Local Government and Public Input
Swampscott has recently kicked off the process to put together the town’s Master Plan which is a document that helps guide the town over the next decade. As with seemingly every public input opportunity, there are complaints brewing about government listening to “the will of the people”, and the truth is that they are kind of right, but not in the way the people that are complaining mean.
What is a Master Plan? In brief — it sets out the guiding principals to make physical and economic changes to a municipality. Why did the town pursue the redevelopment of the Hadley school into a hotel? The general idea of it was in the previous Master Plan. Purchasing more open space? In the Master Plan. In Swampscott we also have an Open Space and Recreation Plan, a Harbor and Waterfront Plan, and a Housing Production Plan. These documents set out general directions and then the town undergoes additional public input processes to actually make specific things happen.
Swampscott contracted with the MAPC to develop our Master Plan because we simply do not have the staff to do it. The department that produces this plan has 2 people in it. I don’t know the exact dollar figure, but I’m assuming we are using grant funds and it is somewhere in the realm of “not much” in comparison to our other budget items. We have an advisory committee made up of members of the various boards and committees as well as random appointed citizens that applied to be a part of it. While the advisory committee certainly gives input, it’s mostly there to help guide the process on things like survey editing and helping out at public forums. For this Master Plan, there will be 2 surveys and 2 forums to gather public input.
The people that show up to these kinds of forums or public comments in general are the ones with the most free time and are generally single-family homeowners, older, whiter, and historically are also a bit more conservative than the general population they are a sample of. The main difference between forums for planning and every other public meeting comment period is that generally people show up to complain about something very specific and these forums people will want to complain about all the things they don’t like about the town. Yet, that isn’t exactly the purpose of these forums. They are to get input on what people would like the town to be like in the future.
In the forum last Thursday, moderators of the small group discussions had the painful job of respectfully getting people to stop just airing their grievances and instead talk about things that are important to them, what hurdles could be removed to improve their lives, and give a vision of how they would like things to be. Was it enough time to get all of ideas from the 60 people that were there? Absolutely not, but there were some interesting discussions and points that came out of it. Each of the 4 tables had an MAPC employee as a note taker who were all scribbling furiously the entire time. A summary has not yet been released yet.
Post forum, one of the attendees has taken to Facebook to complain about the entire process. This isn’t really surprising. The people that show up are generally the loudest voices, the most likely to complain about something, and the most likely to be involved in the process. Interestingly, they are also the most likely to call for “pure democracy” or where citizens vote on every single thing that their government does because they have zero faith and trust in their government to do what they want them to do. When they don’t see their individual ideas getting implemented, a lot of times they fall back to conspiracy theories about “the people” being shut out of the process and the government just doing what it wants despite these individuals being very much part the process.
As with all unfounded conspiracy theories, there is a shred of truth here that is being abused and spun into something wild. In Swampscott and elsewhere, there are definitely cases where some ideas of citizens are left on the cutting room floor so to speak because quite frankly they are in no way helpful to positive change in the town or so infeasible as to not be worth consideration. This is normal, expected, and should be welcomed. It will be town employees that do this opinionated filtering of commentary and we should thank them for doing this. As an example, in a previous forum someone had the idea to put flower baskets on the railings of town seawalls to make it look nice and a lot of people thought that might be pretty neat. No one considered though the futility of trying to maintain flower baskets in spots where the waves constantly come over the railings at high tide though so the idea was not implemented.
On the flip side, in these forums historically no one really mentions needing ADA compliant sidewalks, the need for multifamily housing, spaces for various ethnic group needs, or a whole host of things that citizens who don’t either have the time or may not know how to be part of the process would like to have heard, but can’t.
The irony is that there is a large portion of the people who show up to complain that also have the complaint that taxes are too high and we should spend less money on everything. If the town were to actually invest in making sure they got the most representative sample they could in a public process, they would need to spend a lot more time and money on this. There are ways we can do this better.
Personally, I think one of the cheapest ways to get feedback is to release a draft of a plan/bylaw/etc. to the public digitally and allow for a period of comment. This still requires outreach though and making sure the most representative sample of people are contributing and outreach costs time and money. The better way to do this is to make sure you are targeting certain groups intentionally. This isn’t some unsolvable problem either, there are best practices on how to do it.
For the Swampscott Master Plan, we started down the path of making sure we were holding focus groups of people generally not part of the typical process, and advisory members on the committee have repeatedly been saying we need this, but that action was recently axed due to lack of funding.
While it is absolutely true that the public input process in Swampscott and a lot of places really, is a bit broken or certainly under-invested in, we do have a representative government for a reason. We shouldn’t want the oldest, whitest, single-family home dwellers with the most free time giving their opinions on every thing (it’s OK to not have an opinion on something!) the government does or doesn’t do. We elect people to shape the policies, procedures, and processes of government employees in order to get done what needs to get done in a way that works for ALL of its citizens without the vast majority of us having to do the work of making all of the day to day decisions. It’s OK if some of those decisions happen without a public input process as long as they are done transparently and people understand why.
Unfortunately, a lot of loud people have decided that when there is a lack of transparency and understanding of why something was done the way it was done, the solution is that government needs their individual opinions to be the way forward and if that doesn’t come through, then there is some sort of conspiracy against the entire population. We have seen this in national politics, although certainly in more brazenly absurd ways, but this is an impulse that should be resisted. We should absolutely demand transparency, pro-active notices, and opportunities to have ALL of our voices heard, but as citizens, let’s take a step back and make sure we are giving equal opportunity to everyone in our community and ask our government to do this same.
Written by Aaron Berdofe
