Notwithstanding the ambiguous mention of utilizing scarce resources, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should be commended for its efforts to incorporate more citizen involvement in environmental protection programs (Fiorino 2000). With improved community relations as a motivating goal, the EPA pushed for national and regional enhancements in environmental decision-making throughout the latter half of the 1990s. This ambitious effort was not limited to the EPA, nor to just environmental management. At all levels of government, citizen participation programs were launched, beginning in the 1950s (Day 1997), with the underlying assumption that if citizens became actively involved as participants in their democracy, the governance that emerged from this process would be more democratic and more effective.