There is an up-front cost in time and people that is harder for the smaller entities involved in the process to bear. This is offset, however, by the fact that a small entity that is a stakeholder in the process has the same voice as larger entities, a result of consensus decision making. The parties need to have a clearly defined task. In the railroad reg-neg, a neutral recorder took minutes. It s also important that the agency makes sure that all committee members have equal access to data.
Neutral facilitators are essential to the process success.
It takes time, a high-level of commitment, and is very labor intensive. Rather, the decisions were made by those people within the participating entities who were more directly responsible for safety and engineering. Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen. This union represents 10,000 members. Although the committee was large, it was still manageable.