Last month I opened the town newspaper to find an advertisement for my County Supervisor’s Sidewalk Office Hours buried between real estate listings and restaurant reviews. The concept was simple: the Supervisor planned to man a booth at the local farmers’ market the following Sunday, allowing constituents to “join the conversation about [their] county government.” Between haggling with tomato sellers and sampling apple slices, residents could meet their County Supervisor, find out what projects his office was pursuing, and share their own ideas for how to improve county government.
Earlier in the week, I saw a posting at a local coffee shop wedged between flyers for babysitters and lost dogs. I learned that my State Senator held “Java with Jerry” sessions one morning a month. On their way to work or school, residents could stop by the coffee shop and share their concerns with the State Senator. The flyer announced that the State Senator even footed the coffee tab for these get-togethers.
The simplicity of the Sidewalk Office Hours and Java with Jerry events conceals a radical idea -- the notion that elected officials have a responsibility to bring the political and governance processes to the public where they are. Dark hearing rooms at City Hall are not the public square of the twenty-first century. So why should they be the only place where public voices are heard and where policy debates occur?
To be sure, the public hearing format is not without its virtues. A true public record emerges from this process in a way that Sidewalk Office Hours do not. Because comments are formally recorded in one fashion or another, residents’ responses are available after the fact, and constituents’ sentiments are given greater gravitas. On the other hand, my remarks at the farmers’ market aren’t archived in the halls of power or reported in the town newspaper, even if an aide might scribble down my name and address for a follow-up conversation on a county issue of particular interest to me.
There is much that municipalities can do to improve existing public hearing formats, bringing them up-to-date with twenty-first century technologies, encouraging participation from underrepresented groups, and incorporating public comment into decision-making processes in deeper ways. An excellent new guide entitled “Making Public Participation Legal” from a host of organizations including the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD) and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC) details creative approaches to changing the existing three-minutes-at-the-microphone format for public participation.
Programs like Sidewalk Office Hours have the advantage of soliciting input from those who never attend public hearings. Some communities experiment with technological approaches for involving the mother who can’t find a babysitter to come to a nighttime meeting on cuts to athletic programs at her child’s school, the undocumented immigrant afraid of voicing his views on public housing in front of authorities, or the car-less worker who can’t find public transportation to attend a meeting at City Hall. Indeed, the City of San Francisco is expanding its pilot participatory budgeting process to include online voting in order to involve under-served communities.
Such tech solutions are important ways of removing barriers to civic participation, even if participants need to know about the existence of such tools to participate. But, as a recent CCIP report points out, tech solutions are less good at relationship-building. As such, tech projects don’t always ask the right questions. A participatory budgeting ballot asks residents to allocate money across different projects, but voters have not necessarily been involved in the creation of those projects. A public hearing asks residents to voice their opinions on a proposed plan to build a park, but it doesn’t always allow citizens to offer other suggestions for how to use the land. On the other hand, Sidewalk Office Hours asks residents to pose their own questions.
This technique is something that should not just be the domain of elected officials. City and county staffers, too, can and should find new ways of engaging the public on their own terms in their own spaces. Many are already doing just that. In the process, they are redefining the space where government lives, and its ability to act on behalf of its people.
Earlier in the week, I saw a posting at a local coffee shop wedged between flyers for babysitters and lost dogs. I learned that my State Senator held “Java with Jerry” sessions one morning a month. On their way to work or school, residents could stop by the coffee shop and share their concerns with the State Senator. The flyer announced that the State Senator even footed the coffee tab for these get-togethers.
The simplicity of the Sidewalk Office Hours and Java with Jerry events conceals a radical idea -- the notion that elected officials have a responsibility to bring the political and governance processes to the public where they are. Dark hearing rooms at City Hall are not the public square of the twenty-first century. So why should they be the only place where public voices are heard and where policy debates occur?
To be sure, the public hearing format is not without its virtues. A true public record emerges from this process in a way that Sidewalk Office Hours do not. Because comments are formally recorded in one fashion or another, residents’ responses are available after the fact, and constituents’ sentiments are given greater gravitas. On the other hand, my remarks at the farmers’ market aren’t archived in the halls of power or reported in the town newspaper, even if an aide might scribble down my name and address for a follow-up conversation on a county issue of particular interest to me.
There is much that municipalities can do to improve existing public hearing formats, bringing them up-to-date with twenty-first century technologies, encouraging participation from underrepresented groups, and incorporating public comment into decision-making processes in deeper ways. An excellent new guide entitled “Making Public Participation Legal” from a host of organizations including the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD) and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC) details creative approaches to changing the existing three-minutes-at-the-microphone format for public participation.
Programs like Sidewalk Office Hours have the advantage of soliciting input from those who never attend public hearings. Some communities experiment with technological approaches for involving the mother who can’t find a babysitter to come to a nighttime meeting on cuts to athletic programs at her child’s school, the undocumented immigrant afraid of voicing his views on public housing in front of authorities, or the car-less worker who can’t find public transportation to attend a meeting at City Hall. Indeed, the City of San Francisco is expanding its pilot participatory budgeting process to include online voting in order to involve under-served communities.
Such tech solutions are important ways of removing barriers to civic participation, even if participants need to know about the existence of such tools to participate. But, as a recent CCIP report points out, tech solutions are less good at relationship-building. As such, tech projects don’t always ask the right questions. A participatory budgeting ballot asks residents to allocate money across different projects, but voters have not necessarily been involved in the creation of those projects. A public hearing asks residents to voice their opinions on a proposed plan to build a park, but it doesn’t always allow citizens to offer other suggestions for how to use the land. On the other hand, Sidewalk Office Hours asks residents to pose their own questions.
This technique is something that should not just be the domain of elected officials. City and county staffers, too, can and should find new ways of engaging the public on their own terms in their own spaces. Many are already doing just that. In the process, they are redefining the space where government lives, and its ability to act on behalf of its people.