PITTSBURGH, Pa., July 16, 2010 – A comprehensive initiative to promote public discussion and feedback about municipal services in Allegheny County is being launched as the biggest-ever opinion-gathering exercise around local government improvement.

 

The initiative, called Allegheny Forum, has been developed by The Pittsburgh Foundation, with support from funding partners and will provide public officials with feedback and ideas from citizens on improved efficiencies and cost-effectiveness among Allegheny County’s 130 local municipalities, including the City of Pittsburgh.

 

Key components of the initiative include:

 

 

In addition the results of a state-wide poll recently completed by the Institute of Public Affairs at Temple University in Philadelphia will be posted on the Allegheny Forum website to help stimulate discussions. One of the poll’s objectives was to determine how Allegheny County residents compare in their opinions about local government improvement to the rest of the state.

 

“Strong, effective local government is essential to the overall quality of life for our community,” said Grant Oliphant, President and CEO of The Pittsburgh Foundation, who announced the organization’s initiative today as a guest speaker at a public event hosted by the University of Pittsburgh Institute of Politics focused on fiscal challenges confronting local government in the Pittsburgh region, and possible solutions. 

 

. “Our goal is to canvass a full and diverse spectrum of public opinion and provide those opinions and ideas to help inform future decision-making of public officials. We urge as many members of the public as possible to participate – the issues are just too important to ignore.”

 

Using Allegheny Forum’s special new website, scheduled to go ‘live’ shortly, different issues will be featured in detail every two weeks, and visitors to the site will be encouraged to comment on these and to raise new topics for broad public consideration and discussion.

 

The website will include a library of information and resources and provides a discussion format for the presentation and sharing of opinion. The website will be available later this month at: www.alleghenyforum.org.

 

Among the special issues to be featured, with participation by community experts, are: water and sewer infrastructure, parks and recreational facilities, emergency services and fire protection services and street maintenance.

 

A major part of the initiative is a day- long citizen deliberation on local government improvement on September 25 with 300 citizens randomly selected from communities across Allegheny County. The idea of deliberative polling, originally designed and tested at Stanford University’s Center for Deliberative Democracy, is to engage a representative sample of the community to pose questions, organize small groups for discussions and following deliberations, seek responses to a scientific poll.

 

Later this year, the results of the Deliberative Poll will be announced, together with an overall compendium of all the public opinions and ideas received by the Allegheny Forum website, at a forum where comment will be invited by state and local elected representatives.

 

The Foundation’s local government improvement initiative is being led by its Senior Program Officer, Jane Downing. “This is an historic opportunity for our community to register its opinions and ideas and to give voice to what they would like to see happen in local government,” she said. “Financial pressures are forcing decisions about how to do more with less and the public has a vital role to play in exploring every possible opportunity to reduce costs, improve services and seek new and different ways of managing government.

  

“We have solicited opinion from municipal and elected officials in the design of this initiative, we will be inviting input from elected representatives during the process and we will be actively engaging them once we have assimilated the results and outcomes.”

 

            The Foundation’s opinion-gathering program began last year with a forum hosted by the Institute of Politics, designed to encourage broad community discussion and participation around options to expand city-county cooperation. The initiative was then further developed to include all municipalities in Allegheny County.