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Jeffrey L. Edelstein, P.E. is a consulting public policy mediator and facilitator with over 21 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 has worked on a number of high-profile national environmental policymaking initiatives and disputes. His primary focus areas are water resources, coastal management, land use, climate change, and energy. He has also worked on a variety of other issues, including solid waste management, waste prevention, forest management, building codes, low-impact development, education policy, and public health. Because of his engineering background, he is sought out for particularly complex technical and scientific disputes and policymaking efforts. In recent years, he has become increasingly involved in energy issues, including oil and gas drilling, renewable energy development, and climate change policy.

Some of Mr. Edelstein’s successes with highly-challenging high-stakes situations include leadership of the facilitation team for a national process to establish a new approach to U.S. coastal management; facilitation of a Federal Advisory Committee addressing impacts of oil and gas drilling in the Greater Yellowstone region; brokering an agreement between conservationists and industry on federal forest management legislation for 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.

Mr. Edelstein is actively involved in leadership of the Environmental Conflict Resolution (ECR) field. He currently serves on the Leadership Council of the Association for Conflict Resolution’s Environment and Public Policy section and on the Steering Committee for the national ECR 2010 conference sponsored by the US Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution.

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 http://www.cbuilding.org, an internationally recognized leader in public policy dispute resolution, based in Cambridge, MA and Washington, DC.  Mr. Edelstein is based in Maine and works nationally.