 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Okay, we're back, we're live, we're here, I'm Jay Fidelin, Think Tech, and guess what, it's the two o'clock block, and guess what, it's Community Matters, because community does matter, and we have a guy who thinks about that all day long, Peter Adler of Accord III. Okay, hi Peter. Hi there. We've got a lot of questions for you. Hi today. Yeah, you're gonna fix it for us. And Greg Chun from the University of Hawaii, involved in what, University Outreach, that kind of thing, yeah? Yeah, working with the community to make sure that we're addressing the right questions. Yeah, okay, the question of the day is, public participation in a polarized era. Okay, this is a serious problem. We have a lot of talk in this town, including in the legislature, the city council, and around the executive branch too, but we don't necessarily have any action. We don't actually come together. Consensus is an elusive goal, may I say. So, can you articulate the problem, and how it affects our lives, our government, our state in general? Well, you don't have to look much farther than the voter turnout to understand public participation. Now, I understand that we have our own cultural ways of doing things, we're a different sort of a community. We're not in New York, we're not in Los Angeles, but we have laws on the books about public participation that are 30 years old and really haven't been looked at with fresh eyes. So, part of this event is to do just that. December one, we're meeting, we expect 100, 150 people, and we are going to try and take stock of what works, what doesn't work, and what are some of the course corrections we need to do, both for things that are required, as well as the other ways that people can and do and sometimes participate. Okay, who's coming, who's speaking? We're gonna have quite a lineup of people, including my good friend Greg Chun, but we're gonna have several, a panel in the morning with a bunch of cases and the good, bad, the ugly, case studies. Case study? I love case studies. Yeah, so we're gonna have some people. We're gonna have some case studies here at this table. I mean, we're gonna look, for example, at the Kaka Hako Citizen Advisory Committee. We're gonna look at some of the complete streets planning that one of the planning firms is doing. We're gonna take a look at the new dairy on Kauai and how hard that's been, and we're gonna look at Envision Mauna Kea, which is Greg's bailiwick one he's been working on. We're gonna look at the Native Hawaiian Constitutional Convention, and we're looking at different methods in saying, do those work? Are they good forms for at least consultation and problem solving, or do we need to do better? That's what we're gonna be doing, and we're gonna be doing that all day long. Next day we'll be doing some specialized strategy and skill workshops. This is really important that we do this, clearly, because I think we have a culture problem here. We're always seeking consensus, but never actually getting there. And it's always, may I say, kicking the can down the road, lots of events and conferences and group sessions and workshops, and I could go on seminars, I could go on. But if you look at each one of them, it's hard to draw a line from that to action. And so I guess what you guys are saying is that this one is different. This conference is different from other conferences because you have a special sauce. Well, we do, and we do. We're gonna have some good food, too, so that's always a special sauce. But yeah, we want to tee it up and incubate processes and ways that we can start to improve this whole political participation climate in Hawaii. We don't know if we'll be successful. It certainly won't happen on that day, but we better come out with a short list of things that we can do, and we think we will. Yeah. So how do you feel about this? I mean, what's your role in it? You know, from the point of view of the university. And as we discussed before, a lot of ideas, maybe most of the really important ideas that sort of foment around our community come from the university one way or the other. So where do you stand? What does the university stand in looking at this? I think the university in general has become much more engaged in understanding the need to bridge their work with the communities that they're working in. That's sort of a general statement. And certainly a lot of the work that I do at the university is involved in working with our researchers, working with our scientists, working with our administration and trying to align the work that they're doing better with community needs and community interests. But in terms of the process that Peter is talking about, it's something that I personally have been very, very concerned about for many, many years. It's not that the conflict, public conflict hasn't occurred in the past. That's just sort of natural in our democratic process. But what I do see what concerns me is the increased divisiveness that that conflict is causing in our communities. We've certainly seen that with GMO and Kauai. We've seen that with TMT on the Big Island. Any of a number of other development-type projects of... Rail, coca-cola, lots of good one, yeah. And as we were talking earlier, I mean to the point where it's dividing families. It's dividing communities. It's dividing co-workers around these issues. And so I think we have to find a better way to resolve these issues and seek problem-solving, design these processes so that we can more effectively problem-solve. You know, when you say that, actually, Greg, it all sounds like the Trump issue because families are dividing, friends are dividing, the community is dividing on that too. And I'm wondering if there's a relationship, sort of an atmospheric relationship between that issue and what we have here and what. This is maybe, is this the time in which we live where people would rather maintain self-interest and never agree with a consensus with some kind of collaborative result? Is it limited to Hawaii? No, it's not. It's a national issue and it's a particularly polarized time, which is why that's in the title. And we're worried about the spillover into the islands and whether that's going to infect us in the ways it's infected Charlottesville and many other places. So, you know, this is a timely discussion. This is a neat, I want to raise one other thing, which is an issue that I've been talking about with some friends which has to do with, I'm going to call it strategic complacency. So we worry about very short-term issues. You heard it here. Yeah. Strategic complacency. Well, let's do that again. We have the final exam. And a test to follow on you. So, no, no, so we have very short-term horizons. But really one of the question also in my mind is, how do we begin to incubate the right kinds of conversations that will help shape the longer-term future? It's not just about who pays for rail. It's not just whether the telescope goes up or comes down. But what's the future of the whole mountain? What's the future of a lot of research? And so we tend to be very short-sighted. And if I can just add one more thing, I think there's a logical reason for it. Because we know that the election cycle that puts people in office really is fairly short. It looks to the next election. And I don't say that critically, because that's how it is. And the business community is the same thing. They're looking at it next year, and the end of this year, and next year, and I get that. So who's going to look long-term if we don't invent the forms? I mean, the problem is, you say, excuse me, public participation, what is that? I mean, we've seen groups and meetings with stakeholders who are self-interested and also transparency that is like endless, that takes forever. And how do you find the right group? I mean, isn't that what we have government for originally? To rule, to think, to plan, to make important public policy decisions? So I believe that government is necessary in this, but they're insufficient. We need more. And we can't just rely on those strikes, especially in light of the declining confidence in our institutions, which has been going on for 40 years. So we know that the trustworthiness and confidence level in government is declining all over. And that's global, actually. It's not just here, and it's not just nationally. So the question is, if not them, who? How about us? And how do we invent the right way of doing it? Yeah, and I think inherent in that approach is that when the, say, call it the body politic, you know, make a decision or come to some kind of real consensus about it, they'd go to government, which I believe is more porous now than it used to be, because you can go to government with a checkbook and you can get a result, look at Citizens United and a similar process here at White. So I think that maybe what you're talking about is sort of a pre-government, a wraparound government kind of group decision process involving the public. And the question is, what kind of attitude does the public need to have in order to become the wrapper that way? And how do we change the attitude of the public to be, not elimotory, but community-based? And looking broadly. Yeah, yeah. How do we change that? Well, one of the things I think is that, and we've been a little misguided in thinking that we have to have full consensus. And we actually, what I think our leaders need is consent more than consensus. They need a plurality, they need a majority so they can actually lead and do things. So we don't have ways of testing that and looking at that. You were telling us before this started about people who do really cool surveys that starts to pull out the pulse of an issue and a group of people. But why aren't we doing more of that? Why isn't there more of that that comes to light? And we can say it's not just a developer-commissioned project, but it's something that's long-term. Yeah, you learned so much from surveys. And I was talking about Jeremy Firestone, who is a faculty in the University of Delaware who visited Hawaii a few years ago and talked about how he did, in order to examine a project, an energy project in Connecticut, he sort of invented a survey approach and the government of Connecticut hired and refined it what people really thought, not just the protesters, not just the self-interested, but everyone. And he did the survey among the people of Connecticut and had some tabulated results that were very useful to the government. And the important thing is that that kind of diminishes the possibility that one noisy, loud protest group can make it sound like they are the public. And this happened here. And hijacked everything. Yeah, like TMT is a perfect example of that. Yeah, one of the issues to Jay is we have to realize when consultation occurs within one of these established processes already, the end game is a yes or no vote and up or down. So those processes are really set up to comp votes at that point. They're not really set up for the kind of problem solving that Peter and I are hoping to get to through this. You want more than yes or no questions. Yes, absolutely. I think it's more nuanced. I think some of our issues that we run, some of the conflict we run into is because of how we frame the questions. TMT is a perfect, perfect example. With Envision Mauna Kea, the project that I'm working on, it's not so much whether you support project, support TMT or not. It's really trying to get to a more core or fundamental understanding of where the general public feels, how they feel about the future of the mountain. The whole mountain, not just the summit. And you can't have, that conversation isn't going to occur in a contested case here. So let me give you another example, just to piggyback on what Greg said, because I'm a great admirer of what Greg's doing and his colleagues there. So for example, we have a lot of toying and froing about rail, which is fine. It should be, it should be examined. We need to flip the rock and look at that. But isn't the bigger issue of long-term about transportation, it's less about this railroad and how do we have the right kind of long-term conversation about transportation? And it comes up, but it becomes only a piece of the rail fights. It doesn't get focused on very well. So how do we do that? That's just an example. I don't have an answer to it, but I think we can invent one. Well, part of this I think relates to, what did I see lately where the issue came up about where does the buck stop? And I think when you have a lot of meetings and a lot of searches for consensus, there's no place where the buck stops. I'm a member of the Energy Policy Forum. It's a consensus organization. And there is really no place where the buck stops and they just allow a platform. So are you talking about allowing a platform or are you talking about making a system where at some point it's on somebody's desk or some official person or group says, here's what we're gonna do. I mean, we heard all the arguments, we heard all the proposals, we heard you guys come to a plan or at least a rough plan about how we should approach, say, transportation with all the elements. Everybody could think out of the box that way, but somebody has to say, that's what we're gonna do. Now, in the past, I think we expected government to do that, but we have been disappointed. And that's part of the genesis of this meeting. I mean, and I say that not as a hard critic of the government because it's a tough job. It's just the way it is. It is the way it is. It's a system and that's why I say it's necessary but insufficient. We need to add some kind of additional rudders or trim tabs onto this system and we don't have them yet. So when you get up at the beginning of this conference on December 1st, and where is it? It's at East West Center. East West Center. And it's gonna be eight o'clock in the morning to start. That's gonna be what? A couple of days? It runs that there's one big plenary session all day on the first and the second day are gonna be some more focused workshops on skills and strategies. For example, native Hawaiians. How do they wanna be consulted? Or the issue between privacy and transparency. How do we really navigate that? So we're gonna take on some very specific issues in the second one. Yeah, that'd be good. But when you get up there and you sort of open the plenary session, there's camera one over there. Okay, what are you gonna tell them? I'm gonna say, we're gonna take up a set of topics that hasn't been looked at with the kind of clarity that we're gonna try to bring. And if we do this right, if we succeed, we will incubate a short list of possible initiatives to be done after this conference. We can't do it at that conference. We don't have time. But we can say, okay, here's some specific areas where we can attack those and start to make some movement. So we will incubate a short list of future initiatives. You're gonna tell them what you expect from them in terms of concentration involvement? Yes, I'm gonna tell them the first thing is no whining. And no whining, let's set the whining aside for a little while and do some hard thinking and use our noodles for this one day. That's what I'm gonna say. Something like that. I'll tell you what I'm gonna say though. I'm gonna say it's time for a one minute break. I always say that. And he always knows I'm gonna say that. This is Community Matters, that's Peter Adler to Greg Chun. We're talking about public participation in a polarized era. So important, not only in Hawaii, but everywhere, but we have a loa. We can try to fix this, don't you think? I do, we'll be right back. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Hello, everyone, Ted Ralston here, a host of our Think Tech Show, where the drone leads where we talk weekly at Thursdays and noon, by the way, on subjects related to the emerging technology and business of drones as they might apply here in Hawaii. Issues involving commerce and education, legislation, technology, public safety, all the things that you might wanna hear about. We talk about them with local experts and people from across the country. So join us at noon on every Thursday, and we'll have a new subject and we'll have new faces to talk about this most interesting subject area. For a little tailgate. I usually drink, but we'll be drinking today because I'm the designated driver and that's okay. It's nice to be the guy that keeps his friends in line, keeps them from drinking too much so we can have a great time. A little responsibility can go a long way because it's all about having fun on game day. I'm the guy you wanna be. I'm the guy, say good morning. I'm the guy that says, let's go. I told you we'd come back and we came back, you know, like MacArthur, we came back. An honest man. Yeah, yeah, there you go. Okay, this is Peter Adler, that's Greg Chun, and they can do a program at December 1st, you should go. Public participation in a polarized era, the good, the bad and the future. So let's talk about some of the specific issues, problems that you hope to discuss, either in the plenary session or in the second day. Greg, you have the Monacaia Envision Monacaia, is it? What is that? How does it work? And how is that the kind of subject we can wrap our minds around in this program? So Envision Monacaia really did germinate out of the TMT controversy and comes from conversations with Peter and many people in the community I've had about who have a growing discontent with the nature of public discourse. And so the idea was to create a process that people could feel safe about talking about their vision, their hopes, their aspirations about for the future of Monacaia. Not just astronomy, not just a particular project, not just the summit, but what they saw for the whole mountain. And so we've created a community-based process that is outside of the contested case hearing, outside of any regulatory decision that's needing to be made, but is intended to inform and provide input from a broad base of community about their vision for the future of the mountain. And it needed to be community-based. It couldn't be housed within the university. It couldn't be housed within a particular, you know, TMT developer or astronomy. Although those entities have supported the process. So we have a community partner, a very strong community partner, Friends of the Future, based in Waimea, who's running that whole process. And we have a strong group of community- Friends of the Future. Friends of the Future. I love that name. Yeah, so who are they? What do they do? Friends of the Future is an organization started by Kenneth Brown many, many years ago who had a vision for Kauai Island, particularly the Waimea-Kohala area, as really kind of being a place to convene and bring people to solve big questions in our communities. And they have been in existence for 20 plus years. They do a number of different programs. You can look at their website. But one of the programs that they've done for many years is that they work with Bishop Museum and working with the farmers in Waipio Valley. We try to help bridge those conversations about leases and whatnot with Bishop Museum. Yeah, so they have a lot of experience in sort of bringing people together, convening people around contentious issues. So we approach them. They are running the program. We have a community-based group of volunteers who are actually sitting through all these listening sessions, receiving the input. They'll be summarizing what they're hearing. We have a group of community-based facilitators who are running the process. So a lot of thinking went into the design of it because we had to ensure that it existed outside of any of these formal and other entities. So it's a community-based process, asking the bigger question of what do you hope for the future of the program. So you're gonna get lots of answers on that. We're all over the board. We've heard everything. How do you reach some consensus on it? The community group who is actually going through the sessions, we are facilitating their thinking around and decision-making, if you will, around what are they hearing? We anticipated certain themes. We anticipated certain narratives, certain storylines. We're using that as a starting point, but as we facilitate that process, it really becomes what that group besides they have heard. And part of it is information. You know, I mean, I remember in the dispute on Lanai or whether they should have wind in the garden of the gods on the west side of Lanai, back when with Murdoch, the people in the Lanai city were convinced that the windmills would be right there in Lanai city. That was never the case. But if you ask them, they were all convinced. So it was grand misinformation. And that's one of the keys. This kind of discussion, hopefully you can clarify that. I think when I find, I think Envision Montecay is gonna also look for those sweet spots where a lot of different pieces can fit together. Maybe some of them where they can't. But they're talking to conservation people, artists, tour operators, folks who feel very passionate about the telescope itself, pro pro and con. So they're talking to a lot of groups and the question is, can this group then say, you know, here's some sweet spots. And planners, legislators, governor and county council and mayor, here's some things for you to focus on. We've done the listening. Yeah, well, I think they have to come into a meeting like that into your meeting with an open mind. It can't come in and say, well, I'm gonna advance my cause. I'm gonna advance mine. I'm not taking any wood and nickels on it. I'm not compromising. That's the problem with polarization today. But let me ask you this. I mean, you've identified a number of issues and areas of contention. Is there room for another one? I mean, for example, somebody comes to this program, public participation, polarized error. And he says, you know, we needed the great Mahaley of 2017. Land value, occupancy value was way too high. It's distorting the economy and the social fabric of the state. Let's talk about that. Is he gonna be able to do that? We're not gonna have a whole meeting and spend the whole day talking about that one time. Everybody's got a pet topic. So I have mine and I'm not gonna get to talk about all mine too. We're gonna focus on some high level notions and take in, first we're gonna try and do some information. Say, here's what the required elements are. And we're gonna get some business perspective. We'll have Ed Case talking about a governmental perspective on that. Marge Ziegler from the conservation can talk about community and NGOs. And then we'll have these case studies and we'll really try to lift up the rock and understand those. And if I wouldn't want someone coming to this meeting and say, I'm gonna spend the whole day talking about rail. It'll take you off the track is what'll happen. That's the risk of this kind of over-prescussion. You know, we're gonna try our best to manage this thing and not let it get hijacked. We're pretty good at that actually. We're reasonably good. Every once in a while we slip, but most of the time we do. But that is appropriate to the whole problem solving you're talking about too, not to get distracted. I think we live in a world of distraction. Our esteemed president distracts us all the time. The press itself gets distracted. There are politicians out there that make U.E. Long look like a piker. So, I mean, we have to avoid distraction. So you have to stay on the pace. And it's very easy for a conference like this to get ADD and completely distracted and fragmented and pulled apart to the next shiny object. And that's what we want to stay focused. And I'll be there to remind them, as will Greg and others. Well, in their hearts, that's what people really want. They want structure. I think so. And some trustworthiness in the platforms. Greg, one of the things Greg has done is build a trustworthy platform for those discussions. And that's one of the keys to this. I can tell you, Jay, how many times in these listening sessions that we've been holding, no matter where a person stands on EMT or astronomy or some aspect of an issue related to the market, at the end of the day, they say, you know, we should have had these conversations much earlier in the process. Somebody should have been doing this with us much earlier because they have a chance to hear other people's perspectives in a safe setting and express theirs in a safe setting. And that in itself has tremendous value for our communities. So who do you want to come down? Because everybody that comes down as a player, as a participant, will have a say in the proceedings. So who do you want to be there? That's a great question. So if it worked out well, which I can't fully control, we would have people from government agencies, people from community and NGOs, and business people there. And we're all talking about the same thing and listening to the same stuff in one place. And we're all thinking hard about inventing solutions. So we know the problem will look different to different people, but the question is, can we get it more inventive and creative in this next era? Can we do this better? Can we do public engagement and public participation better? I'm an optimist that we can. I'm optimistic that we can. Now at the end of the program, say after the second day or shortly after, hopefully, you're gonna want to document maybe and create a book of proceedings about what was discussed and what the takeaway was. What does the takeaway look like? I mean, as far as you can see it into the future, and what does that book or proceedings look like? We've asked, it won't be a book, first of all, because books are too long. Books are very long. Yeah, I know the book you wrote about India, that was pretty long, that was pretty long. And God bless you for reading any of it. So what we're gonna do is, we have two people who are, I will call, are designated listeners. And one of those is Jana Wolf, and the other one is Ann Smok. And they are both gonna be spending the whole day listening for their ideas. What's the ideas that we can turn to actions? What are actionable ideas? And at the end of the day, the first day, they're gonna report, and they'll say, here's the list. Here's a list of things that we can do. That you can do, we can do, if somebody has the energy and time to organize it, these are things that we can go forward with. Now, you know, we do that sometimes in our talk shows, really. You do a lot of it. It's sort of the end of the talk show we say to somebody at the table, we do this in our energy shows all the time. We say, okay, we've had a good discussion, but we've got a lot of points, Hither and Jan. Can you summarize for us, Greg? What the takeaway is? Yeah. In the ideal situation, you will have these two or three strategies that people see are actionable. And in the process, my own personal hope is through the conversation, I'm not gonna call it consensus-building, but maybe at least some healing that can start to occur. Because I think that is what concerns me so much about the state of... Yeah, we need that, don't we? We need the healing, oh, po-no-po-no. It's certainly well within the culture to do that, have to do it in a certain way so that people come out the other side and they like where they are. They like the people around them and they like the idea of going forward on it. So, you know, I wanted to ask you if you would speak to Camera One, Peter, and tell them what you want them to know. And in the process, you could give them your website also. So, if you can, this is what we are doing on December one and two, half day on the second. And I would just, I wanna do this commercial and encourage you, if you are interested in this, to come to the conference, to participate in it. Yes, there is a registration fee, yes, there's gonna be some good food that we hope to provide to people for the registration fee, plus it's a nice venue. And I hope people will come with a very open mind and our goal is to get inventive and creative, more so than we have been, about figuring out ways to talk about the toughest issues that we have in the state and do some of that healing and at least have some civility in those discussions. It's very provocative what you're doing. It wraps around the whole notion of what is wrong in our community? Why is it wrong? What processes haven't worked for us? How can we get people together to make good process and have good results? This is really important. And now is the time for it. You're absolutely talking. And you're gonna be there. I'll be there. You're gonna be there. You and your colleagues are gonna be there. We'll do some filming. We'll try and capture a record of it. So, I'm looking forward to this. This is really special. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Greg. Aloha. Thank you. Aloha. Again, as we get closer. Absolutely. Good. Yeah.