Inside Report for November 3, 2009

• By DAVID J. MITCHELL
• Advocate River parishes bureau
• Published: Nov 3, 2009 - Page: 9B

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Ascension Parish government is employing a really interesting tack to develop a new comprehensive development plan.

Parish consultant Winston Associates of Boulder, Colo., is using virtually instant and entirely anonymous keypad polling to collect public reaction and hone the plan.

During public input meetings, participants are issued hand-held pads and shown questions with multiple-choice answers on a screen. Participants key in their responses. Aggregate results then pop up.

After five meetings in August and in October, it has become clear what this method accomplishes but also what risk it may present.

Keypad use prevents an impassioned few from dominating meetings but reduces the loudest and most rhetorically effective voices to single anonymous and largely silent votes.

Lisa Cox, Grand Junction, Colo., planning manager, has used Winston Associates for her city’s planning efforts and said keypad polling gives an extremely accurate picture.

“I think it’s an absolutely great way to have people participate in a very safe, neutral context,” she said in an interview earlier this year.

Grand Junction and surrounding Mesa County, high-growth areas, are updating a joint plan from the 1990s, Cox said.

In Ascension Parish, the keypads have elicited some interesting opinions so far.

During one October meeting, for example, participants were asked if the parish should take measures to create buffers of open or rural land between communities.

Buffers would keep towns from sprawling together. Some communities have even raised taxes to buy property or buy development rights to keep spaces open or in agriculture.

Thirty-seven percent of the 35 people polled that night in October agreed the parish should take such measures even if taxes go up.

Thirty-one percent agreed if taxes didn’t go up. Seventeen percent disagreed; 11 percent had no opinion. Three percent felt the issue does not need to be addressed in the plan.