Communicating with Elected Officials

ITE JOURNAL / DECEMBER 2005 ONE OF THE MOST FRUSTRATING aspects of being a transportation professional, especially one with an engineering background, is the seeming reluctance of elected officials to readily accept the recommendations of highly qualified technical staffs. This feature is intended to help transportation technical staffs better understand the context within which elected officials operate and to suggest some principles to consider when working to improve communications with elected officials.1 The focus of this feature is non-federal elected officials who play a decisionmaking role in surface transportation planning and operations. This includes officials who affect the transportation planning and operations decisions of executive and legislative agencies at the state, regional and local levels. From a modal perspective, the emphasis is on surface transportation planning, primarily highways and transit. With more than 100,000 elected officials at the state and local levels, it is challenging to characterize their perspectives on transportation planning and operations and to suggest ways to enhance communications with elected officials. This brief survey, however, does suggest several key observations: • The vast majority of elected officials are part-time, hold regular jobs and are involved with family and community. • In general, elected officials are not conversant with the complex transportation planning process and its vocabulary. • In communicating policy and concepts to elected officials, priority should be given to those who are key decision-makers and those who can influence others (for example, transportation leaders/champions). • Because it is not realistic to envision working directly with thousands of elected officials, strategic approaches must consider partnering with associations and advocacy groups (for example, the Association of Metropolitan Planning Organizations (AMPO), National League of Cities (NLC), National Governors Association (NGA), National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), National Association of Regional Councils (NARC) and Conference of Mayors), which can provide conduits to key elected officials. • The type of information and how it is disseminated is critical. Elected officials are deluged with paper and e-mail. Information needs to be clear, understandable and concise. Time is of the essence—information should be factual and brief. • “Buy in” of senior staff (for example, staff directors of legislative transportation committees and metropolitan planning organization (MPO) transportation directors) is critical to reaching senior elected officials. Especially for operations issues, local elected officials depend upon their staff engineers and are reluctant to challenge an “engineering solution” unless local political imperatives override.