Evaluating Impacts from Noxious Facilities: Including Public Preferences in Current Siting Mechanisms

Abstract

This paper describes an approach to facility siting that ranks potential sites in terms of their social impacts. A contingent choice survey based on paired comparisons is used to construct a utility index to rank sites consistent with predicting Results of a hypothetical referendum based on the attributes of the sites. The method is likely to be acceptable to public decision makers, since it is analogous to site scoring methods that have been commonly used. Indeed, our approach is currently being employed as part of a larger landfill site selection process in the state of Rhode Island.