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Jeffrey L. Edelstein, P.E. is a consulting public policy mediator and facilitator with over 20 years of experience with complex multi-party governmental, coastal, land-use, and environmental issues. His experience ranges from the mediation of federal legislative disputes to the facilitation of community forums and numerous state, federal and inter-jurisdictional planning processes.

 Mr. Edelstein specializes in water resource issues, with over 20 years of experience in this arena, from both a facilitative and technical perspective. He provides a unique mix of skills, combining proven expertise as a mediator and facilitator with a background as a registered professional engineer specializing in water resource management. This combination of skills enables him to translate information, facilitate dialogue, and negotiate agreements amongst parties with widely varying technical backgrounds, including scientists, community residents, resource users, government elected officials, advocacy groups, industry, and government technical and management staff. Mr. Edelstein’s water resource experience covers water quality management (including monitoring, mitigation, and restoration), habitat protection and restoration, non-point source/stormwater management, flood hazard mitigation, floodplain management, drinking water supply, wastewater treatment, dredge management, fish passage, watershed management, coastal management, land use planning, and Low-Impact Development.

Mr. Edelstein is proficient in the development and writing of resource management plans, legislation, and inter-governmental agreements. He has facilitated numerous multi-jurisdictional and multi-stakeholder resource planning processes, including interstate, intermunicipal, and interagency processes. He is a skilled practitioner at bringing diverse parties together to reach consensus on contentious issues. In addition to water resource management, Mr. Edelstein works on a variety of other related environmental and natural resource issues, including oil and gas drilling, forest management, solid waste management, and climate change. He has worked with numerous U.S. Federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, Department of Agriculture, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Some of Mr. Edelstein’s particular project successes with highly-challenging technical situations include facilitation of a Federal Advisory Committee addressing environmental, socio-economic, and cultural/historical impacts of oil and gas drilling in the Greater Yellowstone region of Wyoming; brokering an agreement between conservationists and industry on federal legislation addressing forest management in the Northeast U.S.; serving on EPA’s public participation team for the $400 million Hudson River PCB cleanup; the resolution of a 30-year effort to develop Maine’s first statewide building code; and the facilitation of an award-winning regional collaboration for stormwater management among 13 cities and towns, recognized by EPA as a national model. He has conducted numerous public community forums and was a lead organizer of a recent conference on Collaborative Community Problem-Solving.

Mr. Edelstein has trained in public policy dispute resolution at the Muskie School of Public Service, the Consensus Building Institute, the USM Mediation Institute, and the Lincoln Center for Land Policy and holds a B.S. from Cornell University in Biological and Environmental Engineering. He is on the rosters of the federally-chartered U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution, the US EPA, and a number of states, and is affiliated as a Senior Consultant with the Consensus Building Institute, an internationally recognized leader in public policy dispute resolution, based in Cambridge, MA and Washington, DC.