A long time ago, when I was new to citizen involvement, I buckled up my three small children into their car seats and drove to Salem for a hearing on school funding. We had to wait more than three hours for my turn to testify; it was perhaps one of greatest achievements of my mothering career that with the aid of industrial quantities of crayons, books, and grapes, my offspring contributed to the cause by behaving themselves impeccably in the packed hearing room. But after I had given my three minutes of input, driven home exhausted, and read that the committee had voted contrary to the urging of all those testifying, I realized it had, in fact, been a Fake Public Hearing. The votes had been lined up ahead of time, and ten times the testimony would still not have made any difference. "Why don't they just post 'Token Public Hearing' on the announcement, so working people don't waste their time going?", I muttered to my friends.

Fast forward to 2006. As noted in a previous post and its comments, I see problems in open debate and transparency in Portland City Council decisions, as well as those of other elected bodies. Often, the newspapers will announce which votes are lined up, before the public hearing. Insiders mock Commissioners who dare to put items on the agenda without being sure their proposal will pass. We've passed a crisis point in public confidence in the decision-making process, when many citizens don't consider showing up at City Council worth their time.

I believe elected officials have the right and authority to make decisions. They must comply with open meetings laws in the way they make those decisions - an individual Council member may not get a quorum of members together in private to ask them for support for a proposal - but it is entirely legal to visit each of the other members in turn, to secure votes before the public hearing. I don't believe that is the best way to make good decisions, because citizen experts often provide information or opinions a small group of people in City Hall hadn't considered, and should. But as I see it, public officals do have the authority to seek/seal votes before public hearings. They are mandated to hold a public hearing and provide opportunity for testimony before adopting ordinances and resolutions; I don't know of a law that requires them to listen to, consider, or incorporate citizen opinions.

That's why I'm proposing a new way of giving notice on Public Hearings of the Portland City Council. I am more irritated by the Council wasting my time in a public hearing that doesn't matter, than I am by them making decisions before hearings. Plans made without listening to citizens will surely return to bite politicians if they go sour, and should rightly be credited to the author if they work out. So here's my proposal:

Post all City Council agenda items with a letter designated by the member proposing the ordinance/resolution, indicating the level of public involvement desired by the Council, as follows:

Type A - an item where there are already at least three firm votes, that no amount of public testimony will change. Citizens who wish to participate have 10 seconds at the microphone, and may state only their name and whether they support or oppose the proposal, since any lengthier comments are a complete waste of everyone's time including the testifier's. Additional testimony may be submitted in writing, so that citizens have documented evidence of "I told you so" if the project goes awry. This process would be known as the "Token Public Hearing".

Type B - the decision already has at least three votes, but citizens may take 2 minutes at the microphone to voice their support or opposition. The main purpose of citizen testimony in this type of process is to allow citizens to share their stories, and/or to celebrate the item coming to Council. The timeframe for testimony is shortened because it won't make any difference in the vote. It would be called a "Public Expression of Concern". The recent hearing on the resolution opposing the war in Iraq is an example of good use of the Type B hearing.

Note: A Commissioner steamed about a proposed Type A designation for an issue he does not intend to support would be allowed to move an amendment to change to Type B at the hearing, to allow for the entertaining public arguments that spiced up City Council hearings in 2006.

Type C - issues where the votes have not yet been solidified, and it may make a difference if citizens show up to give their opinions. Three minutes of oral testimony per person, and the Mayor would not be allowed to shorten this timeframe. If necessary, the hearing would be continued to a later date, to allow more testimony to be taken than can reasonably be heard in a single Council session. This would be known as a "Full Public Hearing and Decision".

Get it? Types A and B correspond to the personality types - A is hurry-up, just make the decision already, B is the warm fuzzy version. Type C is for Citizens.

The beauty of this system would be that everyone would be clear in the purpose of each public hearing; City Council would take responsibility for decisions they want to make without listening to citizens; and citizens could budget their time to make sure they show up when it might actually make a difference. Four-hour City Council sessions would become the exception rather than the norm. The process would be open and transparent, even when citizens disagree with a particular issue being Type A. It could be fine-tuned, for example by limiting the number of Type A and Type B hearings to a certain allocation per Commissioner per year, so Council members might have to consider which issues they want to lobby for ahead of time and which they might leave for public review. At the very least, interested parties could post a scorecard at the end of the year, which would show which Council members put most Type A and Type B proposals on the agenda and which were more open to Type C (for Citizens) processes.

This concept started as a joke, and I'm still only half-serious in proposing it. I'll be interested to hear if others have ideas that would improve public awareness of how government decisions are made, and how to make citizen involvement in those decisions more meaningful and targeted.