Administration

Scope of SNEP

Technical Framework

PUBLIC PARTICIPATION

Summary

FACA

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The SNEP public participation strategy consisted of a multistage approach involving newsletters, an open letter to the public, meetings and workshops, and focused public reviews of draft assessments (a list of all individual public involvement meetings and more general public interactions is provided at the end of this section).

Newsletter. Four issues of a newsletter, SNEP Update , were used to provide general information on project activities and preliminary findings. Each issue included discussion of public involvement activities, including calls for public input and announcements of public meetings. Newsletters were mailed to key contacts and others on SNEPs mailing list, which totaled close to 3,000 names, and was made available at all public meetings, workshops, and other meetings attended by team members.

Open Letter. An open letter to the public was prepared requesting information and calling for public contributions to scenario development. The letter was printed in the March 1995 issue of SNEP Update . It was also widely distributed via mailing lists provided by key contacts and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. From this outreach effort, a total of forty-one submissions from the public were distributed to the Science Team.

Meetings and Workshops. A series of public meetings and workshops were conducted with collaborative groups (and communities of place), key contacts (largely communities of interests), and the general public.
Two public meetings were held within the geographical areas of each of the two collaborative groups. These meetings were co-hosted by the collaborative groups, which made arrangements and ensured that the broader public was invited. After the first meeting in the east-central Sierra, a special planning meeting was held with a subset of members of the CURES group to plan the second one. In the northern Sierra a member of the key contact group facilitated discussions and arrangements between the SNEP team and the Quincy Library Group. A single public meeting was held in the city of Jackson in the west-central Sierra during the summer of 1995 without the aid of a local collaborative group.
These local meetings were attended by a subgroup of the Science Team representing a diverse range of disciplines, including areas of particular interest to the collaborative groups. Each meeting had a different complement of scientists and was initiated with an introduction to SNEPs mission and general progress to date. Brief presentations were made by members of the Science Team on approaches and progress within their individual assessments. The last half of these two- or three-hour meetings was dedicated to informal questions and answers and open discussion among scientists and public attendees. The second meetings in both the eastern and the northern Sierra also included interactive demonstrations of some of SNEPs computer-based geographic information system (GIS) data. Notes were taken at each meeting to ensure that questions and suggestions from the public were captured, and these were later shared with the full team.
The first public meeting was held in June of 1994 with the release of the SNEP Progress Report. There was limited interaction between the Science Team and the public beyond a formal question-and-answer session. The first SNEP team meeting with the key contacts took place in November of 1994. At this meeting the team learned the importance of public access to scientists: breaks in many instances proved more valuable than the presentations themselves, as participants took the opportunity to discuss issues with scientists directly. Two additional large public meetings were held along with a separate workshop with the key contacts. The key contacts work group helped plan these meetings, which allocated considerable time for interaction between scientists and the public. The key contacts work group was instrumental in providing ideas on how to maximize interactions between SNEP scientists and the public. The public meeting held in February of 1995 focused on introducing the approaches used by scientists in the assessment and discussions of preliminary findings. The full-day meeting began with formal presentations by some of the scientists, including questions from the public. Nearly three hours of the meeting were dedicated to an open workshop format in which attendees were able to engage in discussions with scientists at tables organized by resources and disciplines. Included in this arrangement was an area dedicated to interactive demonstrations of some of SNEPs GIS data. Note takers were stationed at each table to capture the questions and suggestions offered by the public.
In June of 1995 a special workshop was held with the key contacts to solicit ideas regarding the development of policy scenarios. During this workshop, the key contacts were briefed on a list of possible scenarios based on ideas from the public, scientific models, and the teams resource assessments. Attendees were then divided into small groups composed of both scientists and key contacts. Led by SNEP facilitators, the groups discussed concerns and offered suggestions regarding scenario development. Notes were taken on poster sheets. Representatives from each group summarized their discussions to the full group. The dialogues captured were used by the Science Team to expand and refine the development of a suite of scenarios.
The final public meeting, in September 1995, was scheduled to provide sufficient time to incorporate public comment gained during the meeting into the final development of scenarios. This meeting offered an opportunity for the public to understand and evaluate the range of strategies developed to date and for the SNEP scientists to listen to the publics concerns, insights, and suggestions. Scheduling additional time to incorporate public comment allowed the SNEP team greater opportunity to fashion strategies that incorporated local expertise and reflected public concerns. The round-robin type of interaction in which the public conversed with scientists face-to-facea style first suggested by the key contacts work group for the February public meetingwas repeated in this meeting. Following a few formal presentations by SNEP scientists, participants were given the opportunity to discuss scenarios and findings directly with scientists at tables organized by strategy focus and general resource area. As with previous meetings, notes were recorded at each table to capture the questions and suggestions offered by the public, and these were circulated to the team shortly thereafter.