How we adopted online commenting to make public meetings inclusive - Lauren Mikulak, AICP, Planning Manager City of Wheat Ridge, CO
I’m the planning manager in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. We’re neighbors with Lakewood, we’re an inner ring suburb of Denver, of about 32,000 people. Historically we’ve had the oldest median age in the County, but we’re trending slightly younger as millennials seek suburban homes for their new and growing families.
I’ve worked for this community for almost exactly 10 years, our story began with a familiar setting—or once familiar setting I guess pre-Covid. I was sitting in council chambers nearing midnight, midway through a contentious hearing for a modest 40-unit townhome project. Back when you could scan the room in person, I realized that the people with kiddos in tow had left the room hours ago. Of those remaining to testify it didn’t look like the crowd that was necessarily waking up at 6am for work. The people in that room at midnight had the endurance, the time, and frankly the luxury, to wait it out to say their piece, and it certainly wasn’t representative of our community at large.
That project ended up getting approved, barely, but was the subject of a referendum, ended up on our local ballot, and was ultimately defeated after a dizzying amount of misinformation on social media. That sounds like a whole different session, but it was during that public hearing that I felt really personally compelled to flip the script for public hearings.
After that case ended and residents on both sides were trying to make sense of what happened and what it meant, residents were telling me, “I emailed my council person about the zone change and they never responded…” These were people who hadn’t shown up to the meeting, hadn’t provided written comment to me or my staff, they knew I was the case manager, they seemed relatively well educated on city processes but whose comments never made it into the record. Or you had the people who didn’t understand why Council had felt so conflicted. They’d say, “There had been people online who made comments in support—on Facebook and on Next Door.” And I found myself explaining time and again what ex parte contact is and why you can’t email a councilperson about a zone change and why councilmembers can’t take the pulse of the community on Facebook for a pending land use application.
There was an obvious disconnect between how people like to voice their opinions and how Council can receive that information as part of the official record.
I started thinking about it from a more personal perspective. I’m a planning nerd, I live and breathe for public hearings, but I’ve never attended one in the community where I live because I have enough night meetings for my own job, and I have two small kids on the homefront, and I surely can’t afford to give up yet another night to sit in my own Council Chambers down the street from my house.
It’s familiar. We all know the barriers to involvement—work, jobs, commute, driving at night, weather, kids, you name it. We also all know that public hearings and public meetings an incredibly important part of the work of local government, but the format is antiquated and people are frankly turned off by and excluded from the process.
My awakening to that reality was on April 8, 2019 just before midnight.
Two weeks prior in March 2019 I had half-watched over my lunch hour an American Planning Association webinar [featuring the City of Lakewood and their use of People Speak] about rethinking public hearings, but it suddenly took on new meaning and I pulled it up on YouTube to watch it in full a second time.
Our adoption process in Wheat Ridge started off by educating our staff. I needed buy-in. I needed to know I wasn’t crazy and I asked my team and my director to watch the webinar. In May, we did a lunch and learn with Travis Parker, the Planning Director at nearby City of Lakewood, who graciously answered all our questions and showed us the backend of his site.
We did enough homework and enough brainstorming to convince ourselves that this made sense to pitch a change.
My director approached our City Manager and pitched the idea of mimicking the public hearing online and in advance.
By September we had met with our City Attorney and convinced him too that it was both legal and worth trying.
The story of how we adopted specifically online commenting for public meetings, is a little bit about who we talked to, and in what order, and who we trained, and how we made checklists and handouts, but it’s more importantly I think about how we framed it and got political buy-in. We were the beneficiaries of the work the City of Lakewood helped pioneer, so our adoption was a marketing campaign in the end. Pre-Covid, you’ll recall that in local government we were collectively perhaps quite a bit less eager to jump into innovating a long standing in-person highly ordered process. There either wasn’t time, interest, money or political will. I think Covid has really, thankfully, greased the wheels of innovation.
In any case, this time last year, the context for our adoption was an update to a strategic plan for the City. It was abundantly obvious through that process that our community wanted to have more opportunities for truly meaningful involvement. I don’t think that’s unique to us, but it gave us a timely basis for bringing the idea to our city Council in a study session. In our community, most agenda items are brought at Council’s direction, so the idea of an online hearing was a little out of the blue coming from staff but we pitched it on this premise:
The opportunity for online commenting in advance of a hearing or a meeting is inherently inclusive, easy, transparent, convenient.
It’s hard for any public official to say they don’t want a public process to be more inclusive, more transparent, easier, and more convenient for their constituents.
We formatted our pitch as FAQs because that’s what innovation invites…lots and lots and lots of questions. We shared how this kind of change would affect staff, the public, applicants, commissioners, council members. We shared data, we shared screenshots. Our big pitch, specifically, for decision makers was that we can help deflect ex parte contact.
We actually now provide business cards to decision makers so when they get accosted in the grocery store, they can share the card and say, “please don’t talk to me about that zone change, please don’t email me; please share your comments on Wheat Ridge Speaks.”
Ultimately, we got the full consensus of our Council in October 2019. There’s no code that needed to change, so no formal meeting or ordinance. We set about making checklists and how-to documents—I’m happy to share those. We offered tech support and tutorials for decision makers, but it was so easy they didn’t take us up on it. We educated the public with postcards and press releases, and then we launched.
In our case last fall, we thought we were respecting the pace of governmental change by taking it slow—we had intended to use the online comments only for items out of the planning division—developments, zone changes, subdivisions, theoretically the contentious stuff.
Our first hearing on the platform was the week before Christmas, December 2019. It was a little anticlimactic—we didn’t get comments until our 4th meeting, and we’d only used Wheat Ridge Speaks for a total of 6 meetings before Covid hit. The point is, we didn’t get a lot of practice pre-Covid.
By the end of March, only 3 months in, we jumped all in, we had our first virtual City Council meeting in the Covid era. And since then we now have an online presence for Planning Commission meetings, City Council meetings, and also study sessions, and we essentially welcome comments online for any topic or agenda item that you could otherwise comment on live during the meeting. Our full agenda is online. Our comment volume and participation has certainly increased. n the last month or so our top three agenda items were a zone change with 23 comments, a face mask discussion with 15, and, poetically, last night’s discussion on inclusion, equity, and race solicited 22 comments.
I think in general the pandemic has been an incredible boon to local government, maybe government and organizations of all types, in forcing innovation in a matter of weeks or months; the kind of innovation that historically took years or even decades to evolve.
For us, I was careful about how I framed success from the outset. It’s not about how many people comment or whether it changes the tone—more or less supportive.
It’s always been about creating the opportunity—an easy and convenient opportunity—to participate in local government.
I will say that we have frequent fliers who viewed this change as a threat, at least initially.
We have citizens who like to have their moment at the podium or now on the zoom screen – people who feel like they made the effort to show up at 7pm on a weeknight so their voice should count more, people who feel like they’ve lived here for decades so their influence should be greater.
We have people who don’t want to give up their influence.
To them we have said, we’re not trying to take away influence from any person or group
We’re trying to add more chairs, more voices, to the table of influence.
--
I spoke with my Council almost exactly a year ago, and the idea of a more inclusive public hearing resonates with people, now more than ever.
I would encourage you to look at your processes – public meeting or others – even those which are seemingly most constrained by legal requirements or due process or tradition and seek ways to improve, to innovate, and to include more voices.