Bring collaboration back into city processes
Last Saturday, the Daily
Camera had some useful commentary by the Community Editorial Board members on how citizens could better participate in city council meetings. These were stimulated by Boulder partnering with the National Civic League to run interviews and meetings and provide recommendations.
I participated in the NCL process and found it quite illuminating. But in my opinion, the fundamental issue was avoided: For citizen participation to work, the basic relationship between the citizens who want to engage and the citizens who were elected to be engaged with needs to change. What’s missing is “collaboration” — council members and citizens need to “co-labor,” to jointly work together. This cannot be a top-down process; getting elected does not magically endow someone with superior skills or intelligence.
When the council sees itself as apart from, more virtuous than or smarter than the citizens, this “collaboration” falls apart. Alternatively, when council members see themselves just as citizens who were elected to manage policy formation as an inclusive process, then it feels “collaborative,” and things work.
If real collaboration has occurred, most people will accept the results. That was my experience on the council. When a decision finally got made, after being fully argued out with plenty of citizen input on all sides, and council members not locked into positions from the start, the outcome was relatively easier to live with, even for those of us on the losing side.
A key piece is the willingness to hear new information or analyses, and as a result, to shift one’s position. When citizens observe such behavior on the council, they feel that the whole process is likely to be worthwhile to participate in.
Here are a dozen suggestions. Most of these were developed and/or improved during the time I was on the council. They work.
• Make sure agenda materials address all the relevant issues (even those that the council would rather avoid), and that all reasonable questions are fully answered, with supporting material. This is the primary job of the Council Agenda Committee. And it’s not getting done.
• On complex and/or lengthy projects, keep an ongoing public list of council and citizen questions and staff responses with backup material. Keep another public list of alternative approaches, along with analyses of pros and cons and supporting material. Include a detailed look at what could go wrong with all the various approaches.
• Acknowledge citizens’ contributions when they bring useful insights or ask important questions at the council meetings.
• If a lot of people show up to say the same thing, the mayor should have a few people testify and then ask for a show of hands or cheers or whatever, so everyone doesn’t have to listen to the same thing over and over.
• Invite knowledgeable citizens to come to council meetings and testify, and then question them. That way council members can learn from citizens who may know more and/or have different viewpoints than council members or staff. Also, citizens who are watching can see that council members are actually interested.
• Council members should challenge each other’s viewpoints. Without this, the whole thing looks like a scripted show.
• Include citizens early in the process on any controversial and/ or complex subject. This helps avoid having ill-defined problems fester until someone comes up with a “good idea” and everyone gloms onto it.
• Implement an integrated planning process between departments, and avoid “silos,” so that the staff perspective is widened.
• Use the goal-setting process to limit the number of projects and carefully define them to ensure that the work can reasonably be done in the two-year council term.
• Make 100% sure that survey information and questions are unbiased and do not contain language that implies what answers are desired or politically acceptable. Two surveys in the last few years miserably failed this test.
• Appoint people with a variety of viewpoints to boards and commissions rather than just people who support the council majority’s views. Engage the relevant board(s) early in projects, so that they are not just reacting to staff decisions.
• For complex problems, at the beginning appoint a working group of knowledgeable people with diverse viewpoints, so whatever comes out is robust and will withstand contact with reality.
To get this “collaboration” off the ground, council members should lead by openly acknowledging past errors, failures or misstatements, and by fully responding to questions. Without this, there is no space to provide honest feedback, to have legitimate disagreements or for people to feel like providing input is worth the brain damage, which, right now, it is not.