Imagine a hiring committee that agrees upfront to evaluate candidates on four criteria: experience, references, interview performance, and salary requirements. Each candidate is scored on those four things. The scores are tallied. Then, in a closed room after the scoring is done, one committee member says: “I know from a prior conversation that Candidate A has a conflict with our biggest client.” The group nods, and Candidate A is quietly moved down the list.
No one lied. No one falsified a score. But the decision was not made on the stated criteria. It was made on a fifth criterion that was never disclosed, never scored transparently, and that Candidate A had no opportunity to address.
This is criterion injection: the introduction of an evaluative factor — at any stage of a decision process — that was not part of the publicly stated framework. It does not require bad faith to be a procedural problem. It is a structural error that corrupts the integrity of the process whether or not anyone intended it to.
The Lebanon WWTP site selection committee is operating a scoring process with this vulnerability built in. Understanding why that matters — and why the informal nature of the second stage makes it more problematic, not less — is the purpose of this document.
The committee has established a five-category scoring framework: Community Impact, Environmental Impact, Existing Infrastructure, Service Efficiency, and Size of Property. Each committee member scores each candidate site on each category. Those individual scores are aggregated — averaged or summed — to produce a ranking. Sites near the bottom of the ranking are eliminated.
This is the visible, documented stage of the process. It has been conducted in public meetings, its criteria have been discussed on the record, and the petitioners have engaged with it directly in formal filings. For all its procedural gaps — the absence of anchored scoring rubrics, the incomplete environmental data, the undisclosed technology assumption behind the acreage threshold — this stage at least exists in the public record.
What happens next is the problem.
After individual scores are submitted and aggregated, the committee will discuss the results. In that discussion, members will draw on everything they know — including things that were never introduced as scoring criteria and that are not part of any public record. A member who sat in a prior working session where a specific site was characterized as politically difficult will carry that characterization into the discussion. A member who received a private briefing on a site’s infrastructure challenges will weigh that knowledge when advocating for or against the site’s advancement. The city’s engineer, who has professional relationships with certain property owners, utilities, and contractors, will offer professional judgment that no member of the public can scrutinize because its basis has not been disclosed.
None of this is necessarily the result of dishonest intent. It is the natural and nearly inevitable consequence of a process in which the people making decisions possess information that has not been shared with those affected by the decisions. In decision-science terms, this is called information asymmetry: the decision-makers and the affected public are not working from the same information base.
The second stage of scoring is informal precisely because it is not called a stage at all. It happens in the discussion, in the motion, in the vote. It leaves no paper trail. And because it leaves no paper trail, it cannot be audited, contested, or appealed. The formal scoring matrix — the one conducted in public — will appear in the record as the basis for the outcome. The informal adjustments that shaped the actual outcome will not appear anywhere.
A fair public decision process has two essential properties. It is transparent: the criteria, information, and reasoning used to reach a decision are available to the affected parties. And it is reproducible: if the same information were given to a different group of decision-makers applying the same criteria, they would reach the same or defensibly similar conclusion.
A process that fails either test is procedurally deficient. It does not matter whether the outcome is ultimately correct. A correct outcome reached through a flawed process provides no assurance that a different outcome — reached through the same flawed process — would also be correct. The process cannot be trusted because its internal workings are not visible.
The Lebanon site selection process fails the reproducibility test at the second stage. If a different committee were given the same aggregated first-stage scores and asked to advance a shortlist, they would not necessarily advance the same sites — because the criteria driving the actual selection have not been documented. A citizen challenging the outcome has no basis for the challenge beyond the first-stage scores, which may accurately reflect the published criteria while bearing little relationship to why specific sites were actually advanced or eliminated.
This is what makes criterion injection a governance problem rather than merely a transparency inconvenience. It severs the connection between the stated basis for a decision and the actual basis for a decision. In public administration, that severance is a due-process concern: affected parties are entitled to contest the actual grounds on which a decision affecting them was made. If those grounds were never disclosed, the right of contest is nominal rather than real.
Criterion injection is most difficult to detect — and most difficult to remedy — when it is enabled by privileged or asymmetric information. In the Lebanon process, the city’s engineer possesses technical, contractual, and operational knowledge about the candidate sites and the infrastructure serving them that has not been fully disclosed. That knowledge will shape the discussion at the second stage. Criteria that could have been evaluated publicly — the cost of force main rehabilitation, the regulatory status of the existing effluent lines, the engineering assumptions behind the acreage threshold — will instead be applied informally, as professional judgment, in a manner the public cannot assess.
When a party with privileged information participates in an informal second-stage evaluation, the stated first-stage criteria serve as a frame rather than a constraint. Sites can be advanced or eliminated for reasons that track the privileged information, with the first-stage scores providing cover for a decision whose actual basis is inaccessible. This is not necessarily deliberate. It is structurally inherent to any process in which:
All three conditions are present in the Lebanon process.
What makes this particular procedural error durable is that it is self-concealing. The committee can point to a formal, publicly conducted scoring exercise as evidence of a fair process. The scores exist. The criteria were published. The meetings were open. The fact that an informal adjustment layer operated on top of those scores — applying criteria never formally adopted, weighted by information never formally disclosed — is invisible in the record.
This is categorically different from an error that leaves a trace. If a score is miscalculated, the miscalculation can be found and corrected. If a criterion is applied inconsistently, the inconsistency can be identified and remedied. But if the effective criteria were never recorded because they were applied in conversation rather than in scoring, there is nothing in the record to identify, contest, or correct. The error has already been laundered through the formal process.
The practical consequence for eliminated sites is severe. A site eliminated at stage one on a low score has a documentable basis for that elimination. A site eliminated because of informal professional judgment operating at stage two — judgment grounded in information the public never had and criteria the committee never formally adopted — has been eliminated on grounds that cannot be articulated, contested, or reversed through any mechanism the public record supports.
Abstract descriptions of procedural risk are easier to dismiss than concrete ones. Two examples from the Lebanon process illustrate how criterion injection is likely to operate at the second stage — not through falsified scores or deliberate deception, but through the quiet application of information and considerations the public was not given the opportunity to engage with at the stage where they determined the outcome. By the time the process reaches City Council review, the shortlist has already been set — sites eliminated at the committee stage are no longer on the table regardless of what the public presents thereafter.
Willing seller and land acquisition cost. Land acquisition cost — including whether a site could be assembled at a negotiated price or would require eminent domain proceedings — is not one of the five published scoring criteria. It has not been evaluated, scored, or entered into the public record for any candidate site. Yet the city almost certainly possesses, through private conversations with landowners and legal counsel, a working understanding of which sites are available at what cost and on what terms. That knowledge is material to the committee’s decision. It is also entirely asymmetric: the committee and its engineer have it; the public does not.
A city-located site that scores well on all five published criteria — strong infrastructure access, lower community impact, favorable environmental profile — could be deprioritized at the second stage on the basis of land cost or landowner unwillingness, factors the public cannot contest because they were never disclosed. The first-stage scores would remain in the record, accurately reflecting the published criteria. The actual basis for the site’s elimination would not. A resident seeking to understand why a well-scoring city site was passed over in favor of a lower-scoring rural site would find no answer in the public record, because the answer was never put there.
The acquisition offer as a controlled input. The willing-seller concern becomes more acute when one considers who controls the acquisition offers. The city — through its engineer, attorney, or administration — makes the initial approach and offer to any site’s owner. A deliberately low offer to an interior-site owner registers as an unwilling seller or an unworkable land cost in the committee’s deliberations, regardless of whether that owner would have accepted a fair-market offer. A more generous approach to an exterior-site owner produces the opposite signal. The committee sees the outcome (willing versus unwilling, affordable versus prohibitive) without visibility into what produced it.
In federal defense procurement, this structural conflict is addressed directly. The Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR Part 15) separates source selection authority from the offices with operational preferences about the outcome; requires independent cost and price analysis; and mandates that selection decisions be documented with rationale traceable to stated evaluation criteria. These safeguards exist because the buyer’s natural incentives — toward preferred vendors, preferred outcomes, preferred locations — are well understood to distort evaluation when left unchecked.
The Lebanon process has no analogous safeguard. The city’s engineer who advises the selection committee would also direct or conduct the site acquisition process. No independent land valuation or offer methodology has been established for any candidate site. No mechanism requires that initial acquisition approaches be made consistently across sites. “Willing seller” and “unwilling seller” are presented as discovered facts about the market; they are, in practice, produced results — shaped by decisions the selection committee cannot see and is not positioned to audit.
Jurisdictional benefit as post-hoc rationalization. A second form of criterion injection operates through political framing rather than financial calculation. The argument that a site outside the city limits serves both the city and Wilson County — that the new facility represents an opportunity to expand the city’s infrastructure footprint in a way that benefits the broader region — may be introduced informally in discussion as a reason to favor outside-city sites. This is a criterion that was never part of the published framework. It cannot be scored. It cannot be weighted. It cannot be contested by residents who were not told it would be a factor.
The jurisdictional benefit argument is particularly difficult to challenge because it sounds public-spirited. Shared infrastructure serving multiple jurisdictions is a legitimate policy goal in other contexts. But its introduction at the second stage of a scoring process that did not include it as a criterion is criterion injection regardless of its substantive merit. The affected rural residents — who bear the full community impact of an outside-city site while sharing none of the city’s political constituency — have had no opportunity to address this criterion in the record because it was never disclosed as one.
Both examples share a feature that defines criterion injection at the informal stage: they are non-falsifiable in the public record. There is no disclosed analysis of willing-seller status or land acquisition cost for any candidate site. There is no formal evaluation of jurisdictional benefit as a scoring criterion. When a criterion is applied informally using information that has not been shared, the affected parties have nothing to rebut — not because the argument is unanswerable, but because it was never made in a form that permitted an answer.
The remedy is not complex. It requires only that the second stage be made as transparent as the first.
Before aggregated scores are discussed and a shortlist is advanced, the committee should formally document:
A process meeting these requirements is reproducible. A different committee, given the same information and the same stated criteria, could reach the same conclusion. Affected parties have a documented basis for any challenge. The formal and informal stages of the decision are unified in the record rather than separated by an undocumented gap.
The petitioners have asked this committee, in prior filings, to adopt procedural safeguards before voting to eliminate sites. The safeguards requested are precisely those that would close the gap described in this document. The ask is not that the committee reach a different outcome. It is that the outcome — whatever it is — be reachable from the public record.