That’s because potential project opponents are more easily mobilized with information that can be gained quicker than ever thanks to the Internet, said Michael Saint, founder and CEO of the Saint Consulting Group, a firm specializing in land use politics.

“If they thought it was hard to get projects built in the past, it’s going to be harder in the future,” Saint said in a recent interview to promote a new book, “NIMBY Wars: The Politics of Land Use,” he co-authored.

“The Internet gives opponents new tools and access to information they didn’t have before,” he said. “There is more and more information on the Internet that teaches people how to organize a campaign against a project.”

But the Internet and social media also can be used to help promote a project, Saint said. “Successful use of social media can build online petitions and a way to keep in touch with all of our supporters to make sure they turn out at the proper time and the proper place to demonstrate political support for the project,” he said.

And building that support is a key.

“We’ve worked on well over a dozen controversial landfill and trash-to-energy projects,” he said. “Clearly you have to do a lot of political work to get people to show up and speak on behalf of landfills and trash-to-energy facilities. They are the quintessential not-in-my-backyard kind of use.”

Mobilizing support — just as someone will certainly organize opposition — is a key to gaining approval of a landfill project, Saint said. That means landfill developers need to explain the benefits of a project to a particular community.

“What you have to do is go out and find people who live in the community who have a reason to support the project and get them to understand the project won’t happen unless they come to city hall and communicate to city officials that make the decision,” he said.

While people might not be enthused about a landfill coming to their town, they can be swayed by what Saint calls the indirect benefits of a facility. “You’ve got to find indirect benefits that it will provide and convince the beneficiaries the permitting of this new facility will help them achieve their goals or get the indirect benefits they are looking for,” he said.

Those benefits, for example, could be money for a local school system a landfill could provide, Saint said. School administrators might not care about the landfill, but they would care about a new funding source.

“NIMBY Wars” explains what developers can do to win approval for their projects. The book is available at www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com. Robert J. Flavell and Patrick F. Fox work at Saint Consulting and are co-authors.

Saint Consulting has given advice on more than 1,500 controversial projects during the past 25 years. The company regularly publishes the Saint Index, a survey that measures opposition to different types of development. In the latest index, landfills were the most opposed land use, with 78% of those surveyed coming out against that use.

“Landfills and waste plants are right up there with mines and power plants and casinos and Wal-Mart as the least popular thing you can introduce into a community,” Saint said.

“Tip O’Neill used to say all politics is local,” he said. “We say all land use decisions are political. You have to understand it’s not about the facts and the figures of your project.”

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