Siting Major Public Facilities: Facts, Values, and Accountability

Abstract

Government agencies and other organizations responsive to a diverse constituency face enormous challenges in identifying priority sites for relocation, expansion, or new development. Of paramount importance is establishing transparent decision processes that reach accountable, defensible, and wise outcomes. Unfortunately, documented examples of successful approaches to evaluation, prioritization, and site selection are scarce. The purpose of this paper is to both offer a descriptive case study and an intellectually rigorous, fundamentally practical “best practice” approach for identifying priority sites. By employing value-focused thinking and decision analysis techniques to a complex site selection problem, we present a way to address common challenges such as potential technical and nontechnical knowledge conflicts, distinguishing between “facts” and “values,” incorporating uncertainties, generating criteria weights, making trade-offs and building consensus across interests. Our approach is contextualized in a Canadian government case study of relocating a $300 million dollar facility.