Staff Responsibility: Jo Allen Gause
Transportation 2040, the Puget Sound region’s long-range transportation plan, was adopted by Puget Sound Regional Council’s (PSRC) General Assembly in May 2010 with 98% of the weighted vote. Although the plan was approved by such a large margin, some stakeholders were concerned about the plan content and approach. One concern was that local agency staff did not have sufficient time to brief their elected representatives before policy decisions were finalized. As a result, PSRC was directed, as a first step in the T2040 Implementation, to revisit the methodology for prioritizing projects and programs within the long-range plan.
The objective of this project was to demonstrate the efficacy of the Transportation for Communities—Advancing Projects through Partnerships (TCAPP) tool in facilitating development of consensus among PSRC stakeholders charged with making key decisions in the updated Transportation 2040 Prioritization Process.
This project used the tools contained within TCAPP’s Long-Range Planning Key Decision Point 3 (LRP-3) to facilitate enhanced collaboration with PSRC advisory and elected committees in the areas of policy making, establishing goals, values and performance measures, and implementation. Pilot testing the TCAPP framework presented an opportunity to broaden stakeholder involvement during this process and provided PSRC with the appropriate tools to develop a consensus through increased collaboration and information sharing. Specifically, PSRC sought to apply the TCAPP tool to a critical subprocess of the Transportation 2040 Update: the update of project prioritization criteria. This was an important undertaking that affected both the overall Transportation 2040 strategic direction and the specific major investments (and investment types) selected for inclusion in the eventual adopted Transportation 2040 Update.
To help determine the potential for successfully pursuing this collaboration, PSRC employed the TCAPP Stakeholders Collaborative Assessment Tool as a means gauging readiness to work through differences to achieve consensus and progress. PSRC staff administered the Assessment Tool to the Regional Staff Committee two times: at the beginning of the prioritization update process and after the process was completed. This approach allowed for a before-and-after assessment of the PSRC’s perceived ability to collaborate. It also provided important information to PSRC staff regarding issues and information gaps that staff could address to make future collaboration processes more effective.
Status: This project is complete.
