 This is Stink Tech, Hawaii. Community matters here. The back were live. It's a two o'clock block. I'm so happy to be here. We have a special show, as we did last week. It's about public participation in a polarized era. Continue. Step two. We have Keith Mattson, who is one of the organizers of this program and a participant. And we have my special guest, Colin Moore. He is with the political science department and the School of Social Policy at UH Manila. And he is a participant in the program. Are you also an organizer? Yes. Okay, well, okay. It's all level playing here. So will somebody please tell me what the program is about? Where, when, how, and who? Okay. Well, it's a conference on public participation in a polarized era. And it's basically designed to take stock of what is working well in public policy or public participation and what is not. And to probe where are better ways, maybe better solutions, better approaches, better methods for getting the valuable types of public consultation you need, whether it's for planning, whether it's for permitting, whether it's for agency rulemaking or some other hot issue where in a democracy we need that consultation. December 1st. December 1st at the East West Center. That will be the day one. And then there's a day two part, which is really focused for practitioners that will be at the UH Law School. And it will showcase a little bit more of what some professionals are doing innovatively in the areas of public participation, particularly for specific kinds of things like controversial issues, native Hawaiian communities, designing unique processes. So can you give us the lay of the land on what kinds of panels? We have a few different panels that we'll talk about. Well, two in the morning that I think are particularly interesting. One will be looking at what's on the books, the legal requirements for public participation right now for, let's say, an environmental impact statement or for agency rulemaking or for something like that. And then we're going to have three perspectives, one from the environmental community, one from the business community and one from government, about how will those legal requirements, those things that everybody's doing on a regular basis for consultation, how well are they working? Where are they falling apart? Where in their own personal experience have they seen them either succeed or fail? And that's going to kind of get us to a point of looking at different ways of doing public participation that are maybe a little bit more unique. So we're going to have following that a panel on case studies, five different people talking about in their profession examples of different types of public participation processes that they've run. And some have been successful. Some have been kind of middle of the road and some have been, to be quite honest, failures. And your role? I'm going to be moderating that first panel I talked about, the one we're looking at, the existing requirements and the sort of experience from three different perspectives on that. Okay. So will I get depressed coming down to this, Colin Moore, Professor Colin Moore? Well, I think that if you're coming down to this conference, you're probably already depressed about the state of public participation. That's a discouraging thing because as a lot of folks will recall, the reason we have all these requirements, I mean, it dates back to this period where people thought that, you know, sunshine was the solution and more public participation would lead to better outcomes and people would be more involved in the government. We'd get away from the smoke filled rooms and bring the community in. The problem is most of the people who do this work most of the time, I mean, who have run these opportunities for the public to participate, I think are pretty discouraged by the results. The public who does come are pretty discouraged and I think anyone who's been part of one of these would feel discouraged as well. I mean, usually you get a small number of very intensely interested people who are often there to push their own ideological agenda. Often the same people seem to turn up to meeting after meeting after meeting. You almost don't even need to hold them because you know what everyone's going to say before they open their mouth. Nobody's listening. And nobody's listening. No. There's no, it often just turns into a shouting match, which is often what my students say when I tell them to go to one of these and see how it works. They just come back and they say it was just a bunch of yellied. I mean, they never want to go again, which is a pretty discouraging thing. So I mean, I think you and I share the thought about, you know, the quality of our democracy these days, if we all do. So if the world is more complex and the government is more complex, because the world is more complex, the people have to keep up their participation because after all, the people are the government. The government is the people. There is a social compact. There's a requirement of exchange between the people and the government. But somewhere along the line, and it's only been revealed in my view in the Trump administration as, you know, so starkly is that people haven't kept up. They don't, you know, EIS, oh, that's so complicated. We don't want to be involved in that. Make it go away. It just gets in the way anyway. Transparency, that's too much information. And the only people who really speak to transparency, the ones in those silos who won't listen to anyone else, I mean, it's like, have we lost it in terms of connecting up the government and the people? Is that involved in this discussion somewhere? Oh, I think absolutely. I think that's one of the key things we'll discuss, how to do that in a more effective way. Because right now it's not working. I mean, even if you, even if we don't talk about some of the results that we've seen from the Trump administration, the fact that we don't even seem to share the same reality anymore, I mean, we can accuse anyone of making up their own facts or just dismiss any report that doesn't confirm what you already believe is fake news. It's pretty difficult to have a conversation about much of anything. But even before that, I mean, we saw, I think, this system begin to break down. And part of it, too, is from the folks in government, I mean, because they sort of talk about this, even the word stakeholder engagement, I mean, really sounds, can sound a bit condescending, that we're going to go and show you our plans, people are going to say whatever you say, and we're going to go back and do whatever we want to do. But at the end, and I think a more effective approach tends to be, you have to engage these people from the very earliest stage. But that's a difficult thing to do and is becoming, I think, increasingly difficult in a more polarized world. Well, if I want to, you know, assuming we could agree on the facts and an approach, you know, this is the reverse of latency, I'm going to talk about that in a minute. But how long would it take to get everyone in this country of, what, 300 million plus people together to understand that we have to work together on this and we can't be in silos and we have to listen and we all have to believe in certain fundamental ways of doing government business? How long would it take to train everyone, yet again, to make them take courses in history and government, the kinds of courses we had to take in school to make to understand the relationship and the obligation of a citizen, I mean, 20 years, 30 years, do we have that much time? I think you're asking a very impossible question to answer right there. But I think you're getting at something that is really important and that is, like, there seems to be quite a breakdown in the ability to grapple with issues from a sort of a whole-cloth sense. I think we're seeing situations where people are jumping into their bubble chambers or their echo chambers, if you will, just listening to news that fits the political narrative that they have decided is correct and reinforcing that constantly. And because so many, there's so much news in such a sort of specialized way, some of it real, some of it not, you can just feed that beast 24-7 if you want to. And I think we're seeing a situation right now where there's a breakdown in civics, where people may have the last meaningful interaction with people who don't agree with them in high school. And then after that, they're often to a very, very closeted sort of orbit. So that's a pretty dark view. Well, I mean, less darker is the future. I mean, if this continues and if people do these kinds of silo things and bubble things, how long can the country last when the country is really, it's a collective of people who all believe in something. How long can the country last that way? It's very troubling. I mean, there's a well-known legal professor named Cass Sunstein at Harvard University who's studied some of this. And he really talks about the damaging effects to democracy of what he calls the daily me, which is what Facebook and Netflix offer. I mean, the algorithms try to give you more of what you want. You like to watch this show, we'll give you more of it. You like this information, we'll give you more of it. And that fits the market model, because businesses want to deliver to you, Jay Fidel, the kind of things you want to consume. It doesn't work as a model for democracy, because the only way for democracy to work is for you to feel uncomfortable at times, to be confronted by ideas you find objectionable. And think of the greater good for everyone. Exactly, exactly, because you're forced to do that. It's harder to dismiss people or ideas if you've actually confronted them, or you know someone who shares that idea. If you can retreat into your echo chamber, you don't have to do that anymore. And so it's much easier to dismiss people as enemies or fit them into some sort of insane conspiracy theory. I mean, you don't have to treat them as fellow citizens. And so breaking out of that is going to be very tough. And we know from all the social science studies that when somebody believes something, I mean, when they really believe it, and you say, OK, you don't believe in climate change here, can I show you some data that demonstrates that might be true? Or you believe that Barack Obama wasn't born in Hawaii? I'll show you some evidence that shows that's not true. The problem with that is, as all the psychological studies show, is when you do that, people cling to their previous belief even more. And the only way. You must be trying to trick me. Yes, you must be trying to trick me, or you're a liar. Because I know this to be true. Yeah, I've heard this before. It's something called reactance, I guess it's called. Yeah, interesting, interesting. You hear facts, and even if you, like this happens in the vaccine debates, where parents who's not to vaccinate their kids, and then are showing some facts about vaccines that refute what their beliefs are. And they actually say, yeah, this is kind of true, but I'm still not going to. So it hardens them. These are really big questions that we're talking about. My question to you is, how can you wrap around such a huge, fundamental discussion? I mean, a discussion that affects our lives and our future, everything around us, I mean, and our children, and our progeny, and how can we do this in a day and a half? Well, I think, in particular, to try to put a little bit of focus on this particular, on this conference. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on nationally and internationally. But in our own state and community, we still have to live and work together, share infrastructure together, make decisions collectively on where we're going to build, where we're not going to build. So why are you better suited? So why do you have certain natural, cultural, community characteristics that make us better likely, more qualified to deal with these problems? I think, in some cases, yes. I think it's a fair statement to say that most people would agree Hawaii is a more civil society. You can see it in driving habits. When people go to mainland, it's a little different. How they, people interact in retail. It just seems like it's a little bit more respectful. So if we focus this discussion here in the program on December 1st, on dealing with the sort of, the lesser polarization, I'm hopeful about this. The lesser polarization we experience in Hawaii as opposed to the country, then maybe we can wrap around the solution. Is that the hope here? That is the hope. I mean, we don't have as far to go as some communities on the mainland, but we do have our own set of challenges and I'll give you an empirical example of that. So my public policy center is starting a survey research center and we just have our first sample poll. And one of the questions we asked was how often do you participate in a public meeting? And the vast majority of people say not at all. I mean, that's our major problem here is just no civic engagement. But when you keep asking, okay, two meetings, three meetings, four meetings, the number keeps going, going down, down, down, until you ask eight or more and then all of a sudden it jumps up. There's about 10% of the population. Exactly, you show up to everything. And that is the other challenge for public participation is you can't just listen to the activists. The point of this is to listen to the community, but we only are listening to the activists and we know those are the people who are the least likely to be interested in compromise. You talk about public meetings as if there was something special about a public meeting. I mean, I can get information it's a six o'clock news. I can get information with my 140 characters. Right. I can get information from whatever flies at me in the email and all that. What do I need a public meeting? Why is a public meeting mono, mono important? And I think that's what you're talking about. Yeah, and I think you really have to get it what type of public meeting it is, but ideally it's not just a chance to voice stuff, it's a chance to interact with the proponents of a project or an issue. Ask them very honest questions and hopefully get honest answers. That's the best kind of public meeting. Yeah, something about being close physically to the next guy. For example, we have Norman Rockwell's painting of the Four Freedoms, which hangs in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Not too far from Harvard. Not too far from Yale, for that matter. Which is a fellow in a working man's shirt, blue collar worker, and he's standing in a town hall meeting and all the people are looking at him and listening. It's right outside. And they are touching each other. I mean, if not personally, then they're close enough to actually react to each other physically. And I suspect that's what you're talking about. That's a public meeting where people actually react to each other. And it's one on one, but it's more than one on one. It's one on many, many on one. And the whole thing is guaranteed to come to some kind of psychic conclusion somehow, no? That's the hope. I mean, there's lots of ways to structure public participation. Obviously you can do it online, but I tend to think that's actually not as successful. I mean, the gold standard are actual human interactions. And that's true for a number of different issues. I mean, it's the way you build trust. It's harder to dismiss someone as a crazy conspiracy theorist. If you know them, if you help them get their coffee or something, all of a sudden they're a human. And then you might listen to what they say, you know, hey, this guy, he's not so bad. Maybe he has a point. We gotta get back to that. It's something in New England. It's something in the formation of the democracy. So let me ask you some questions that are specific here. What are the problems that we have identified in our community that get in the way and that you're gonna be discussing? Well, this will be more about the types of process that goes on with different, for public participation. So some of the issues that will come up are like, you know, planning projects, complete streets in Honolulu, the Kauai, GMO, pesticide debate. Points of contention. Yeah, those will be the examples. But, you know, what we really wanna get it is like, how was the public involved or not involved? What was the outcome? Was it a good process, an effective process or not? Can there be better ways to do it? And, you know, to me, I think the most interesting thing about this conference is there's, first of all, there's no set way to do public participation. It really should be tailored for the specific issue, audience, and community. And- How can you resist having an inclination, Keith? Don't you have to go in there with an inclination? Don't you carry your inclinations with you somehow? Oh, you mean biases? Yeah, yeah, okay, biases, yeah. Well, I think everybody has biases, but the important thing is- So you don't show them? No, I think the best thing you do is disclose them. Ah, disclose them, okay. Yeah, I mean, do it honestly, you know, as long as they're not like malevolent biases. And that goes for everybody, right? Including the people in this conference. Ideally, yeah, yeah. But, I mean, we're not gonna ask people to display their biases necessarily. But surely there'll be people who show up to this and think the public participation is garbage. But if you're getting it, what are the issues with public participation or the problems? I think a lot of it has to do with timing. So many participation processes happen late and they are seen as sort of after the fact. Yeah, like rail. Well, I don't know. It's Neil Milner, you're a predecessor to Neil Milner. Yeah. And what he said was you guys, the government decided on rail before the public weighed in. So should you be surprised now that there's a lot of controversy about rail? You started putting spikes down before the public had actually agreed. And I think that's true. That's what happened. Well, another thing that's, I think an issue with public participation is it takes a lot of work to do it well. And if you're, let's say, building a project, you're focused on the engineering, the budget, the environmental work. But to do an effective public participation process all the way along, it takes a lot of work. Well, it takes a lot of work to alleviate polarization because polarization is an impacted condition and it runs deep, especially if you've been doing it since you got out of high school, right? And haven't been having honest, legitimate conversations. So how do you bust the polarization bubble? Are you hoping to do that at this project? Well, I think we're hoping to have some strategies and we'd like to leave with some concrete recommendations. But I mean, I think one thing that works, seems to work, is starting this process much earlier. And Jay, you're involved in, I think one of the more successful long standing groups that does public participation or community consultation and that's the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. And I think one way that works is you're not consulting about a specific one issue, should we do X or Y? I mean, it is generally a forum about future energy policy for the state that brings together stakeholders. It's a standing group. And so you can, not only do you have representation from a bunch of different groups, but you can kind of begin to see where there might be potential problems early on and I mean, it's a collaborative process. People don't feel like they're being consulted at the end. It's an ongoing, it's an ongoing meeting. And that, I mean, for polarization, this is one thing that does work, is that if people are much less willing to dismiss facts or suggestions as fake news, if it comes from someone they already trust, if it comes from someone they see as an ideological ally. And so if I know that I trust this person because I work with them and they say, I've been part of this process, we've been doing a lot of work on it and this is a reasonable plan. I think you should give it a second look. That changes the way people perceive it. I know you're getting into leadership. I mean, leadership is so important and we haven't been blessed with a lot of really good leaders, at least in my time anyway. I mean, you guys could be, I mean, a leader has to be open-minded. He has to disclose his biases and be able to talk about them. But he has to also foment following. And people have to be ready to follow a person who is a good leader. That's another social compact. Isn't that part of this discussion to deal with the question of finding good leaders, elevating good leaders and following good leaders? That's a big issue right there. But I think kind of to tie it to both this conference and what Peter Adler was saying on the interview you did the other day is in public participation, government should be looking for consent to lead. So not consensus on the topic because quite frankly, it's almost impossible to get 100% of the people behind anything. But if you seek that, you won't get a result. Right, you won't. You'd be frustrated forever. But if you are looking for consent to lead after you've had a very good thorough discussion of the issue with the broad cross-section, then I think you've got that ability to lead more effect. Yeah, oh, this is gonna be an exciting conference. I mean, I'm gonna be, okay. Now, the next question is, how have your own experiences with public participation? Because you guys wouldn't be here. You wouldn't be in the program. You wouldn't do what you're doing now without having had plenty of experience in the public engagement. So what do you bring to the table there in terms of that experience and how would you roll it out in this program? My career's got a lot of agency work. So I've been to a gazillion and one public meetings on different issues and I call them as saying the type where the regulars have shown up and you know what they're gonna say before they say it. But I'm gonna focus on just two different ones that are local and fairly recent. When I was with the university, I was a project manager for the regional biosafety lab project that ultimately never got built. I remember that. I remember I was there when you were speaking. It was down in Japson one day. I remember that, yeah, yeah. So anyway, make a long story short. This was a lab that was gonna do research on infectious diseases that are airborne like tuberculosis, like dengue fever. And it was a state of the art, National Institutes of Health funded and we were gonna build it out in Capillai. But as you can imagine, building a laboratory that does work on infectious diseases is a very, very tough sell. Nobody wants to be near the antigens. In classic 20s science fiction movies and all that. It's called a lulu, which is a locally unacceptable land use lulu. So, it was very, very difficult to do the public outreach on this, but it was also a matter that people were misinterpreting or misunderstanding the nature of how people actually contract infectious diseases. They don't contract them walking past the lab. I remember there were a lot of activists who would never ever have agreed that a regional biosafety lab would be appropriate in Hawaii. They had so many reasons and they never thought that actually it would be a good thing because it would help us deal with infectious diseases. I found that remarkable. They rejected that out of hand. But you know, one thing you said makes me remember my own experience. I was in Washington Place being sworn in as a director of the high tech development corporations as in the early days, Linda Lingles administration. And Steve Levinson, the judge at the time was there and he said, this is gonna change your life. Really? Why? You know, I'm not gonna change that. But it did, because all of a sudden I was on the inside of government. And when you go inside, like in the university, same thing, your experience factor, your point of view changes so dramatically. And I learned, it was like taking a, I say a PhD. I don't wanna deprecate the term PhD here, but I was like taking a PhD in government. All of a sudden I knew what went on in those back halls. It sounds like being a colonoscopy program. There's a remarkable coincidence there. What about you, Colin? Well, so I've always been either a consultant or an academic in these processes. I've never had to run a real public consultation process myself, but I've seen so many of them and seen how they seem to fail. And I've always had a difficult time squaring that with my belief in good government and more government transparency and trying to think about more creative ways to do this well, because I think it's something that everyone who studies politics thinks they wanna believe in. And when you see it in practice, it's pretty ugly business. And to some extent you begin to feel nostalgic for the days of the smoke-filled room where people could just hammer out a compromise and move on and maybe we'd be all be better for it. There's a lot of scholarly literature that's worked on this, but partly we do need to have more discussions. I think we really don't have the answer going into this, and we hope that bringing people of a lot of different experiences and different stages of the process, we can actually come to some concrete recommendations. I believe you guys, and I feel the same, maybe we go into a meeting like this, you don't know exactly what's gonna happen. You don't know what the result is gonna be, and it's not just there's gonna be some activists on this point or on that point. No, it's gonna be something that germinates within the group and all people being reasonable, and they're gonna come up with stuff that we cannot actually anticipate about that. This is a pretty valuable conference, I think. I think so too, I mean, and that's why, I mean, we're having it in person. Like we said before, I mean, this is a way to really exchange these ideas. We could have done this, you know, as per comments on the internet or written the piece and seen what comments we got, but I think this process of bringing everyone together, we actually might get some original insights. This whole thing like the forum, it is an electricity and having an even playing field, electricity and listening to whatever anyone says. Okay, Les, what expectations do you have with types of outcomes? Don't commit yourself on this. Would you like to see? Well, you know, this gets to what the other interviews with Peter and Greg said, we wanna have a short list of initiatives that could be done by different types of people to improve public participation. And so we don't know exactly what those will be. We have a couple of, you know, initial ideas, but we want people to spend enough time thinking about where things have worked and where they haven't to be able to intelligently and effectively say, you know, maybe we need to do more of this in this situation. And maybe we need to try this, that has never been tried before. Maybe it's been tried in a different community. For example, Oregon does some amazing things with public participation. They're enlightened there. Yeah. Most of the state, not all of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, they're willing to take some risks in Oregon. I mean, that's part of the problem here in Hawaii is that there is this deep, not political conservatism, but almost, you know, social conservatism where we're done it this way forever. It works okay. So why are you trying to mess with everything? I mean, we need to take more risks here. Yeah. Well, I think this is gonna be very interesting. And the question I put to you guys, which I put to Peter Adler at the last time and Greg Chun is that, you see, you have this meeting as so many meetings and everybody says at the end, gee, that was so great. That was so great. And then everybody goes home. They go home. That's it. How do you perpetuate this thought process? How do you move it forward? How do you, you know, breathe it into the atmosphere so people remember it? I mean, one of the points is you're gonna make proceedings, you're gonna make a book and you're gonna publish, but tell me how you feel that will work. Well, I think one of the things is that we expect most of the audience or a good part of them are going to be people who run public meetings themselves and or decision makers that, you know, have responsibility of overseeing the public participation process. And so if they come away with, you know, I'm gonna try this approach next time in this particular project. That's a win right there. The proceedings themselves should be able to identify the initiatives that could or should be looked at and whether or not we as individual volunteers take that up or possibly as people in the county or state government take that up, we don't know yet. But, you know, those are two ways that I think it can quote unquote live on. Yeah. You know, when you went to school and political science took your degrees and all that, you never thought that your education would be so relevant and so critical in our time. You must wake up every morning thanking God that that's what you studied. Well, it is a very interesting time to be a political scientist, but I have to say that this has also been a crisis for the discipline because we have a difficult time explaining polarization at this level, people's support for Donald Trump, you know, how you operate a democracy when everyone lives in their own echo chambers. And I think where we're struggling to catch up. Yeah. After all, political science is no more than, I would say, large scale psychology. Yeah. It's a discipline that's barely a hundred years old, so. Well, this is going to be a great conference. I'll be there for sure, I want to participate too. I'm so glad you guys are putting it together, participating, I think it behooves all of us to throw in our lot on this kind of discussion. And the good news is that at this conference, my right, check me on this, at this conference, polarization is not permitted. Oh, yeah. That's right. Thank you. Come with an open mind. Thank you, Colin. Check your weapons in the door. Thank you Keith Mattson. Great discussion. So looking forward to December 1st. Great. Thanks, Jake. Aloha.