REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT SUITABILITY MODEL

Public Participation

To achieve these goals public involvement was included in the process at as many levels as possible. A series of public meetings and workshops were designed to assist in the development of the model procedures and methodologies and serve as input into the policy formulation process. Public participation began with a group of workshops in which professional planners and lay people interested in planning were asked to discuss the factors to be included in the model. Attendants of these workshops expressed their judgments about the importance of factors through a structured scoring process in which each member of the group was asked to put a numeric rank on each factor. Differences among the members were resolved by consensus. These workshops gave project staff useful insight into how people perceive development pressures. More importantly, the workshops served to educate participants about the model and land use planning in general.

A full day forum, co-sponsored by the Idrisi Project and CMRPC, was held in which a preliminary version of the model was shown to the 70 or so attendees. In this situation the model was used not so much for the precise results it gave, but to educate forum attendees about the potential powers of GIS.

The real heart of the public participation component of the model came with the series of workshops held to discuss the model's results. A total of four forums were held in the agency's communities during April and May 1995. In each the model and its results were presented. More importantly, the second half of each meeting was reserved for discussion about the results, the methodology and applicability to individual communities. Project staff asked attendees about what alternative development scenarios might be modeled. In the end three ideas were taken from these forums and turned into alternative scenarios.

A final meeting was held on June 21, 1995 to present these alternatives and discuss their policy implications. In all project staff estimates that well over 100 different people were exposed to the model at one point or another.

Since 1995, staff have used the model in several regional planning studies. Various factors have been modified to reflect changes in infrastructure, and to strengthen the model's representation of reality. CMRPC relied heavily upon the model in preparing our Regional Growth Management Plan, which contains the agencies policies to direct growth in the 21st century.