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Erik: What approaches do you find most useful in building consensus to accomplish goals?
Matt: Well, I don't know if consensus is always achievable, so I sort of moved into this theory
of citizen participation, the idea being that you don't bring everybody to the middle, to
one point, where everyone can agree on absolutely every part of the project or the plan, the
public works initiative... less about consensus and more about citizen participation, more
about educating the community, making sure that all aspects of the community, most importantly
probably the people on either side of the far side of the issue, making sure they both
really understand the issue and what you do is you close that gap a little bit, maybe
the guys that were really, really for the initiative are still for it, but they're not
going to fly around the country and go to Best Practice conferences about it anymore,
so they lose a little bit of their steam but then the people that are adamantly opposed
to it and couldn't understand why you can't fathom their opposition, they understand a
little bit more, we hear their opposition and may make some tweaks based on their thoughts
and concerns and they still don't like it but it's not so bad. And that seems to be
the rule of thumb for citizen participation, which you usually see on many more long--
larger, long-term public works projects, road construction, dams, that sort of thing.