ISSUES
EVENTS:
The Public Trust Alliance is currently participating in several resource planning processes and gathering individuals and organizations interested in broader application of the public trust doctrine to current development debates. Keep an eye on this space to keep current with our plans for these and other events.
ADVOCACY:
All Public Trust Alliance advocacy is intended to encourage government agencies to take their trust responsibilities seriously and to follow established guidelines to protect long term public values. We also take steps to ensure that the general public has access to information about the public trust doctrine and the standard of conduct that should be expected from government trustees. In many ways, these reasonable expectations are the source of responsible resource management for the benefit of present and future generations. Unfortunately, it seems that as more and more decision making is delegated to groups of "stakeholders" assembled by public agencies, it has become less and less likely that individual new participants know very much about the public trust, its application, or even any sense of what they are entitled to expect from their government representatives.
Courts have historically applied the public trust doctrine to cases on the margin where public resources are being used for changing economic purposes. The usual complaint is that a proposed use or management plan doesn't preserve either the resource itself or it somehow interferes with historic public rights to access and use. We use the public trust doctrine as a guide for responsible public decision making. A workable knowledge of the public trust doctrine thus requires a historic understanding of its principles and values and a sense for how they can be, and very often are, extended in changing contexts. The Public trust is actually crucial adaptive tissue in our institutional bodies.