The Planning Directors’ Retreat – a valued tradition at the Western Places Western Spaces Conference
By Sheila Lynch, AICP
In the planning profession, the role of a municipal planning leader is often understated. The position calls for strategic leadership to guide a community’s physical, economic, and social development, and sound management to ensure a strong link between local policy and technical implementation. While most planning directors will attest that the work is never boring, balancing diverse responsibilities while navigating complex public discourse can challenge even the most seasoned professionals.
Each spring, the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute’s Western Places | Western Spaces Conference at the University of Denver convenes scholars, attorneys, and planners from across the West. The conference offers a thoughtfully curated program of panel discussions and workshops that highlight timely and pressing land use topics.
Among its offerings is a lesser known but highly valued tradition: the Planning Directors Retreat. Held on the final morning of the conference, this session intentionally draws on the expertise of the participants while exploring cutting edge topics. The retreat brings together an invited group of municipal planning leaders to connect with peers, reflect on shared challenges and successes, and explore emerging strategies for navigating the future of planning practice.
In coordination with conference organizers, retreat facilitators identify themes and participants that align with the broader conference focus. Over the years, retreats have grouped leaders by community size, geographic region, or shared issues, fostering meaningful dialogue and peer learning. Regardless of format, the goal remains consistent: to support professional development and strengthen connections among planning leaders.
This year’s conference theme, We the People Under Pressure: Exploring Tensions in Land Use Law, Democracy, and Federalism, provided a timely framework for discussion. Participants—representing communities across Colorado—examined current tensions in their jurisdictions and explored models and tools for managing complex planning issues. Key topics included housing affordability, wildfire mitigation, transit-oriented development, and growth management strategies, all of which continue to generate significant public debate.
One enduring feature of the Planning Directors Retreat is the immediate sense of camaraderie that develops as participants recognize common threads in their work. While the retreat does not aim to produce universal solutions, it consistently leaves attendees with renewed energy, fresh perspectives, and a strengthened professional network to support the important work they lead in their communities.
A sincere thank you to my co-facilitators, Susan Wood, AICP, and Bill Mahar for shaping and guiding the thoughtful and engaging discussion and to Stefan Chavez-Norgaard for sharing his deep expertise with this year’s participants.
About the Author
Sheila Lynch, Director of Regional Planning & Development, Denver Regional Council of Governments Sheila Lynch is the Director of Regional Planning and Development for Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG) where she leads a talented team of planning professionals who support local governments at the confluence of land use, transportation, and health to promote thriving communities. Prior to joining the DRCOG team, Sheila was the Land Use and Built Environment Manager for the Tri-County Health Department where she led a team of diverse professionals who worked closely with local communities to incorporate health and environmental considerations in planning decisions and development projects. Sheila’s career has spanned different settings and roles with a focus on building capacity for community planning that supports equitable outcomes. Her passions include developing and applying planning innovations including the use of health impact assessments, cultivating cross-sector partnerships to address complex community initiatives, and developing inspired and effective teams.
From Public Policy Theory to Planning Practice
During the Planning Director’s Retreat, drawing on the work of scholars such as Gerald Frug, John Dewey, and Xavier de Souza Briggs, participants considered how lessons from public policy and engagement theory could inform their approaches to planning challenges. What follows is an exploration of those concepts. Collectively, their work suggests that planning is not simply the process of developing technically sound solutions, but also a means of building the civic capacity necessary for communities to understand complex problems, deliberate over competing interests, and act collectively. Dewey emphasized the importance of civic participation, communication, and the relationship between experts and the public; Frug examined the role of local government in community building and the institutional structures that shape local decision-making; and Briggs advanced the concept of civic capacity—the ability of communities and institutions to create and sustain collective action in addressing public problems.¹
These ideas provide a useful framework for translating engagement theory into everyday planning practice. Rather than treating public engagement as a procedural requirement or a final opportunity for residents to react to a proposed plan, participants considered how planners can use engagement to improve problem definition, build understanding, navigate disagreement, and strengthen a community's ability to act.
Start with the problem, not the solution. Dewey's conception of democratic inquiry places emphasis on understanding public problems and developing the knowledge necessary to address them. In planning practice, this suggests beginning with a shared understanding of the problem rather than presenting a predetermined solution for public reaction. Whether addressing housing affordability, wildfire mitigation, transit-oriented development, or growth management, planners can engage communities in identifying what is happening, what is known and unknown, what values are in conflict, and what alternatives might address the underlying problem. This creates an opportunity for public experience and local knowledge to inform the planning process before a preferred solution has been established. Dewey's work also emphasizes the relationship between experts and the public; experts provide essential information, but effective democratic decision-making requires opportunities for the public to communicate its needs and experiences to those experts.¹
Treat disagreement as part of the process. Public disagreement is often viewed as an obstacle to planning, but Briggs distinguishes among contest, deliberation, and problem-solving as different ways of understanding democratic action. Conflict and competing interests are therefore not necessarily evidence that an engagement process has failed. Instead, planners can help participants understand competing interests, make tradeoffs explicit, identify areas of shared interest, and determine what information might change their understanding of an issue. The goal is not always universal consensus, but a decision-making process that can move from disagreement toward legitimate and actionable outcomes. Briggs argues that civic capacity requires the ability to combine learning and bargaining over time, rather than simply seeking agreement at a single point in the process.²
Recognize that participation is not automatically equitable. An open public meeting does not necessarily provide everyone with an equal opportunity to participate. Time, transportation, language, familiarity with government, professional resources, and confidence in public settings can all influence who participates and whose perspective is heard. Applying these theories to planning therefore requires asking not only who has been invited, but who has the capacity to participate meaningfully and whose knowledge may otherwise be missing. This shifts engagement from simply providing access to a meeting toward creating conditions in which different communities can meaningfully contribute to decisions that affect them. Dewey's discussion of the public and its relationship to government and experts provides an important foundation for considering who is able to participate in democratic decision-making.¹
Value different forms of knowledge. Planning professionals bring technical expertise, data, regulatory knowledge, and professional experience, but residents, businesses, community organizations, and other stakeholders possess forms of experiential and institutional knowledge that may not be available within a planning department. Dewey's discussion of the relationship between experts and the public is particularly relevant here. The role of the planner is not to abandon professional expertise, but to connect technical knowledge with the lived experience of the people affected by a decision. In practice, this can lead to a more complete understanding of the problem and can reveal considerations that may not be apparent through technical analysis alone.¹
Match the scale of governance to the scale of the problem. Frug's work raises important questions about the relationship between local government, community building, and the institutional structures through which decisions are made. His work considers both the role of cities and the challenges created when governmental structures do not align with the communities and problems they are intended to serve.³ This is particularly relevant to Western communities, where housing, transportation, water, wildfire, and growth routinely cross municipal and county boundaries. For planning leaders, the practical lesson is that local participation and regional cooperation should not necessarily be viewed as competing objectives. Communities can retain a meaningful local voice while developing the relationships and institutions necessary to address problems that no single jurisdiction can solve independently.
Build relationships, not simply attendance. Briggs's concept of civic capacity shifts the focus of engagement from the number of people who attend a meeting to the relationships and ability to act that develop through the process. His work emphasizes the importance of engaging government, business, nongovernmental organizations, grassroots participants, and other community leaders in addressing complex public problems.² For planning directors, this suggests that a successful engagement effort can create relationships that remain useful long after a plan is adopted. Connecting residents, elected officials, community organizations, businesses, and neighboring jurisdictions can build the capacity needed not only to make a decision, but also to implement and sustain it.
Move from informing the public to learning with the public. Dewey's conception of democracy places communication, knowledge, and collective inquiry at the center of community life. Rather than relying on a one-way model in which an agency develops a proposal, presents information, and asks for comments, planners can create opportunities for residents and agencies to test assumptions, consider evidence, learn from one another, and refine their understanding as the process unfolds.¹ The agency should expect to learn from the public just as the public learns from the agency. This can be particularly valuable when planning decisions involve information that is technical, uncertain, or changing over time.
Consider the institutional structure behind the problem. Some planning challenges cannot be resolved simply by improving a plan or conducting better engagement. Authority may be divided among municipalities, counties, regional agencies, state government, or other institutions. Frug's examination of local government and its legal and institutional structure encourages planners to consider how the organization of government itself affects a community's ability to address shared problems.³ Before asking whether the public is participating effectively, planning leaders should also ask whether the institutions responsible for the decision have the authority (civic and moral), resources, and relationships necessary to address the problem.
Measure engagement by what it produces. The number of meetings held, attendees counted, or comments received provides useful information, but these measures do not necessarily indicate whether engagement was successful. A stronger measure is whether participants developed a better understanding of the problem, whether the agency learned something it did not previously know, whether relationships were strengthened, whether competing interests became more understandable, and whether the process improved the community's ability to move toward implementation. This is closely aligned with Briggs's emphasis on civic capacity, legitimacy, accountability, and the ability to produce meaningful results through collective action.² In this sense, engagement becomes part of building the community's capacity to address future problems as well as the immediate issue at hand.
Understand the planner's role as more than technical advisor. Taken together, these ideas suggest a broader role for the planning director. Technical expertise remains essential, but planning leaders also serve as facilitators of public problem-solving—connecting different forms of knowledge, helping communities navigate disagreement, bringing institutions together, and creating processes through which people can make informed decisions and act on them. Frug's emphasis on the public role of local government, Dewey's attention to the relationship between experts and the public, and Briggs's focus on civic capacity each point toward a planning practice that is more relational and facilitative than purely technical.¹²³
Together, these lessons suggest that the effectiveness of a plan depends not only on the quality of its technical analysis, but also on the community's ability to understand, deliberate over, and ultimately act on the choices before it. For planning directors, this makes public engagement more than a component of the planning process; it becomes part of the community's long-term capacity to govern itself and solve problems together. This distinction is particularly relevant to the challenges discussed at this year's retreat. Housing affordability, wildfire mitigation, transit-oriented development, and growth management are not simply technical problems with technical solutions. They require communities to navigate competing interests, learn from one another, negotiate difficult tradeoffs, and develop the civic capacity necessary to implement decisions over time. Briggs's inclusion of Salt Lake City as one of the case studies in Democracy as Problem Solving provides an especially relevant example of how these concepts can be applied to urban growth and local problem-solving in the West.⁴
References
1. Dewey, John. The Public and Its Problems. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1927.
2. Briggs, Xavier de Souza. Democracy as Problem Solving: Civic Capacity in Communities Across the Globe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
3. Frug, Gerald E. City Making: Building Communities without Building Walls. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
4. Briggs, Xavier de Souza. “Salt Lake City: Growth and the Challenge of Civic Capacity.” In Democracy as Problem Solving: Civic Capacity in Communities Across the Globe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.