The Citizen Participation Ordinance Glendale Arizona
Gary Fulk, AICP	© & Author Info

Abstract

The City of Glendale, Arizona has adopted an ordinance that creates a new citizen participation process for the day-to-day entitlement applications a city planning department handles. The ordinance requires developers to engage in early citizen participation as a routine part of the public hearing process. This paper explains how the ordinance works and discusses how it has fundamentally changed the interactions between the public, developers, and professionals during the development approval process.

Introduction

Many communities are experiencing an increase in public interest in planning and land use decisions. In response, planners are striving to improve citizen involvement in these decisions.

There have been two big shortcomings in these new participation efforts. The first is an almost exclusive focus on the large plan or project. Nearly all new ideas in public participation have come out of comprehensive plans, community visioning efforts, major transportation plans, large public works projects and the like. These big plans and projects certainly are important to residents of a community, but what about the day-to-day land development decisions? Rezonings, subdivision plats, conditional use permits and variances can have as much - perhaps more - impact on the public as the big plans, yet the role of citizen participation in these decisions has changed little in decades.

Second, when looking to improve citizen involvement, planners have concentrated on new and better tools and techniques rather than new and better processes and procedures. Sending hearing notices to more people, making site posters bigger and buying larger newspaper ads may get the word out to more people, but does it improve the quality of citizen involvement? New tools applied in the same old way don't yield better results.

The City of Glendale, Arizona has adopted a Citizen Participation Ordinance that addresses these shortcomings by creating a new citizen participation process for the day-to-day entitlement applications a city planning department handles.

To begin to describe this new way of doing citizen participation, it's necessary to start by looking at the situation that created the need. What was the problem we were trying to solve?

The Problem

Glendale is one of the communities surrounding Phoenix and like Phoenix, has been experiencing a significant rate of growth for several years. Residents have watched the vacant land around them fill with houses, apartments and businesses. They've seen traffic increase and air quality decrease. Concern about the pace and quality of development has grown along with the community.

Residents were beginning to feel that they should have more say in the land use decisions that affected their lives. Many people were demanding to be involved in the decision process to an unprecedented degree. They started to complain that the standard hearing process was inadequate, insisting on detailed information about projects and wanting to be more involved in project planning and negotiation. Citizens became more vocal and angry, frustrated over a lack of meaningful involvement in the decision making process. There was a general lack of civility in public hearings, including personal attacks on applicants, planning commissioners and council members.

At the same time, developers were feeling besieged. Working in good faith with city staff, they assumed they had an acceptable project only to go to a public hearing to find residents up in arms over their proposals. Development applications were being routinely tabled so applicants could address residents' concerns.

In early 1995, the city council began expressing concern about the increasingly hostile public hearing environment. The situation wasn't just uncomfortable, the council feared it would divide the community. The planning staff was asked to do something about the problems.

The planners' first approach was to try and do a better job of what we were already doing. Rather than send public hearing notification letters to households within 300 feet of a project, we sent them to everyone within a quarter mile. Instead of a two-line newspaper ad, we wrote longer, more descriptive notices of public hearings. We set up a meeting hotline, began posting meeting information on the Internet, and published newsletters. This improved things, but not much.

We also took a fresh look at the public hearing process to see if something fundamental was wrong. We found plenty.

Problems with the Hearing Process

The statutorily required hearing process for cities and counties in Arizona is very similar to the rest of the United States:

• The developer/applicant files an application for a change in land use.
• The local government's staff reviews the application and prepares a report and/or recommendation.
• The local government sets a public hearing date before the appropriate review body.
• The local government notices the hearing 15 days prior by putting an advertisement in the newspaper, sending a letter to all property owners within 300 feet of the property in the application and posting a notice of some sort on the property.
• A public hearing is held by the review body, which makes a recommendation or decision on the application.

There are three major problems inherent in this process.

First, there's a huge timing problem. While a public hearing is the culmination of several months of work for the applicant, the resident heard about it for the first time two weeks ago. Citizens are asked to go to a public meeting to speak on a proposal they know little or nothing about. So, while the applicant is ready for a decision, the citizen is new to the process, trying to find out what's going on and how this might affect them.

Next is the structure of the hearing itself. Hearings are designed to allow the decision-makers to hear everyone and make a decision. Hearings are not designed for dialogue, discussion or negotiation. Questions and information gathering are discouraged. That's not usually too much of a problem for the applicant, they've had ample opportunity to work with the staff on the proposal. For the citizen who just heard about a proposal that may adversely impact their neighborhood, hearings are just an opportunity to gripe and express frustration.

Finally, the hearing is a decision point in the process. The citizen's first opportunity to get involved in the discussion is at the time the decision is to be made. Again, what option does a resident have when speaking on a proposal that is within minutes of being decided but to speak against it? When this occurs, it's a very frustrating situation for the applicant who, if they knew of the neighborhood concerns earlier, may very well have been able to resolve them. Instead, they're looking at a denial, a continuance, or at the very least, a nasty public hearing.

We concluded that we really didn't have citizen participation at all. At best, we had citizen notification. All we were doing was notifying citizens that they had an opportunity to complain. They weren't being given an opportunity to participate in a discussion and decision. Even if all parties wanted a productive discussion of the project and its impacts, they couldn't have one.

The Solution

It was clear the public hearing process was not only doing nothing to prevent battles between residents and developers, it was virtually requiring them. If you wanted to design a hearing process that would make all participants angry and ensure that none of them felt like they were treated fairly, you couldn't do much better than the one we had.

But what to do about it? We came up with five simple principles that needed to be the basis of any solution:

• Require applicants to invite a dialogue about their project early in the process. This would encourage the applicant and resident to talk with each other rather than at each other. Residents would get an opportunity to influence the project by talking directly with the applicant. The applicant would get a chance to explain his project and sell neighborhoods on it. Most important, it would be done early, before the public hearing. This would make the hearing what it was designed to be, a final statement of issues and positions before the decision making body.
• Require applicants to address issues and concerns. Applicants would not just listen to residents concerns, but would respond to them and explain what they were - or were not - going to do about them.
• Establish this as standard procedure for any hearing application. As a standard part of the development review process, this "true participation" would be routine and systematic. Residents, staff and elected officials, and commission and board members could count on it. It would be standard operating procedure, rather than something an applicant may or may not volunteer to do.
• Don't touch the hearing process itself. The public hearing was a legal requirement that had to stay in place with little or no change. The city would continue to set and advertise public hearings as before. All legal requirements would continue to be met. No change would be made in an applicant's right to a hearing. This was not to be an attempt to give neighborhoods inappropriate decision making power or to try and force consensus on issues.
• Put it in the zoning and subdivision ordinances. This would make it "the law of the land." By actually putting it in the City Ordinance rather than making it an administrative policy or procedure, it would be clear that this was the Council's policy for every public hearing.

The Citizen Participation Ordinance

In September of 1997, the City of Glendale's Citizen Participation Ordinance went into effect. The ordinance is quite simple, consisting of five parts:

1. A purpose statement that clearly outlines that the ordinance is there to facilitate communication and encourage a dialogue early in the review process. The ordinance is specific that it is not intended to produce complete consensus on all applications.
2. A description of the citizen participation process; requiring all applicants for any public hearing to accomplish three basic steps:

1. Prepare a Citizen Participation Plan: This includes a written description of the project, an assessment of who might be affected by the project, and a strategy for how those affected will be able to participate. City planners work with applicants to customize their participation plans to fit the specific needs of their projects. The type and scale of the request, the character of the surrounding area and the level of potential controversy determines the strategy. A comprehensive handbook with guidelines on how to develop the plan is available to applicants to help them with the process.
2. Implement the Plan: The applicant mails letters, holds meetings, calls property owners; whatever their plan requires. They listen to citizen comments and concerns, answer questions, and determine the best solution for issues presented to them.
3. Report What Happened: After the applicant has implemented their plan, they prepare a final report summarizing their effort, the issues and concerns raised, and what they have done about them (or not done as the case may be). The report must be submitted before the hearing is advertised and goes to the decision-makers, along with the City staff's report.

3. A list of the minimum information needed in a citizen participation plan and report.
4. A description of the minimum required notice area. The applicant must work with the planning staff to determine the notice area.
5. Timing provisions for both the plan and report. The applicant can start their plan before they apply, but not before meeting with a planner. The public hearing cannot be set until a report is received.

After these steps are completed, the applicant goes through the normal public hearing process, citizen participation report in tow.

Here's the actual text, taken from the City's zoning ordinance:

How the Ordinance is Administered

Major responsibility for the program has been assigned to a planning department staff member, who works with planners, applicants, and elected officials to make the process run as smoothly as possible. A major function of this staff member is to be the liaison with the city council office, arranging project briefings and answering questions from council constituents.

The applicant can start at any time during the application review process, even before the application is made. Planners work to make this process as "non-regulatory" as possible, taking a cooperative approach and working extensively with applicants.

The ordinance sets up a process and basic information the applicant must provide. It does not, however, specify participation techniques. There is no requirement for a neighborhood meeting, for example. Applicants and their assigned staff planner work out the techniques required based on the type of application, past experience with other applications of the same type, knowledge of neighborhood issues, and other factors. This allows the ordinance to be applied to all kinds of hearing applications, from major planned developments covering thousands of acres of vacant land to a setback variance for a room addition on a house.

Does It Work?

After a year and a half, we can make some initial assessments about the ordinance's impact:

• The process is more civil. We've seen significant changes in the interactions between developers and the public. People are talking to each other, not at each other. Having to present and defend their own projects to citizens has made developers more respectful of their neighbors, and some are actually enjoying the process, seeing this as an opportunity to influence future customers. Even in those projects where there is still significant disagreement at the public hearing, the discussions tend to be more calm and focused on problems rather than personalities. Residents feel as if they're part of a dialogue and developers, even those who don't prevail have told us they were treated fairly.
• Citizens go to public hearings better prepared. Having more information about the project early in the process allows citizens who speak at public hearings to better make their case. People also seem less nervous about speaking in public when they're prepared.
• Decision-makers are better informed. The members of the planning commission and the city council have been very pleased with the Citizen Participation Reports they get with each application. They get valuable information on discussions that have occurred prior to the public hearing and what the developer has done to accommodate neighborhoods.
• Citizen participation procedures are standardized. Planners still have to judge what techniques are appropriate for a particular application and what appropriate notice areas are, but they don't have to try and talk an applicant into working with a neighborhood.
• Public hearings have been calmer. In the past eighteen months there has been only one of the knockdown drag-out hearings that were becoming quite frequent in the years before the ordinance.

Problems with the Ordinance

There have been some problems, of course. In addition to the usual kinks and stumbles any new program has, we've encountered a few fundamental issues that keep coming up. Many applicants are leery of the process the first time they encounter it. For many, public participation is something they've never been directly responsible for and they assume the plan and implementation process will be beyond them. Some are afraid they're being set up, or that a neighborhood vote will be taken. Once an applicant has gone through the process though, the most common reaction is something like 'Is that all there is to it'? A lot of this can be attributed to the newness and uniqueness of the ordinance. Applicants who have done more than one participation process have found it easier each time.

Most applicants are concerned that the citizen participation process will add time to the usual hearing process. Since the participation process is done concurrently with other application review, and can even begin before filing an application, there is no reason it has to add to the total processing time. What appears to be happening is that more time is taken to get to a hearing, but the hearings go more smoothly, with fewer tablings, continuances and the like.

Getting some developers to take this seriously has been a challenge. The best predictor of success in the process seems to be the attitude of the applicant. Applicants that accept the process and are sincere about following the staff suggestions and review comments do well. Those that fight the idea of participation have an uphill battle.

Conclusion

Many communities are finding they need to improve their public participation and hearing processes. As more citizens and elected officials look for alternatives to the routine hearing process, Glendale's approach can be useful. It's simple, the ideas in the ordinance are easily transferable, and it works.