Public Input is not democracy

The Willamette Shore Trolley’s ex Portland Traction car 813 is seen here in Riverwood (near Dunthorpe) in 2003. This old railroad line may become an extension of the Portland Streetcar.

Last week, there was yet more grumbling about the Lake Oswego-Potland transit project, this time from Jack Bogdanski. The complaints were, in effect, that the use of a streetcar rather than other transit and transportation modes has already been determined in some back room somewhere, and that as a result the public involvement process is no more than window dressing. The evidence to back this argument? Jack suggests, in effect, that people will be unable to use the public involvement process to swing the project in a direction other than a streetcar, and therefore the process is illegitimate.

I raise this topic here not because I support the Lake Oswego streetcar. In fact, I have some serious doubts about this project’s viability, and have in the past offered criticism of the Portland Streetcar project in general. This notion, however, that a public involvement process is illegitimate because it is not a direct democracy is something that I have witnessed in many projects, and it is a matter that needs addressing, for the benefit of both citizens and communications professionals.

First, the public involvement process is not a political process. Decisions are not made by the populace in a public involvement process. Political decisions are made, rather, at the ballot, when the people vote either directly through initiatives or indirectly through the election of representatives. No other process in our system (save for juries) is a democratic political process.

So what, then, is the point of even having public involvement? The purpose of public involvement is to follow and inform a political decision and to include voices from the public during portions of the project that, if the public were not involved, would be driven purely by professionals with narrow training. It is to help balance the potential groupthink that would occur if everything was being run by engineers and planners and nobody else. It is also to keep the public that will be directly affected by a project informed and included, thus avoiding potential conflicts. It’s not a power space, it’s a dialogue space, where professionals consult with the public for advice, not consent.

Just as importantly, it should be noted that it would be nigh to impossible for the process to work any other way. Public involvement processes are qualitative, not quantitative. Regardless of the effort placed to seek input and participants, there are never enough people involved to be representative of an entire populace. Since the goal is to seek advice and therefore as diverse a set of opinions as possible, this is not a problem, but if the public involvement process were a public consent process, not only would variety be required but also numerical representation. The only way to equitably convert a public involvement process into a public consent process would be to place every project on the ballot for public vote, a condition so cumbersome that it caused the framers to create a republic rather than a direct democracy.

None of this, of course, means that once a political decision is made that there are no options left to the public to shape or stop implementation. The people can still apply political pressure through protest, seek to place initiatives on the ballot, attempt to recall politicians involved in the project, or campaign against those politicians during the next election cycle.

What is important to note, however, is that public involvement processes are not intended as a venue for democratic power, but rather for democratic advice. Government and agency staff seeking public involvement have the obligation to listen to the people, note concerns, and even try to address them, but they are not bound to comply with them. Public involvement does not exist to allow the people to be architects without a license, or transportation engineers without a degree.

Does this mean that if a project that seems unjust to a citizen, that that citizen ought not participate in a public involvement process? Not at all. It is always important to place input into the process, even if it isn’t input that project leaders want to hear. In addition, it is important to place objections on the record prior to starting processes such as those I outlined above, as a way of building a history and an argument.

To argue that a public involvement process is a joke because it is not an example of direct democracy is, however, a bit like arguing that pigs are useless because they don’t have wings.