Land Use Planning Common Grounds

Partners: Addressing the Common Ground between Public Health and the Built Environment

Pulling Together: A Guide to Building Interagency Collaboration at Hazardous Waste Sitesis an interagency collaboration tool designed for NACCHO's Superfund/Hazardous Waste Sites program. Its purpose is to address agency needs when working with the multitude of partners involved in addressing hazardous waste sites. Pulling Togethercan be tailored to a community's needs.

Health agencies need to forge strong partnerships with the local planning agency to effectively address the health implications of land use planning and community design. These partnerships can tackle concerns about issues that cross both disciplines by addressing environmental health matters such as the exposure to, and redevelopment of, hazardous waste sites.

Pulling Togetherprovides users with the ability to communicate with their partners and the general public. Through improved communication, planning and health agencies can enhance overall cohesiveness and effectiveness in working together, enabling them to coordinate and focus their activities and share resources.

By focusing on agency roles and responsibilities, overcoming barriers, and building on the successes of the involved agencies, users will be able to:

• Define agency roles and responsibilities;
• State key benefits of, and challenges to, interagency collaboration;
• List criteria to measure successful collaboration;
• Evaluate agency efforts at collaboration; and
• Identify opportunities to improve collaboration and project outcomes.

Pulling Together is particularly effective in addressing the reuse of brownfields and hazardous waste sites; the tool can be used in its entirety without modification. When public health considerations are integrated into redevelopment of these sites from the beginning, the process becomes one of cooperation and partnership. This strategy encourages redevelopment that benefits the overall well-being of the community. It enables all parties to anticipate and prevent adverse health consequences in the future. The public health role includes the application of public health expertise, determining the readiness and appropriateness of a property for redevelopment, and determining the baseline health of the local community. Pulling Together allows for cooperation in reaching this critical involvement.

Further, the tool can be used to address social justice issues in communities living near the site. Low-income and minority populations are more likely to live near hazardous waste sites, placing them at greater risk for related negative health outcomes. As a local health agency, the environmental and social justice issues that this can create must be recognized and addressed throughout the agencies involvement with the site.

Pulling Together for the Built Environment
Pulling Together begins by focusing on the roles and responsibilities of various agencies involved in hazardous waste sites. From here, there are links to worksheets, flowcharts, and other useful tools to assist in understanding the different roles and responsibilities of agencies involved in hazardous waste sites in general.

Section two provides guidance on developing collaborative partnerships. It also includes links to tools and worksheets to assist in this process. Section Three includes all of the Pulling Together worksheets for quick access. Each worksheet is in a format that can be easily modified to adequately reflect built environment issues above and beyond hazardous waste sites.

Section One: Roles and Responsibilities
Although the Roles and Responsibilities section focuses specifically on federal, state, and local agency roles at hazardous waste sites, the Community Profile worksheet has been tailored to reflect the needs of partners working on land use planning and community design issues in the community. This worksheet will be useful in learning more about the affected population in general and will help health officials recognize potential areas where social equity issues need to be addressed.

Section Two: Building Collaboration
This section provides a general overview of interagency collaboration and details a working definition of collaboration, benefits of interagency collaboration, challenges specific to interagency collaboration, a framework for understanding collaboration, and cautionary considerations. This section provides worksheets that allow the agencies to develop a shared mission and priorities, as well as identify their ability to work together. The worksheets provide an opportunity to formalize the partnership with specific commitment to activities and/or with letters of commitment, and also to record the work being done and to resolve potential conflicts among partners.

Section Three: Tools
The third set of worksheets provides assistance in developing and implementing a joint work plan. Many of the items in this section aim to create a fair, open, and credible process while getting the work done. These worksheets provide a framework for agencies to evaluate their efforts at working together and identify factors that could impede or enhance their collaborative ability.

Several of the worksheets have been modified to address agency needs regarding interagency collaboration around issues concerning land use and community design. They have been adapted to help local planners and health officials overcome barriers to communication, address community concerns more effectively, and develop strategic collaborative processes to ensure protection of the public's health. Worksheets take the partners through a series of activities that will help set the stage for a successful collaboration.

A strategic and realistic plan allows agencies to know exactly what to expect from each other as individual agencies and as part of a collaborative effort. First, the worksheets provide a general framework for determining background information about the community to allow for appropriate planning. Next, the worksheets identify the purpose for working together and goals for the partnership, while identifying strategies to make this happen. This will provide measurable results on which to evaluate success. Finally, a road map and timeline will clearly lay out a plan to follow, measure progress, and list roles, responsibilities, and available and necessary resources.

The modified worksheets are attached here and can be used in lieu of those within the Pulling Togetherdocument. Additional information to address collaboration between planners and local public health practitioners includes a list of jargon used by each profession that explains the definitions or context in which the terms are often used. This list is not exhaustive, but can improve communication among the disciplines by demystifying common terms.