PUBLIC INVOLVEMENT

Public involvement is the cornerstone of decision-making in America. Ensuring that the public voice is heard and understood is the key to successful decisions. Since 1979, Shipley has been committed to the principle of public involvement—democracy at work—with all of its noisy inefficiency and uncivil behavior. Our excellent professional staff has been facilitating public meetings and guiding agencies in public involvement processes for over 25 years.

A well-designed public involvement effort ensures that stakeholders are involved in a meaningful way, adding value to the decision-making process. Shipley can create and implement an innovative and comprehensive public involvement plan for your next project. Our public involvement strategies bring real issues into focus and create the forum for progress and meaningful public participation.

FACILITATION

Shipley provides unexcelled facilitation and mediation services that complement our public involvement and environmental project packages. All of our core team members have been involved in managing contentious public processes—such as conducting town hall meetings and advising State and National political leaders on issues of environmental concern. In fact, Shipley has worked with every large land management agency and has facilitated hundreds of public involvement efforts of all scopes and scales in many environmentally sensitive and politically charged areas, such as the periphery of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the foothills of the Brooks Range, and the Medicine Bow River Drainage.

America’s growing environmental awareness has made public involvement more time- and effort-intensive than ever before. It has also raised the bar for agencies, who must properly integrate their decisions and solutions with input from diverse groups and interests. Shipley’s facilitators will enhance your agency’s ability to refine its dialogue with the public and create context-sensitive and sensible solutions.

CONTENT ANALYSIS

Some complex public involvement efforts can elicit 1,000 to 1,000,000 public responses. Shipley maintains a full-time staff of educated professionals with significant environmental and regulatory knowledge who can process, analyze, categorize, and summarize the results of your public involvement effort. We maintain a server with well over a Terabyte of hard drive space and fail-safe backup systems to securely receive and store nearly unlimited responses. Shipley will perfect the public comment process for any planning, rulemaking, policymaking, or NEPA effort. The product is a simple summary promoting every relevant concern for your consideration, and eliminating all duplication of effort.

“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” Winston Churchill