RMS – Community Consultation on Road Upgrades
$16 million was allocated for a second road over rail bridge in Gunnedah to provide a route for heavy vehicles and address local traffic congestion issues due to the coal trains causing delays at level crossings. Community consultation was undertaken as part of this project.
Photo credit: RMS 2017
KBR was engaged to assist in the development of options for the project in 2013. Three preliminary options were presented to public review and feedback.
Community Consultation for Gunnedah Road over Rail Project
Community consultation on the options included:
- Two community drop-in sessions with 58 participants
- Eight meetings with property owners within the study area
- 73 feedback forms submitted
Some photos of the community engagement process held by KBR are shown below (Photo credit: KBR)
Effective Public Submissions Analysis
KBR implemented Darzin as a stakeholder management system due to Darzin’s ability to easily capture stakeholder feedback in different formats and to provide rich understanding of community issues and suggestions through a comprehensive data analysis and reporting engine.
A feedback questionnaire was created in Darzin for preferred concept options and provided to community members in electronic and hard copy forms. All feedback forms were entered and imported into Darzin for the submissions analysis. The consultation team was able to prepare a high quality community submissions report within a very short timeframe using Darzin’s powerful analysis engine. “Darzin definitely made the whole process 100% easier” – feedback by a KBR stakeholder engagement specialist.
Darzin was able to provide detailed reports including:
- Summary of consultation activities
- Total number of submissions and submitters
- Preferred concept options
- Top issues for the whole project and for each concept option
- Drill down to specific comments on specific top issues for each option such as such dust, environment, pedestrian safety, etc
Examples of analyses generated in Darzin that were used in the Community Submissions Report are below (KBR’s Gunnedah second road over rail bridge Community Submissions Report 2013).
In addition to the submissions analysis, Darzin was used to manage day-to-day community consultation activities including maintaining an up-to-date contact list; registering all stakeholder enquiries; tracking responses to stakeholder issues and requests; tracking and analysing all interactions with potential affected properties; tracking media coverage; as well as compliments on the team’s effort and achievements.
Darzin’s easy and intuitive interface made it easy for KBR to share the stakeholder information with the client (RMS) so the client team could access the consultation updates in real time and run reports in Darzin easily with very little training.
Ongoing Consultation
After the concept design phase, Darzin access was created for PB consultants who were responsible for the detailed design and construction of the project. The new team benefited from the existing stakeholder engagement information in Darzin instantly and has been continuting to build on the existing knowledge. All communications with property owners prior to finalising the detailed design are being captured in Darzin.
Work to build the second road over rail project is expected to start in early 2018 and will take about two years to finish. Consultation will continue to update the community and key stakeholders in the lead up to and during construction. Darzin will continue to be used as an ongoing stakeholder engagement database during construction phase.
Similar case studies where Darzin was used to manage community consultation on road upgrades can be found here.