Plan for the Bumps

Put public participation protocols in place now

By Mike Conduff, ICMA-CM

The mayor and councilmembers were clearly frustrated. After years of working hard for the community; sacrificing time, energy, and personal resources in their volunteer positions; effecting widely appreciated improvements in the community; and even after being acknowledged as City Council of the Year by the state’s professional managers, their meetings had turned ugly.

“We had more people show up at one meeting than we had all of last year,” is how the mayor put it to me during a council retreat. “And they were all angry, and they all wanted to speak—if yelling and screaming constitutes speaking. They were mean, vicious, and nasty, and those were the nice ones.”

This annual planning retreat that was scheduled a year in advance, just happened to come on the heels of a significant water rate increase and its associated public outcry.

Problems Galore

Weather-event-related catastrophic line failures and significant capital maintenance expenditures, which had to be accelerated as the result of annual inspections, had also left this diligent body no alternative other than to invest the money necessary to keep the water utility strong and functioning.

The public, however, was fuming and chose to use the public-comment section of a council meeting agenda as one means to express their outrage. Charges ranging from “being inept” to “being corrupt” were being leveled, and trying to maintain civility at the meeting in the face of the mob mentality was nearly impossible.

“Our informal rules of procedure, which we hadn’t really even been following because there was no need for them until now, simply did not work. Since we had not been using time limits or even needed to think about decorum, trying to do so in this instance just left us open