were pooled into a list submitted to the Public Committee's scrutiny.

In the parallel "technical information" track the staff recruited and assisted volunteer advisers to locate and analyze environmental risk data to be used by the Public Committee for prioritizing regional risks. The formal locus of this activity was a set of three technical advisory committees (TACs)--Human Health, Ecology, and Quality of Life--staffed by a volunteer mixture of citizen activists, government officials, academics, and business-employed scientists from a pool of more than 500 public nominations. REPP staff gave the TACs the issues list produced by the Public Committee. Each TAC selected from this list the issues it found directly relevant to its "topical" focus.

One REPP "ground rule" scrupulously enforced by staff with the strong endorsement of the Public Committee proved essential for the priorities ranking process. Since the REPP aimed to understand and rank the risks, rather than to respond with specific solutions, it observed during all TAC and Public Committee debates the difference between the analysis and the management of risks, which amounted to a strict distinction between assessment of the various environmental risks and suggestions for their mitigation. This rule had two key effects on REPP outcomes. First, consistent with the goal of basing decisions on the best available information, data analysis preceded any debate of policy options. One by-product of the focus on understanding the data first was the participants' realization that what they thought they knew was not always borne by the facts. Second, attention to the nature of environmental impacts rather than worry over their mitigation led the TACs to turn their attention to the causes of those impacts. As a result, analysis traced the linkage of negative environmental impacts to infrastructure planning, operation, and maintenance problems.

We propose that one reason the REPP committees identified the links between infrastructure choices and environmental impacts is that information collection and analysis preceded and supported the subsequent decisions, overcoming some of the cognitive barriers to infrastructure visibility. The effect of separating the tasks of understanding the information and making choices reduced the perception of overwhelming complexity and technicality of the data. The separation also enabled participants to set aside their initial positions while considering the information with no concern that decisions unfavorable to their interests might ensue. And it is also the separation and the clear lack of decision mandate for the TACs that fostered the necessary trust between technicians and members of the lay public who allowed themselves to be persuaded by what they trusted to be facts. Process details by track follow.

Track 1: Public Committee Process

The visioning--the aggregation of individual values into a group vision--deserves attention. Its goal was to help the Public Committee articulate the values that were to underlie the consensus over environmental priorities of the region. The committee chose the year 2014--20 years from the beginning of the project--as a target for the vision, which states that:

This statement provided the Public Committee a rallying device for an initially disparate set of stakeholders who needed to work together for more than a year crafting a shared future. For a sizable region like Northeast Ohio, comprising numerous communities connected loosely at best, one practical barrier to public involvement in regional decisions is lack of cohesion deriving from the absence of communication channels, mutual familiarity, and trust. Initially, Public Committee members were nodding acquaintances, with bonds too weak to allow for the development of consensus over momentous stakes. During the visioning process, participants had an opportunity to demonstrate their good faith as they left behind strongly held personal agendas and focused on the region, trying to accommodate other interests besides their own. We watched the unfolding of a learning process: Representatives of various community interests began to work together, trust each other, and believe consensus could be achieved.

Track 2: Technical Advisory Committee Process

The three TACs--Human Health, Ecology, and Quality of Life--were to produce criteria for evaluating environmental threats and devise a process for conducting the analysis of risks. No new research or data collection was undertaken. Instead, the TACs were asked to anchor their analyses in data already available for the four-county Northeast Ohio region and in best judgments based on the members' practical experience and on their understanding of the national scientific consensus on each issue. For example, the Quality of Life Committee produced the following criteria to evaluate environmental risks related to the region's quality of life:

• Number of citizens in the region affected by an issue;
• Availability of roughly equivalent substitutes for a threatened resource such as a lake;
• Reversibility of the damage to quality of life;
• Short-term impact on quality of life;
• Long-term impact on quality of life;
• The extent to which the positive and negative impacts are equitably distributed among the region’s population (a measure of environmental justice).

In turn, each cluster was then ranked according to technical issues and finally public values were included by the Public Committee resulting in the Priority list.

The decision to separate problem management from problem analysis contributed to the surfacing of infrastructure issues. For example, as the Ecology TAC was searching for ways to tackle surface water quality, the environmentalist members proposed to move to a ban on industrial use of choline feedstock, recognized by all TAC members as a key threat. Other TAC members were then able to cite the Public Committee’s desire that TACs should restrict themselves to problem analysis rather than problem solving. As a result of data analysis the TAC concluded that surface water quality was actually threatened by septic system failures and combined sewer overflows, which are essentially infrastructure problems.

Outcomes of the REPP

The Public Committee attributed a special meaning to the term priority. In this parlance, an issue was given high priority if it commanded a sense of policy urgency. That urgency could be driven by the fact that currently the issue does not seem to receive attention in proportion to its value and risks, that it may be irreversibly harmed in the long run, or that it is deemed critical to achieving long-term goals of the region's citizens. Therefore, as the Public Committee members often found it necessary to reiterate to each other, a low or medium ranking does not correspond to an issue's lack of importance. Rather, it reflects either the perception of relative lack of urgency compared to higher-ranked issues or a belief that it is currently adequately managed, posing little threat to attainment of the region's goals. And while the ranking is to hold for the entire region, local "hot spots" of high environmental risk were deemed to need separate consideration.

The urban sprawl debate revolved around its effects and then its causes. The impacts of urban sprawl on the regional environment and quality of life were documented in the TAC reports. Environmental impacts included the loss of open space and any habitats within it and the increasing impermeability of regional surfaces from roads and parking lots that can damage surface and ground water resources. Quality of life impacts of sprawl included the progressive decline of the central cities due to the flight of residents that contributed to the city’s tax base. The resulting neglect and decay of city infrastructure duplicated elsewhere at high costs constitute waste of the region’s collective resources. While up to this point infrastructure was one among many other issues, it gradually became the focus during discussion of sprawl causes.

The Public Committee inquired into the factors that lead to sprawl, drawing on theories and discussing the issues with developers, real estate professionals, economic development officers, corporate planners, and home owners. The discussions yielded a combination of push factors that lead people to leave the central city and pull factors that attract them to currently rural areas. Developers acknowledged candidly that the pattern of infrastructure investments at all government levels effectively constitutes a subsidy they would be hard-pressed to forego. For example, one Lorain County developer estimated that the cost difference between building a home in the city of Lorain and building the identical home in one of the townships surrounding it was $12,000. This gap consists almost entirely of state and local government investment in infrastructure, the real cost of which does not accrue to either the new residents or the developer.

The Public Committee combined the information on the role of infrastructure in supporting (if not outright promoting) sprawl with information on the past 30 years of stagnant regional population accompanied by sizable losses in the cities. This led the committee to identify three sprawl-related problems:

1. Economic development markets may be distorted by the infrastructure subsidy from governments.
2. Economic development goals in some parts of the region, served by tax revenues, result in impoverishment in other parts of the region.
3. Infrastructure expansion represents a short-term tax increase to the region as bond issues are repaid; however, there is a long-term concern for expected tax increases for maintenance purposes generally supported by the communities’ general funds.

These observations are notable for having been made by the Public Committee and for surfacing infrastructure decisions as key to the large concern with urban sprawl, which drove the search for information on causes and effects of current patterns of infrastructure spending. This suggests not only that the lay public needs and can digest complex information, but that it needs to go through the painstaking process of identifying specific issues as deserving attention.

During August and September 1995, the REPP staff solicited public feedback by distributing the technical reports, Public Committee considerations, and ranking of priorities to major libraries in the region. Four public meetings held in September 1995 covered the initial four counties and the three counties that joined later and dealt with both the provisional priorities and the two definite high-priority issues of out-migration and quality of the urban environment. These meetings and a number of focus groups produced ideas for possible solutions and future partners in implementation. Partnerships between government agencies and business, environmental, academic, and other organizations, many with experience in dealing with the priority issues, will be essential in developing realistic implementation plans and in fostering and sustaining public support.

The aftermath

The Urban Sprawl Working Group has already begun by considering the outcome of twelve regional focus groups, which identified a set of policy action areas:

1. Education of the public and public officials about the "true" costs of urban sprawl, with special focus on costs stemming from infrastructure duplication in construction and maintenance, and on infrastructure subsidies for roads, sewers, and water systems that distort the functioning of land markets.
2. Infrastructure investment strategies for intervening in policy debates around infrastructure investments. For example, the group has offered criteria to prioritize all regional transportation projects in the framework of the region’s Transportation Improvement Plan (TIP). The group proposed that all projects expected to contribute to urban sprawl and infrastructure duplication should get lower funding priority, reducing the likelihood of their implementation.
3. Quality of the urban environment, with focus on urban sprawl’s "push" factors--those encouraging out-migration from the urban core as well as mitigating or "pull-back" factors, such as redevelopment of inner-city public transportation, urban green spaces, and brownfields to stimulate the urban economy and enhance the sense of community.

Following a similar process, the Energy Use Working Group identified three primary policy areas:

1. Retail wheeling of electric power, taking advantage of the new competition among electric utilities, independent power producers (IPPs), and municipal utilities;
2. Regional energy efficiency, relating to energy consumption patterns;
3. Capturing externalities such as pollution costs into the price of energy.

A program to engage the lay public in development and implementation of strategies that reflect the regional consensus on environmental priorities will be carried out concurrently with the work of the task forces. The Public Committee members have agreed to promote to their constituents and to the region's political leadership those policy changes on which they achieve consensus. The REPP priorities will also be factored into the State of Ohio’s Comparative Risk Project, which unfolded during 1995.

An emerging agenda

We have reviewed the case of the invisible urban structure and its link to environmental quality. After examining some of the barriers to change in public and political attitudes, we have described the Regional Environmental Priorities Project which suggests cautious optimism regarding the likelihood of change in the reactive infrastructure decision-making patterns of Northeast Ohio. The project accomplished at least one seemingly difficult task: It elicited a region’s consensus on the order in which environmental issues should get political attention. It also showed that a carefully designed process that cannot be hurried is able to overcome barriers to infrastructure visibility. The lay public can make decisions based on information with high scientific and technical content, it can balance short- and long-range interests, and it can arrive at consensus. Interestingly, based on this information, the traditionally invisible infrastructure became a key issue through its connection to the region’s top environmental priority--urban sprawl.

Granted, a project like the REPP cannot be deemed successful unless it actually is shown to have had a tangible effect on decisions affecting the region’s environment. Also, this like other cases has numerous particularities that prevent us from claiming understanding of such public prioritizing processes or the wisdom of transferring this design to other regions. However, even after its first stage, the REPP suggests some basic practical lessons and questions for further investigation and validation concerning the nature of participatory decision-making processes, the kinds and formats of information useful for lay public consumption, and strategies that bridge between the public’s priorities and private sector stakeholders and practitioners who make the decisions that count for infrastructure and the environment.

It seems that information availability and accessibility are critical to meaningful public participation in regional decisions. Merely ensuring availability and even accessibility, however, seems insufficient. The lay public’s ability to formulate preferences that can guide public policy seems to hinge on process. That is, supplying information, even in readily understandable form, needs to be accompanied by a process that leads participants to identify a need for that information. The advantage is that such a process seems to help the public trust the information it seeks and to take leaps across traditional regional divides. The disadvantage is that such processes are costly and time- and labor-intensive and need a champion, since they are not yet institutionalized in any fashion. Champions have to take the initiative of organizing the process, seeking funding, and providing staffing, since it seems that a commitment to attend rather numerous meetings over a long period of time is at the limit of what can be expected of volunteer members of the participating public. This is only a seeming disadvantage if one factors in the costs of adversarial resolution of regional conflicts over resources, tax funds, not and economic development, which are also time-, labor-, and resource-intensive but lack the consensus and mandate for action that emerge at end of processes like the REPP.

Following are some suggestion for processes like the REPP, that seem to us to have made a difference and need further corroboration in other cases:

• Make the process easy, clear, and painless (by staffing, using all communication technologies available, and offering staff assistance to lighten the participants’ burden).
• Keep participants’ expectations in line with the end product.
• Insist on rules, but allow for flexibility and consensus over their design.
• Insist on continuous participation for individuals committing to the process.
• Keep the momentum, but do not hesitate to stop when the participants’ level of comfort with content or speed of decisions seems to have been exceeded.
• Make no changes in process or documents without consulting the participants.
• Before key decisions, develop agreement on the procedure (voting, consensus, veto, etc.).
• Use all opportunities to praise participants’ efforts.
• Attempt to keep the media informed of progress.

These suggestions may seem only indirectly related to our main argument about infrastructure invisibility to the lay public and its causes. Together, however, they reiterate the proposition that barriers to infrastructure visibility can be overcome with information and an accompanying process that enables the lay public to acquire, trust, digest, and understand it sufficiently for decision purposes.

Notes

References

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Discuss technical committees’

• findings
• quality of data
• assumptions