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14 Aircraft Noise: A Toolkit for Managing Community Expectations
· How many stakeholders/citizens participated in the effort?
· Were all significant stakeholder groups represented?
· Did the effort result in a product or agreement that furthered progress towards achieving pos-
itive outcomes?
"Stakeholder Involvement & Public Participation by the U.S. EPA" (15)
How Much is Enough?--One Size Does Not Fit All
Airports, unlike other types of transportation agencies, are not required by regulation to do
extensive and regular community engagement other than during environmental project planning.
Consequently some airports have virtually no experience in community engagement. They may
assume that there are technical solutions to all issues and that the public has no role in determin-
ing technical solutions. According to O'Connor et al. (13), the highway industry also is subject to
complex technical requirements, but has found that public engagement leads to more public sup-
port and smoother implementation.
The Highway Experience with Public Engagement
· Public ownership of policies/sustainable and supportable decisions;
· Decisions that reflect community values;
· Efficient implementation of transportation decisions; and
· Enhanced agency credibility.
It is the responsibility of airport leadership to make the decision about how extensive a level
of public engagement to require in airport activities, particularly in noise management offices.
Airport managers can learn from the experience other industries faced with similar decisions.
It is tempting to assume that the correct answer can be found and described in this Guidebook
that will allow all problems with communications to be resolved. In fact, many of the experienced
"experts" interviewed for this research study emphasized that "one size does not fit all" and that
"cookbooks don't work".
Each airport must work to design and refine a process that may go on to engage the public for
decades. As was written in an article entitled "Effective Public Involvement in Transportation A
Primer for Practitioners" (16):
· An effective public involvement effort will take time, money, and patience; and
· Because you got it right once, don't think you've got it down.
What Does the Public Really Want?
Based on dozens of interviews for this project, what the public wants from airports about noise
conditions can be summarized in three basic concepts:
· Promote communication: this includes working in an interactive way with one or more orga-
nized groups, involving them as partners in pursuit of mutual goals.
· Present the facts clearly and honestly: this includes designing websites that can actually be used
by the community to both learn and to do their own analysis.
· Reduce the noise impacts: this may refer to an overall reduction of noise levels or the abate-
ment of particularly offensive single events.
