HNTB | TransportationPoint 26

The Resource for Transportation Professionals | Spring 2021

THIS ISSUE:

Virtual Public Involvement Adopting a virtual platform Darin Welch, Geospatial and Virtual Engagement Manager HNTB Corporation

Rapidly converting to an online public involvement process Scott Rollins, Senior Project Manager

Erica Blonde, AICP, Public Involvement Lead and Environmental Planner

Maine Department of Transportation

Nine tips for successful live, online public meetings Amanda Wilson, AICP, Program Manager

How Iowa’s two-person staff transformed the public involvement process Valerie Brewer, Public Involvement Manager

North Central Texas Council of Governments

Location and Environment Bureau, Iowa Department of Transportation

Rebekah Hernandez, Communications Manager North Central Texas Council of Governments

Jon Rees, Public Involvement Manager Location and Environment Bureau, Iowa Department of Transportation

HNTB Corporation

THIS ISSUE:

Virtual Public Involvement 3 Adopting a virtual platform

@HNTBCorp facebook.com/HNTBCorp linkedin.com/company/hntb instagram.com/HNTBcorp

Determining the right tool for engaging the public in transportation projects

Darin Welch Geospatial and Virtual Engagement Manager HNTB Corporation

Adopting a virtual platform

Determining the right tool for engaging the public in transportation projects Six years ago, in partnership with Iowa DOT, HNTB began active development of the Public Involvement Management Application (PIMA) to help transportation agencies manage the entire stakeholder outreach process and enhance project decision-making. Our efforts were motivated by three public involvement trends:

Erica Blonde, AICP Public Involvement Lead and Environmental Planner HNTB Corporation

1. Traditional public engagement methods that use paper comment forms and rely on interested 1. stakeholders to participate at in-person public meetings were becoming less effective.

5 Nine tips for successful live, online public meetings North Texas MPO integrates two virtual platforms for inclusive presentations that generate four times more engagement

2. live in a digital world driven by consumer-based mobile experiences, “likes” and the public 2. We sharing of opinion. People expect a convenient, inclusive experience.

Amanda Wilson, AICP Program Manager North Central Texas Council of Governments

3.

3. Transportation agencies were looking for solutions to establish efficiencies with internal processes and consistent tools that could be leveraged across all projects.

Rebekah Hernandez Communications Manager North Central Texas Council of Governments

Virtual tools, such as PIMA, address those needs and are becoming a permanent and increasingly popular platform for public engagement. Now adopted by multiple departments of transportation, PIMA is a proven tool that helps public involvement professionals meet critical National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requirements and keep critical transportation projects on schedule.

9 Rapidly converting to an online public involvement process

PIMA transforms the management of stakeholder engagement using configurable capabilities to setup and manage project comment forms, responses, correspondence and meetings/events. It provides a consistent, accessible and mobile-friendly means of allowing the public to continually engage. As information rolls in from the public, project teams can easily monitor, analyze and evaluate how to plan and execute engagement strategies for improved conversation and support with. Key benefits include:

MaineDOT outlines how it successfully instituted an online public involvement process that is generating greater engagement, cost savings and message control

Scott Rollins Senior Project Manager Maine Department of Transportation

Darin Welch Geospatial and Virtual Engagement Manager > HNTB Corporation

Greater public participation. Using PIMA, users can view, comment and digest the data at their own pace, on their own time. Compared to a traditionally scheduled in-person meeting, a DOT is likely to see many hundreds of participants view on-demand, prerecorded online video presentations or log on to live, online presentations.

11 How Iowa’s two-person staff transformed the public involvement process DOT’s suite of virtual tools have increased productivity, transparency and citizen involvement

Increased transparency that encourages conversation. Getting messaging and information earlier into constituents’ hands enhances a transportation agency’s reputation as open, accessible, proactive and accountable.

Valerie Brewer Public Involvement Manager Location and Environment Bureau Iowa Department of Transportation

Greater inclusivity. Virtual public meetings are accessible to nearly everyone – no matter where they live, their access to transportation, their income level, ethnicity or ability to speak English.

Jon Rees Public Involvement Manager Location and Environment Bureau Iowa Department of Transportation

Erica Blonde, AICP Public Involvement Lead and Environmental Planner > HNTB Corporation

PIMA uses GIS processes to aide in the ability to measure inclusion and equity. By capturing location with stakeholder feedback, you can assess which portions of your community — including minorities — are engaged and have a voice. Agencies can also configure language translation to distribute project information in Spanish, for example. Communicating with constituents in their language creates a more inclusive process and their input valued.

Transportation Point is published by HNTB Corporation. HNTB is an infrastructure solutions firm providing award-winning planning, design, program management and construction management services. Please direct all questions or comments about Transportation Point to corporatecommunications@hntb.com.

Earlier agency decision-making. Leveraging PIMA makes it easier for design and project management staff to distribute information earlier in the project’s lifecycle. Meaningful feedback from virtual events empowers project managers and staff to make more informed decisions even in HNTB | Transportation Point | Spring 2021 3

the early conceptual phase. It allows them to gain a sense of the level of support a project may have before the agency invests a significant amount of money in its design.

Increase productivity. PIMA provides agencies with a fast, simple way to gather and monitor feedback from project stakeholders on one or all of their projects. With a few clicks, PIMA managers can: ■ Sort participants feedback by category, tone, source, stakeholder type, date

North Texas MPO integrates two virtual platforms for inclusive presentation that generates four times more engagement

■ Customize comments, response messaging and stakeholder lists ■ More efficiently create, distribute and track individual or mass emails and text messaging campaigns ■ Create events, send invitations and easily track attendance ■ Manage comments and questions through templated and drafted responses ■ Stream recorded and live meetings, or share through Esri Story Maps ■ Measure the effectiveness of outreach and visualize the results with maps and charts ■ Poll your stakeholders with survey participation to assess preference on key issues and objectives, and include map-based interaction like live/work/play ■ Customize URLs for virtual events that include meeting registration and question/ comment sections

The future of PIMA

By the end of 2021, PIMA will have new capabilities that make it even easier for statewide audiences to discover projects, get and stay engaged and see what others are saying. In the meantime, using PIMA as a platform for the public involvement process can bring greater transparency to public involvement initiatives when face-to-face meetings aren’t possible or practical. The virtual platform gives DOTs the ability to make more efficient, informed decisions and move their projects forward while promoting inclusivity and convenience.

MOBILE-FRIENDLY ENGAGEMENT

MEASURE EQUITY & INCLUSION CAPTURE FEEDBACK BY LOCATION

PIMA Comment Form

IMPROVE DECISION-MAKING

PIMA Analytics Dashboard

ACCESSIBILITY FEATURES

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Darin Welch is geospatial and virtual engagement manager in HNTB’s Technology Solutions Center.

He leads a talented support staff team for many of HNTB’s most significant GIS consulting and asset management projects. He brings substantial knowledge and thought leadership through his strong technical background in geospatial systems integration, technology project management, enterprise GIS implementation and application solutions development. Contact him at dwelch@hntb.com or (816) 809-8990.

Erica Blonde, AICP, is a public involvement lead and environmental planner for HNTB. She has diverse public involvement experience throughout the northeast and California. Her focus is on using technology to reach historically underserved communities and evaluating outreach strategies using geospatial data. Contact her at eblonde@hntb.com or (617) 532-2241.

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Nine tips for successful live, online public meetings

HNTB | Transportation Point | Spring 2021

The North Central Texas Council of Governments is a metropolitan planning organization serving 16 counties with a combined population of 7.5 million. We assist local governments in planning for common needs. In May 2020, we began conducting a high-speed transportation study, the first to be administered out of our office.

The 36-month DFW High-Speed Transportation Connections Study reviews high-speed options in the Dallas to Fort Worth corridor. We are responsible for the study’s general project management activities as well as the public and agency engagement plan. In cooperation with the Federal Railroad Administration and the Federal Transit Administration, we are developing and evaluating reasonable alternatives and documenting these efforts following the NEPA process.

Because of the pandemic, we had to change our public involvement process dramatically, transforming our traditional in-person events into live, online, interactive events. Following are some of the steps we took to ensure our first virtual event was a success.

1. Select the appropriate technology Our association had been holding various online public input opportunities long before the pandemic, but they were not very interactive. Starting in March 2020, we became adept at livestreaming policy board meetings and meeting with various resource agencies using virtual meeting platforms. Although the policy board meetings are made available to the public, they typically have little public involvement.

Amanda Wilson, AICP Program Manager > North Central Texas Council of Governments

The high-speed transportation study meeting would be different. We needed a virtual platform that could accommodate a high level of public interaction and involvement. Our consultant recommended a virtual platform called Public Involvement Management Application, which they had been developing and enhancing in collaboration with other public agencies.

PIMA allows people to register and log in online the day of the public meeting, watch the presentation live and post comments that appear on the presentation after our team screened them for inappropriate content.

PIMA captures the contact information of every person who logs on and stores it for future communication. Through PIMA, we can push out mass emails notifying thousands of people on our contact list about an upcoming meeting. Combining PIMA outreach with our traditional efforts of mailing postcards, publishing print advertisements, distributing news releases and posting notices on multiple social media platforms, we hoped to reach a wider audience and generate greater participation.

Rebekah Hernandez Communications Manager > North Central Texas Council of Governments

In addition to PIMA, we selected a live telephone townhall platform, allowing those who didn’t have internet access to also participate. They could call in, hear the presentation and dial in if they had a comment. Obviously, callers couldn’t see our PowerPoint presentation, but we mailed the slides to them if they contacted us before or after the meeting.

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For our first high-speed transportation study public meeting, we planned to go live with both technologies simultaneously.

2. Identify the presentation team and assign roles Our team consisted of 10 key members, each with a specific role during the live presentation. We had a presenter, a moderator to monitor online comments and read them out loud for the benefit of our listening-only audience, a person to monitor and announce if we had a caller who wished to comment, someone to monitor questions posed on social media, a tech expert to remedy glitches, and so on.

3. Script the entire presentation We wrote out the entire 20-minute presentation, word for word, adding in periodic reminders of how participants could pose questions, “And, remember, if you’re on the telephone, press star six for the operator. And, if you’re watching online, type your comments using the virtual podium feature.” Scripting allowed a pre-recorded version that could be watched any time during the 30-day comment period to be identical to the live online/telephone meeting experience.

4. Offer the presentation in different languages We completed the script and the PowerPoint slide deck weeks in advance of the September meeting to allow time to have the contents translated into Spanish. North Texas has a large Spanish speaking population in the proposed high-speed transportation area. We wanted to make sure they felt included, and accurate transcription takes time. We also had to build in time for the videographer to sync the audio with the PowerPoint, so the pre-recorded meeting was available in Spanish as well as English. Both English and Spanish pre-recorded presentations were available online during the entire 30-day comment period.

5. Hold a dry run One week before the public meeting, we practiced connecting and operating the technology and read through the entire script. We even asked other staff members to test the web links to ensure participants could access the online presentation.

Dress rehearsals are great for uncovering what you haven’t anticipated. For example, the dry run allowed us to see how well the slides appeared on computer screens and make adjustments.

We also identified a technical bug when streaming the live video to some individuals’ office networks. We were able to fix it prior to the actual event.

6. If possible, implement in person Managing our PIMA meeting with the telephone town hall technology required an orchestrated effort best executed in person. Fortunately, the number of COVID-19 cases had declined in our area, allowing our team to gather in a large conference room with appropriate social distancing precautions and implement the presentation in person vs. from our home offices.

Had we implemented the public meeting virtually, we would have had to use our microphones to coordinate behind-the-scenes tasks, and participants would have heard it. Being in-person, team members could use facial expressions and visual cues to enhance communication, allowing backstage coordination to stay backstage. When possible, in-person execution of a live, online public meeting provides for more efficient, effective communication.

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7. Assign understudies A theatre cast always has understudies — actors who know the script and can fill in at the last minute for a leading actor who is ill and can’t perform. Understudies should be a best practice for online public involvement meetings, too. Despite our best efforts, at noon on the day of our first public meeting, 45 minutes before our event was to go live, a key staff member, who was responsible for operating the YouTube broadcast became ill. We needed a backup at the last minute. In subsequent meetings, we had understudies ready for multiple positions.

8. Be prepared to fill dead air Our first set of live public meetings occurred over a two-day period. The second meeting did not generate as many public comments as the first meeting did. To fill the “dead air,” we reviewed the questions participants asked at the first public meeting. That way, attendees had the benefit of hearing those questions and our answers. The lesson is to reserve ample time for questions and comments from the public, but be prepared with additional content if those questions don’t come in. Because all the questions from the previous meeting were stored in PIMA, they were easy to retrieve and share with attendees at the second meeting.

9. Resist the temptation to press play for subsequent meetings The first public meetings for the high-speed transportation study were scheduled for noon on a Wednesday and 6 p.m. on a Thursday. We had recorded the first presentation and could have easily hit “play” for the second presentation and then gone live for the Q&A portion of the event using PIMA. However, our director wanted the flavor of an actual public meeting. So, we presented the second public meeting live, just as we had the first.

Average attendance for a typical NCTCOG public meeting is about 20 people. For our first online public involvement meeting, held over the lunch hour, 88 citizens attended the live event, and 50 people attended the second meeting. The two public meetings generated a total of 56 virtual podium questions, all of which were just as valuable as what might have been fielded at an inperson public meeting. Since then, we have held two more live, online public events this past January and are attracting more attendees with each event. We had 213 participants during the January public meetings and received 64 comments. Using PIMA, we can visualize our participants using interactive mapping, and determine if we’re getting representative samples of the region or if we’re impacting communitities of concern.

PIMA and telephone town hall meetings have become permanent tools in our public involvement toolbox. We plan to keep making improvements moving forward to more tightly integrate both technologies with a call-in option directly with PIMA.

Charting the journey ahead

The question is when to hold virtual vs. in-person meetings. Could Tuesday and Wednesday meetings be in-person and a Thursday meeting be held on our virtual platform, for example?

Maybe in-person events have a more intimate nature: a neighborhood association meeting or a meeting with a PTA group, for example. Offering a mix of in-person and virtual meetings could be one solution moving forward.

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In the meantime, we have made tremendous progress in the virtual world and plan to carry these practices forward as we continue to seek to actively engage the public in the transportation planning process.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Amanda Wilson is program manager for the North Central Texas Council of Governments. She manages the transportation department’s public involvement and government relations team.

Wilson and her team are responsible for public meetings, community fair participation, social media, videos and newsletters, media relations activities, military-community planning activities and legislative affairs. Contact her at awilson@nctcog.org.

Rebekah Hernandez is communications supervisor at the North Central Texas Council of Governments. She manages communications activities related to government relations, legislative affairs and public involvement for the transportation department. She oversees legislative outreach and education for elected officials while monitoring and reporting on federal and state legislation related to transportation and air quality issues. She also leads public involvement efforts for specific transportation projects and studies in north Texas. Contact her at rhernandez@nctcog.org.

Rapidly converting to an online public involvement process MaineDOT outlines how it successfully instituted an online public involvement process that is generating greater engagement, cost savings and message control Needing a safe solution that would allow the Maine Department of Transportation to conduct public meetings under social distancing restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the DOT went virtual with its public involvement process in April 2020. Our new virtual approach is redefining how we interact with the public, the quality of data we receive and the quantity of those we reach. It is now our preferred method of public engagement. As a result, our project schedules continue to run efficiently.

MaineDOT’s process When the pandemic required us to accelerate our shift to virtual public involvement, everyone responded quickly, knowing the importance of moving our projects forward. The following are some of the steps we took: We involved many staff in the decision. Going virtual no longer was a question of when or if but how. We gathered the project development staff, our director and our program managers to discuss what public involvement would look like in light of the new social distancing restrictions. We quickly mapped out a new strategy for virtual public involvement and outlined its processes on a Microsoft® Teams site so that all appropriate DOT members could see it.

Scott Rollins Senior Project Manager > Maine Department of Transportation

We adopted a web-based application. Before the pandemic, MaineDOT experimented with various tools as part of the Federal Highway Administration’s Every Day Counts Initiative for Virtual Public Involvement. We chose the Public Involvement Management Application because it is a comprehensive, all-in-one system. We adopted the application in March 2020, issued a contract for its use in April and held our first public meeting using the application in June.

MaineDOT belongs to a consortium of DOTs using and improving PIMA. We were one of the first four states to sign a Memorandum of Agreement with the Iowa Department of Transportation. According to the agreement, when a participating state adds an enhancement to PIMA, they share it with Iowa DOT and the rest of the consortium. Iowa also has created a Microsoft Teams site exclusively for consortium members to share what’s working and what’s not.

We created a public involvement website. Our new website is dedicated to MaineDOT’s virtual public involvement efforts. The website is directly integrated with PIMA and is populated with all of the active projects available for public comment. Each project has a dedicated webpage using Esri Story Maps, prerecorded public meeting PowerPoint presentations, supporting project documents, photos and potential property impacts.

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Those watching a public meeting presentation can type their comments into the PIMA comment form to the right of the presentation while viewing it. It’s a time-saver. Rather than sitting through the entire public meeting and waiting until the end to offer comments, they can go in, log their feedback on the project topics that interest or concern them and receive a response from the DOT.

“For now, our new virtual public involvement approach is allowing us to gather public input, involve more public stakeholders and continue to move projects forward.”

We post all projects. Visitors to our public involvement website can see all the active projects accepting public comment. All of the projects that previously would have had an in-person public meeting now will have a virtual meeting. Visitors have access to all active projects, which allows them to learn about and comment on the projects that interest them, not just those that impact their lives or properties. Further, it adds to our efforts to be transparent and underscores our genuine desire for community input. Once a comment period is over, we transfer the project to a project library page, where it remains available for viewing until construction is complete.

DOT’s suite of virtual tools have increased productivity, transparency and community involvement

We use social media ads to publicize public meetings. When we elected to take our public involvement process virtual, we also kept our existing method of mailing public notices or publishing meeting announcements in newspapers to notify those that are not online.

However, posting Facebook ads that appear in people’s feeds now has become a best practice.

The ads publicize our virtual public meetings and drive traffic to the website. Printed notices also include a link to the website. Facebook allows us to engage many more people. We have reached upwards of 20,000 people in larger, urban projects and as many as 9,000 residents in rural communities.

Transforming Iowa’s public involvement process became essential when several employees retired, leaving only two newer staff members to manage a manual, paper-based system for all six Iowa DOT districts covering 99 counties.

We segmented online public meeting presentations. The on-demand public meeting presentations housed on the project pages of our website are broken into a series of brief, prerecorded segments. Like chapters of a book, visitors can click on only those segments of a presentation that interest them — the project manager’s introduction, the project’s background, the design alternatives, the selected alternative, the right-of-way process, project funding and schedule, etc. Closing remarks invite viewers to offer their comments or contact the DOT if they have not done so by using the online form displayed at the right of the presentation.

Needing to find a better way, we began working with a consultant to reinvent our public involvement process. In addition to eliminating the bulk of the administrative work, our goal was to develop an open, transparent process. Six years later, we have a suite of virtual public involvement tools that have allowed us to achieve our goals.

We grant access to DOT staff. More than 100 members of our department have readonly access to PIMA, enabling them to logon and see what constituents are asking about or commenting on. Most of those who do logon are project managers, but some are staff members who might not otherwise have the opportunity to attend a public meeting.

MaineDOT continues to enhance how virtual public meetings are conducted and how we engage with constituents in real-time. And, we may continue to make refinements to our process as we use it. For now, our new virtual public involvement approach is allowing us to gather public input, involve more public stakeholders and continue to move projects forward.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Scott Rollins is a senior project manager for the Maine Department of Transportation and is leading the Virtual Project Involvement initiative. Rollins has more than 33 years of state government experience, with more than 25 years at MaineDOT. He has worked in various areas of the MaineDOT, including project development, planning and in the environmental office. Contact him at (207) 624-3550 or scott.rollins@maine.gov

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How Iowa’s two-person staff transformed the public involvement process

HNTB | Transportation Point | Spring 2021

Our paper-based system required hours of deciphering handwritten comments, scanning public comment forms and manually assembling pages of documents. The burdensome administrative tasks left little time to focus on messaging, coordination, content and outreach — the most critical aspects of public involvement.

1. The Public Involvement Management Application We reviewed several platforms and reached out to the DOT community for what others were using We reviewed several off-the-shelf platforms and reached out to the DOT community for what others were using before deciding to develop PIMA. For us, a customizable, web-based application that matched the processes and policy we needed to follow as a DOT was the most versatile and easiest path to success. PIMA allows us to post a prerecorded PowerPoint Presentation, a WebEx meeting, or include geospatial mapping, depending on a project’s depth and complexity. And, PIMA will allow us to integrate new platforms as technology evolves. For example, we have integrated PIMA with YouTube Live.

Valerie Brewer Public Involvement Manager, Location and Environment Bureau > Iowa Department of Transportation

Iowa DOT employees can access PIMA using their credentials. It’s a secure web application. The PIMA URL syncs with our Microsoft Office 365 account, so once an employee is logged into Microsoft Office, they can seamlessly pass into PIMA. Because anyone in the DOT can have access, we built in an administrative function that allows us to grant different access levels, depending on an employee’s role with a project. Most employees have read-only access, but district planners, who help us manage the public involvement process, have more access. They can respond to a participant’s posted comment and add attachments to those comments. PIMA even allows us to create targeted access for consultants who are assisting us with our more extensive public involvement programs.

Since we initially rolled out PIMA, we have doubled — if not tripled — the number of projects we are managing at any given time. One staff member can easily handle four to five projects simultaneously.

We have held more than 250 public involvement events, received more than 3,100 comments and connected with 39,000 stakeholders. That’s a tremendous amount of data to track if it were all on paper. But PIMA automatically populates all data into a single source of truth allowing us to see how the same stakeholder may be engaging on multiple projects. With a click, we can run queries, export the data into different formats and create report summaries.

Jon Rees Public Involvement Manager, Location and Environment Bureau > Iowa Department of Transportation

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More than that, PIMA allows us to “hear the silence.” By taking our process online, we are hearing from individuals who usually would not engage — like those who may be neutral or leaning one way but are still unsure. They are no longer reluctant to speak up because it’s easy to access PIMA, post a comment and wait for our response. The submission of their initial comment allows us to create an immediate conversation with the individual, ensuring we have an informed constituent.

2. Geospatial information mapping tool Integrating Esri’s ArcGIS Online with PIMA allows us to map public sentiment about a project.

When a citizen submits an electronic comment, they’re also asked to tap and drop a pushpin onto a map, indicating their comment location and whether they favor or oppose the project. We can view the project map in real-time and see, for example, where there is a cluster of red pushpins (opposition), a scattering of green pushpins (support) and the neutral support. The geospatial features help us to strategically target communications and messaging and instantly identify and address pockets of concern. From a social equity standpoint, we can see areas within the project that lack participation, allowing us to tailor future engagement with more focus on those communities.

3. An online public portal Iowa DOT has thousands of projects in our system. In the interest of transparency, we wanted to give citizens access to information about all of them, not just those requiring a significant detour, right of way impact or NEPA documentation. Our solution was to create a public portal with curated data from PIMA, which anyone can view by going to https://public.iowadotpi.com/.

The site went live December 2018 and automatically lists all Iowa DOT projects, whether they are in the planning stage, under construction or recently constructed. Visitors can locate any project on the interactive map and view all of our engagement statistics live, including overall project favorability, individual comments (via the map) and public meeting statistics. Tap on a comment, and you can see what the stakeholder shared (with his or her personal information hidden). Most importantly, you can see how the DOT responded and engaged in a meaningful conversation. If visitors to the site do not see the project they are interested in, they can click on a state map, click on an area and bring up every DOT project. Users can zoom in on a specific project, see the project manager’s phone number, post a comment and read all previous comments and DOT responses.

With the help of PIMA, we went from fielding overwhelmingly negative comments at the first Lansing public meeting to receiving 300 comments at the third public meeting regarding which proposed bridge design they liked best. Participants became increasingly comfortable with the tool, the process and felt their opinions were valued.

Available to the industry

We share PIMA with any DOT that signs a Memorandum of Agreement directly with Iowa DOT. The memorandum establishes that any improvements or enhancements made to PIMA will be made available to Iowa DOT and other members of the PIMA “consortium” others that have signed agreements. HNTB exclusively manages the source code and performs all PIMA deployments and enhancements, acting as a central steward for the consortium.

Between other DOTs we’ve signed MOAs with, and project deployments managed by HNTB, we’ve just seen the 20th agency deployment take place. It’s exciting to see how PIMA is evolving as comprehensive virtual public involvement tool across transportation, transit and municipal agencies.

The road ahead

Late summer 2020, in direct partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, we developed live-streaming enhancements with PIMA to help support the need to conduct realtime, virtual meetings. One of the key features we felt was necessary was the ability for the public to join our virtual podium. Conducted from and managed with PIMA, the live meeting feature directly integrates with YouTube Live. Using this feature, after a live panel presentation portion of the presentation concludes, a PIMA moderator enables the virtual podium function and encourages viewers to join and share their comments or questions. The PIMA moderator displays in real-time each comment or question to the audience, as the panel of presenters responds to it. All feedback is stored within PIMA and automatically becomes a part of the meeting record.

Giving citizens on-demand access to information about any Iowa DOT project, large and small, has greatly increased our transparency.

We continue to refine and enhance these features as more agencies use and see the value of capturing live meeting conversation.

Utilizing a virtual public involvement ecosystem

A hybrid approach for the future

PIMA is the central component that bonds all of our tools together. It is the hub through which all stakeholder communication is channeled. If we receive feedback, it comes through PIMA, and a stakeholder receives a response through PIMA. If we want to share project updates, we send a mass email to our subscribed stakeholders through PIMA. When we hold a public meeting, in-person or virtual, we send invitations, capture meeting attendance and gather comments specific to that event through PIMA. We’ve held three public information meetings in Lansing, Iowa, regarding replacing the historic Black Hawk Bridge across the Mississippi River. Initial sentiment was negative, and we knew it because citizens were using our public portal to learn about the project and post comments before and after the first public meeting. We learned the community was opposed to replacement because the process would require a 70-mile detour. They didn’t understand why we couldn’t just repair the bridge, which is an iconic landmark.

When we traveled to Lansing to hold our first public meeting (pre-pandemic), we were equipped with these insights and ready to justify the need for replacement. Instead of using paper forms, we distributed iPads to attendees and invited them to submit their contact information and comments in the electronic form provided. Many residents were hesitant to use the iPads at first. By the third meeting, their comfort level had increased, and they eagerly used the tablets.

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Each participant’s information and feedback was automatically loaded into the project’s PIMA database, allowing us to easily track individual stakeholders, their comments, support or opposition and their geographic location in relation to the project site.

HNTB | Transportation Point | Spring 2021

Our goal is not to replace in-person public meetings with virtual ones. Some constituents prefer face-to-face interaction, and so do we. But while we wait for a time when we can return to in-person meetings, we are happy with PIMA. It is a permanent part of our public involvement process because it allows us to work more efficiently, be more transparent and cast our net farther.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Valerie Brewer is a program planner III in the Iowa Department of Transportation’s public involvement section. She represents three of the DOT’s six districts. She has been a part of the development of the DOT’s Public Information Management Application (PIMA) since its conception in 2013. Contact her at (515) 239-1626 or valerie.brewer@iowadot.us.

Jon Rees is a program planner III in the Iowa Department of Transportation’s public involvement section. He is experienced in geospatial applications on highway-related projects, particularly highway safety studies, NEPA documentation and implementing GIS practices into public involvement. His focus is to improve management of public involvement processes and interact with the public. Contact him at (515) 239-1431 or jon.rees@iowadot.us.

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Resource Center Other helpful websites: Federal Highway Administration www.fhwa.dot.gov The FHWA provides stewardship over the construction, maintenance and preservation of the nation’s highways, bridges and tunnels. FHWA also conducts research and provides technical assistance to state and local agencies to improve safety, mobility and livability and to encourage innovation.

U.S. Department of Transportation transportation.gov The U.S. DOT serves the nation by ensuring a fast, safe, efficient, accessible and convenient transportation system that meets vital national interests and enhances quality of life.

American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials transportation.org AASHTO advocates for transportation-related policies and provides technical services to support states in their efforts to efficiently and safely move people and goods.

American Road and Transportation Builders artba.org ARTBA grows and protects transportation infrastructure investment to meet the public and business demand for safe and efficient travel.

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International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association ibtta.org IBTTA is the worldwide association for the owners and operators of toll facilities and the businesses that serve them.

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