 And think tech on Spectromosi 16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to tech and to Hawaii. I'm Elise Anderson. And I'm Nicole Horry. In our show this time, we'll attend a program entitled Public Participation in a Polarized Era, the Good, the Bad, and the Future. It was presented by the Accord 3.0 Network at the East West Center and the UH School of Law. The first part of the program on December 1st was entitled Taking Stock and Devising Solutions. The second part, on December 2nd, was entitled Public Consultation, Strategies, and Skills. In the late 1970s and in the face of strong new environmental laws, federal and state agencies adopted new community consultation strategies. Foremost among these were National Environmental Protection Act requirements, Sunshine Laws, and the use of public meetings whenever new policies, projects, and plans were proposed. Three decades later, too many public meetings have become perfunctory tick-the-box compliance exercises or fresh combat zones for old ideological wars. As public discourse has become increasingly polarized and hostile, it has gotten harder to arrive at decisions that can be supported by a plurality of citizens. The Public Participation in a Polarized Era program was intended to take stock of how public participation is doing, gather ideas for changes to the way it works, offer techniques and approaches to improve public participation and spark better conversations now and in the future. In advance of the program itself, ThinkTech had two talk shows to introduce the organizers and the discussion contemplated. 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. Will I get depressed coming down to this, Colin Moore, Professor Colin Moore? If you're coming down to this conference, you're probably already depressed about the state of public participation. You know, that's a discouraging thing because, you know, 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. And 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, you know, to push their own ideological agenda. On the first day of the program, after a welcome by Peter Adler of Accord 3.0 Network, Colin Moore of the UH Public Policy Center spoke about the current dynamics of public participation. I think most of us would agree that we live in a very polarized time. There's lots of resentment, lots of outrage, lots of anger. Lots of people in tribalized conditions, they're stuck in their own groups. They only listen to people who are already agreeable to them, and they get reinforced through the media. Public participation, what is it good for? The answer I think is best expressed by, at least the best answer I've ever heard, is from the great American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, who wrote that the man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and wear it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied. And I think that really does capture what we think is valuable about public participation, but at the same time, do we also hint that citizen participation should be seen as a compliment, not as an alternative? The first panel entitled The Landscape of Existing Consultation Practices was moderated by Keith Mattson of the Accord 3.0 Network. It featured Denise Antolini of the UH Law School, Marjorie Ziegler of the Conservation Council of Hawaii, Mitch Dolié, businessman, and Ed Case, former congressman. We wanted to make sure we had some diversity in having an environmental perspective, a government perspective, and a business perspective. But what we're going to do to start this off is have Denise Antolini from the Law School kind of walk us through what's on the books, what's required of these public participation processes, whether they're environmental assessments or EISs or some of the other ones that Peter had mentioned earlier. I think a lot of us in the room see public participation for many sides, and if there's one recommendation I would make, which is it would be that you should see it from multiple perspectives, work in government, work in public interest, and work in the community and academia, and you just, nothing like putting yourself in somebody else's shoes. Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of us are familiar with NEPA. How many of you have commented on an EIS or an EA? I hope that's most of you in the room, or prepared them. So it's very, very familiar territory to everybody in the room, so this is a very quick overview. There's the early consultation process, environmental assessments, and at the federal level there's actually a lot of variation by agency, so if there's one takeaway here, it's when you're involved in NEPA, you need to get to know the specific regulations of the agency you're dealing with. There's a lot of variation. For environmental impact statements, it's a little more standardized, and I think a lot of us are participated in the 45-day comment period or public meetings, but again there's a lot of variation, a lot of delegation to the agencies to run their own processes. Some of, then there's a lot of litigation, I'm not going to go into too much about the lawsuit side of public participation, but it's a really important consideration because that's a hammer at the end of the process for some of these streams of public participation. And I'm going to give you some little clues along the way. For more information, there are these great citizen guides for a lot of these major areas of public participation, and there's a wonderful one from the Office of Environmental Quality. CEQ still exists from what I hear in D.C., and they have a great citizen's guide to guide you through the process, and a lot of agencies have their own. There's also a great database of EISs that are open for public comment on EPA's website, and they still have a website from what I hear, so there are these really nice tools out there that I think are underutilized for everyone who participates in the process. And I love this quote, I know it's very long, but I thought Peter would like this. And it talks about basically civility and commenting. And I think this is important because we all have seen such a variety of different kinds of comments, but I love this in the middle, it says as a general rule, the tone of the comment should be polite and respectful. Those reviewing comments are public servants tasked with a job, and they deserve the same respect and professional treatment that you and other citizens expect in return. And I love this, that the citizen's guide is giving us lessons on civility, and we need to keep those in mind. The second panel, entitled Learning from Case Studies, was moderated by Scott McCreary of the Accord 3.0 Network and featured Kim Lowry on Kakaako, Melissa White on Complete Streets, Brendan Kaleiina Lee on AHA 2016, Amy Hennessey on Kauai's Proposed New Dairy, and Greg Chun on Envision Manakea. What you will hear is a series of case studies that really span the gamut from very site specific to regional to issues of truly statewide importance. Let me first introduce Kim Lowry. I want to talk for a few minutes this morning about a meeting that involved about 45 or 50 self-selected members, met over about 13 months, and they were charged with doing a group writing project. And these were people who didn't get along very well together. So picture yourself with about 50 people doing a group writing project over a period of months, and they don't get along. And that describes the situation we have. This is, I'm talking about Kakaako Makai, which is familiar to some of you. It happened a number of years ago. There was a hotel that was proposed for the Kakaako Makai area. It was strongly protested by a group called Save Our Kakaako Coalition. They lobbied the legislature to require the Hawaii Community Development Authority to have a participation process. And the legislature mandated that the HCDA organize a participation process. This is the area we're talking about. Save Our Kakaako is a very strong, very passionate, very well organized group. My work that I've been doing on Complete Streets over this year, in order to, this is a unique case where we're working with a new program that the City and County of Honolulu has established. It's called the Complete Streets Program. And the idea behind Complete Streets is definitely not new either in Hawaii or nationally. It's the idea of making streets safer, more accessible, and more accommodating to all kinds of users and accounting for all modes in the design and construction of our streets. So that's pedestrians, bicycles, vehicle users, transit riders. And it's about kind of increasing that equity, promoting public health. And so this year I have been charged with doing public participation outreach for two Complete Streets projects. And these are kind of the first two major initiatives of this newly established program, which has been around about a year. One of the most interesting things that you said in your presentation is you went to where people were. And you went to where they were physically and online. That's interesting perhaps juxtaposition with what Kim said. People had to sign in and then they participated. So these are what we might say are very porous processes. So it will be interesting to hear as we go through the other case studies how participation was decided, how it was established, who was qualified, and how that process worked out. It's important to note that this was not the first constitutional convention for a native Hawaiian government. This is actually the third. They've all happened within the last, I would say, 25 years. The differences this constitutional convention or AHA came out with a deliverable. AHA drafted, wrote, and adopted an actual constitution. Actually two documents, a declaration and a constitution. How was participation as one of the cross-cutting themes, how was participation decided? Well, originally there were supposed to be a Yopuni election that 30 delegates were going to be selected and they were going to have months to do this work. We all know about the lawsuit that came about that. So what they decided to do was everyone who put their name in to be considered for a delegate for an election were all invited to come. I think that you were actually very adaptive in the use of Robert's rules in using that to motivate an impression of process fairness. You inspired ways of creating trust by using the word cloud technology and method and approach for actually showing common interests in a way what you did with the word cloud step was you did a kind of stakeholder assessment. If you're not familiar with the Plano Initiative, we are an impact investment company and what that means is that we take private equity money from our founder to try to make a difference for our community. Typically folks when they think about dairy it's a feedlot model where you have cows that are in a barn. They live there, they eat there, they go into another barn, they're milked and then they are taken back to that barn and they hang out there. They might be put out on pasture when they're not milking for a few months and then they go back into the milk cycle and they're back in production in that barn. So we wanted to try to do a little bit of a different model where cows are out on pasture all day long. The only time they're in the barn is when they're being milked and then they go back out. The model is more sustainable for the economy but it's also more sustainable for the environment. The reason it's more sustainable for the economy when dairies went away part of it was the cost of input so whether it was the cost to import feed or the cost to import fertilizer relies on fuel and so it's very expensive. So we want to try to get away from that by using natural feed and fertilizer grasses the feed, fertilizer from the cows and design the farm in a way that was going to use that in the best way possible. You know Peter in his opening charge basically challenged us to come up with ways to look at public processes critically and suggest some structural and organizational improvements and Peter asked me to come in and talk about a project that several of my colleagues, some of who are sitting in the back of the room here and I have been working on for two and a half years now, Envision Mauna Kea. This is my disclaimer slide and let me tell you all the disclaimers. Envision Mauna Kea, the story of Envision Mauna Kea starts on April 26, 2015. When the Board of Regents, this is a Sunday, Board of Regents came to Hilo and they held a public meeting to get public input on the conservation district use permit or application that was in process at that time that would allow the construction of the TMT 30 meter telescope. Then McKenna Kaufman of the UH Department of Urban and Regional Planning spoke about who gets heard in developing public policy. Who gets heard? So, that's how I'll actually totally answer that because it always depends, right? But let me share a few recent things. So I wanted to start with the new office of Honolulu City and County Honolulu Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency. So this office, it was born out of an effort, started within an environmental law program at Richardson School. There was a faculty member there who was really passionate on this issue and she saw an opening within the city charter, right? This opportunity to go down and make a long lasting difference through the charter mechanism. And so she organized a bunch of us on campus to think about what would we actually want to do with this opportunity? This was followed by a rapid fire Q&A panel on innovation, solutions and fixes, moderated by Peter Adler. In the breaks and at lunch, ThinkTech had interviews with some of the speakers and attendees who were there. There's been some studies about what you do if someone believes something that's demonstrably false. And in a lot of cases, you try to correct them and if I'm a liberal and you're a conservative and I try to say, well, no global warming is really happening, you'll dismiss me. In fact, you'll cling to that previous belief even harder. But one thing that seems to work is someone you identify as an ideological ally, if they correct you, you take that seriously. Someone you think of as on your team. And so what we need are conservatives and liberals and people who are parts of these various ideological communities to speak up in some ways part of their community, start saying things that are false or behaving in an unacceptable way. I mean, that's what we need the courage for you to say to your friend, knock it off. What led to the polarization in the first place? What are the root causes of that? What makes people so angry and polarized? 1893. Is 1893 also the reason for TMT? I don't know that that's the cause. I would say it's a symptom. For myself as a chair, it actually made my job easier. When someone was trying to be vocally disagreeable with an opinion being offered by someone else, it was easy for me to rule them out of order. And if they got upset about that, I would point out to them, I am just you put me in place to enforce the rules that you drafted. I thought we had some very good sessions this morning. We talked about some specific cases and I think drew some lessons from those cases, heard about some specific initiatives that sound good to me. There was some tension beginning to build and I thought, no, this is going to get really interesting. But I think it was appropriately put aside, but we have been amazingly free of any distracting conversations. We're heading for a real crisis now in terms of how we relate to institutions and our leaders. And people have to trust people. They have to trust the system and it's the kind of thing we're hearing today that teaches us a little bit how to deal with that. There is some polarization, people going, well, I'm not going to attend because it's predetermined. And, you know, and then when something happens, they're the most vocal. It's been a great conference to hear about some of these issues that I hear about or read about in the news and seeing people that are in the trenches working on it is interesting to get their perspective. It takes a particular kind of person to really speak to people and open them to these kinds of conversations. I mean, someone who genuinely cares about those people's experiences, you know, I mean, there's something about genuine curiosity. There's something about that that I think people respond to. I think he did an excellent job as far as coming up with an organization to actually address an issue. For 20 years, I was in land development. And it's become really clear to me that if I want to propose a project, it is far better for me to start two, maybe even three years before I even submit an application for a permit or entitlement or whatever to start working with the community. Because in the long run, that'll be a more effective way to do it. A guy saw a nature article that I was quoted in and called me up from Virginia. And he had been working at that point about 20 years to find a nuclear waste site somewhere in the US. And we both compared notes about how long it takes for these sort of billion-dollar class projects. And I was stunned that, you know, there isn't a lot of difference on the mainland for that kind of project and here on Hawaii for something like as benign as a telescope, unfortunately. 10% of the population participates and 100% of the community engagement. You know mathematically the bulk of the perspectives out there are not being reflected in public policy quid pro quo. So somehow we've got to get people to engage. And if the process isn't working and not pulling them in, we've got to come up with a better process. You know, I think it's so interesting to me that so many people are interested in this issue of collaboration, of how in democratic societies we discuss, we deliberate, we work together, we problem solve and try to find solutions where you create these lines of connection from people in government to people in society in a way that people feel involved. They feel empowered. I think if there is meaningful attempt to bring in the community, I think that saves you a lot of grief. Projects have died because things have taken too long. And that relates to financing and time and cash. And the best thing I can say is that schedule idea, and maybe we need to build the schedule idea into the process somehow. I also would say to project proponents, do your grassroots work. I mean, that will move things along. But then ultimately, you need the honest decision maker who's making, and you need a capable decision maker that will make those decisions. All about leadership and taking initiative and taking leadership, and we're going to talk about that. I see a relationship between our local politics and our national politics and the lack of leadership and the need to redefine leadership and facilitate leadership all through the generations. And I don't really yearning for that. The second day included panels on planning and designing specific public consultation processes moderated by Keith Mattson, untransparency and privacy moderated by Jana Wolf, on consultation processes with native Hawaiian communities moderated by Peter Adler, and a report on potential future action items by Jana Wolf and Ann Smoke. The program clearly succeeded. Its speakers were excellent, incisive, and willing to tackle the huge challenges that have arisen in our community process. And at the end, the program provided a number of promising takeaways for us to consider. If you want to know more about the program and future programs of this nature, or if you want to see the slides and takeaway points from the program, see Accord3.com. And now let's check out our ThinkTech calendar of events going forward. ThinkTech broadcasts its talk shows live on the internet from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays. Then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the weekends. And some people listen to them all night long and on the weekends. If you missed a show, or if you want to replay or share any of our shows, they're all archived on demand on ThinkTechHawaii.com and YouTube. For our audio stream, go to ThinkTechHawaii.com slash audio. And we post all our shows as podcasts on iTunes. Visit ThinkTechHawaii.com for our weekly calendar and live stream and YouTube links. Or better yet, sign up on our email list and get our daily email advisories. ThinkTech has a high-tech green screen studio at Pioneer Plaza. If you want to see it or be part of our live audience or if you want to participate in our programs, contact shows at ThinkTechHawaii.com. If you want to pose a question or make a comment, call 808-374-2014 and help us raise public awareness on ThinkTech. Go ahead. Give us a thumbs up on YouTube or send us a tweet at ThinkTechHI. We'd like to know how you feel about the issues and events that affect our lives in these islands. We want to stay in touch with you. And we'd like you to stay in touch with us. Let's think together. We'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of ThinkTech. But first, we want to thank our underwriters. The Atherton Family Foundation, Castle and Cook Hawaii, the Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education, Collateral Analytics, The Cook Foundation, the Hawaii Council of Associations of Apartment Owners, Hawaii Energy, the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, Hawaiian Electric Companies, the High-Tech Development Corporation, Galen Ho of BAE Systems, Integrated Security Technologies, Kamehameha Schools, Dwayne Kurisu, Kalamon Lee, and the Friends of ThinkTech, MW Group Limited, the Shidler Family Foundation, the Sydney Stern Memorial Trust, the Volo Foundation, Yuriko J. Sugimura. OK, Nicole. That wraps up this week's edition of ThinkTech. Remember, you can watch ThinkTech on Spectrum OC16 several times every week. Can't get enough of it just like Nicole does. For additional times, check out oc16.tv. For lots more ThinkTech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on ThinkTech, visit thinktechhawaii.com. Be a guest, or a host, a producer, or an intern, and help us reach and have an impact on Hawaii. Thanks for being part of our ThinkTech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech, energy, diversification, and global awareness in Hawaii, and of course the ongoing search for innovation wherever we can find it. You can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important weekly episode. I'm Elise Anderson. And I'm Nicole Horry. Aloha, everyone.