The Slow Erosion of the Public Meeting: Why Attendance Still Matters
The public meeting is an imperfect institution. It is also, in many communities, the closest thing we have to a genuine forum for civic life. We should treat it accordingly.
There is a pattern that reporters at this newspaper have observed over a number of years, and that I have observed myself when covering public meetings, which I continue to do when I can: the meetings get smaller. Not always, not everywhere, and not without exception — but the trend is consistent enough that it is worth naming. The people who show up are, increasingly, the people who always show up. The broader public, which has more at stake than it sometimes recognizes, is elsewhere.
This is not a simple problem. Public meetings are often held at inconvenient hours in inconvenient locations. They are frequently poorly run, procedurally obscure, and designed in ways that suggest their organizers have ambivalent feelings about public participation. The business of local government, which is the business of most public meetings, is often genuinely tedious until it is suddenly, sharply consequential — and by the time it becomes consequential, the decisions have usually already been made.
What Is Lost When Fewer People Come
But the solution to poorly attended public meetings is not to attend them less. What is lost when fewer people come is not merely the symbolic satisfaction of civic participation. What is lost is the presence of people who represent a wider range of interests and perspectives than those who attend regularly. It is the elected official who might have been asked a question she had not considered. It is the neighbor whose objection, raised at the right moment, changes the shape of a proposal. It is the accountability that comes from being watched.
"Democracy is not a spectator sport, and local government — the government closest to the lives people actually live — is where that principle has the most direct application."
The Standard will continue to cover public meetings and will continue to report on what is decided in them. But coverage is not a substitute for presence. We can tell you what happened. We cannot be there on your behalf in the way that only you can be there on your own behalf.
Go to the meetings. Ask the questions. Stay until it is over.