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 to charges of trying to stifle the residents and added fuel to a fire that definitely didn’t need any,” another councilmember added.

Discipline Behavior

While enacting appropriate public participation procedures during a chaotic time is certainly problematic, elected and appointed officials can all relearn the lesson they mostly already know.

The time to plan for the bumps is before we encounter them. We call this the discipline behavior. It is not hard to do, but takes consistent commitment to do it.

From a governance perspective, acting on behalf of and connecting with the “owners”—think residents—is a top priority. While it is challenging to get meaningful engagement when things are going well, great councils work hard at finding and, if necessary, manufacturing ways to solicit public participation in decision making at any time. Part of that is being thoughtful about the rules of engagement.

While each state is certainly different in terms of open meetings procedures, and elected officials and managers simply must work with their community’s attorney to avoid First Amendment issues, most high-performing officials have the key components of time, place, and manner restrictions in common for the public comment section of a meeting’s agenda.

These restrictions:

Require signing a “request to speak” card that simply asks the requestor’s name, address, and subject. This is often done in advance, certainly before approaching the podium at the beginning of a meeting.

Mandate a time limit that is generally between three and five minutes per speaker, although some councils set aside a specific amount of total time (say, 30 minutes) and divide that among the number of folks who signed up to speak.

Provide guidelines for appropriate decorum; for example, speakers “may not employ tactics of defamation, intimidation, personal affronts, profanity, or threats of violence.”

Prohibit engagement by the elected members so that there is no violation of open meetings laws.

Will It Work?

The key, of course, is to apply these mechanisms fairly, evenly, and consistently in good times and bad. Seek the reputation of encouraging meaningful input and appreciate it, even when it is uncomfortable or contrary to the current direction.

Then when bad stuff happens, and it will, you will have earned at least the benefit of the doubt.

In the case of the community example here, because of the elected officials’ good governance background and their employment of the “one voice” principal (even the member that voted against the rate increase defended his colleagues), this council was able to weather the storm.