Community impact: More benefit, less burden.

We recognize that our service, our projects, and our people affect the lives of more than one million Northeast Ohioans every day. They deserve our best work and smart spending, as well as an informed understanding of their unique life experiences and the varied neighborhoods they call home.

We are committed to informed actions—environmental and financial—that advance the impartial treatment of residents and the meaningful engagement of communities to maximize the benefit and minimize the burden of our decisions.

Informed actions.

• We make planning and project decisions with an understanding of all our communities and their residents, history, and economy.
• We seek to better understand the human impacts of our policies and projects through community engagement and active listening during project design and execution.
• We equip our staff with appropriate resources, so they can fully appreciate the importance, issues, and impacts of decisions at hand.

Impartial treatment.

• We strive to deliver policies, projects, and programs with lasting environmental benefit and ensure that no community bears a disproportionate share of disruptions or burdens related to our work.
• We employ communication strategies that meet all our constituents effectively where they are.
• We seek to ensure that communities experiencing disruption based on District activities realize benefits from those activities.

Meaningful engagement.

• We engage our stakeholders purposefully and productively at every project stage and in decisions that impact their businesses and communities.
• We interact with the public consistent with our Public Engagement Statement standard: Timely, truthful, thoughtful, and two-way.
• We act with transparency, providing our communities with the information they need to better understand our processes and decisions.