The Urban Institute just published a brief about community outreach for public transportation construction projects. The authors are Yonah Freemark, Gabe Samuels, and Christina Plerhoples Stacy; I don’t know the latter two but I know Yonah well and respect him and his expertise and global curiosity. So I honestly don’t understand why the brief concludes that the US’s problem is “inefficient community engagement” and the solution is to do more community engagement early in the process. Worse, the brief for some reason cites Italy and Turkey, via our transit costs reports, as places that do earlier, more effective community engagement, rather than as places with rather top-down decisionmaking and limited citizen voice. It’s sad, because the brief does go over the problems of the American process but can’t bring itself to the right conclusion, namely that community engagement should be curtailed; its only response to the problems of engagement are to suggest earlier engagement rather than less of it.

The brief is, well, brief. I recommend people read it in full. It quickly goes over the usual critiques of the American community engagement process: it is skewed toward higher-income residents, who are likelier to own a car; public meetings attract people with the leisure to attend during business hours; it leads to defensive design such as the reluctance to engage in surface disruption when building subway stations. All of these are real problems. But the brief tries to rescue the idea that public engagement should inform decisions, by criticizing the “decide, announce, defend” mentality of infrastructure project managers and by demanding early engagement.

Then the solutions proposed are a mixed bag. Some are good, and are lumped in with community outreach even when they’re not about any such thing. The invocation of our Italy and Turkey cases is about the public itemization of costs for infrastructure contracts, but this is not about any outreach but rather about contracting transparency for anti-corruption purposes, and the database is not easily legible to the general public. The same is true of in-house expertise, of simplifying project homologation, and of limiting contingencies; unfortunately, the brief frames the latter in the language of “create contingency budget limits” rather than stating the real problem, which is that federal regulations in the last decade began requiring much higher contingency than is normal, 40% rather than the 20% used in Turkey, and these are mirrored in the UK as an ersatz attempt to deal with cost overruns without addressing the underlying cost problems.

In contrast, the invocation of early and representative community engagement is awkward on the same list. The list tries to coast on the reputation of Italy and Turkey among parts of American transit advocacy for low-cost construction in order to justify more involved outreach laws. But neither Italy nor Turkey is a state with strong civil society empowerment in community engagement. Italian infrastructure construction heavily involves different administrative bureaucracies, for protection of labor, the environment, and historical monuments, but not the community. The community does not have the expertise to judge whether some construction technique is a risk to a Renaissance cathedral. Among our low-cost cases, Sweden has higher citizen voice empowerment and even permits some litigation, but far less than the United States or, as of late, the United Kingdom; it too relies extensively on bureaucratic legalism, and the outreach there tends to be done to large collective groups, for example umbrella unions on matters of labor, or a feminist bureaucracy on matters of gender equality.

What makes me bitter about this entire concept is that the good proposals the brief is trying to wed to outreach are about empowering bureaucrats, not civil society. Civil society does not build infrastructure. The administrative state does. Civil society extracts money and betterments from the administrative state whenever it is empowered to do so, because budgets that are third-order for the state are massive wins for petty actors. But 10 third-order items are a second-order item and 10 second-order items are a first-order one, and the costs of veto points and community actors mount. The solution isn’t to involve any such groups early; it is to not involve them at all.