After several years of Zoom meetings because of Covid, Burlingame City Council meetings have returned to City Hall. The Zoom meetings proved convenient for the public. Simply put, the easier you make local goings on more appealing to the masses, the more the masses will participate. Hold on fellow gadflies.
While council meetings and commission meetings have returned to City Hall, attending these meetings in person is one of the only ways to get your opinion heard by local leaders. If you watch the meetings live on Zoom, that’s all you can do—watch. There is no way to speak during public comments. During Covid you could weigh in. Not anymore.
If you choose to email the council or a commission prior to the meeting, you better get that comment in early or it won’t get into the council’s or commissioner’s packets and it might not get read at all. Until now, the staff would read aloud the late arriving comments to make certain members heard the concerns from the community. No more.
Also gone? City staff will no longer take minutes of the discussions prior to the vote on any particular subject. The notes will only reflect the vote itself. No more record of the rationale behind the decision. The response might be, “Well, you can always go back and listen to the archived meeting.” True. But there will be no written document. A written document can always be retrieved for historical purposes. Who knows what the electronic landscape will look like in the future? Floppy discs, microfiche and VHS tapes were all ways we thought would save items forever. They’re all gone too. Nothing trumps the written word.
There are no town hall meetings or opportunities like “council coffee hours.” True, the council did conduct at least one or two “meet & greets,” It seems there were not more than two of these meetings in the last few years. These meetings, if they were to happen again, need to be regularly scheduled so that public knows when they will be held well into the future. Of note, during Covid at least one former council member held periodic Zoom meetings with the public.
As a matter of full disclosure, I served on Burlingame’s City Council for a blink of an eye, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Back then, I sat at the former Il Picollo Café on Broadway each Tuesday morning and Copenhagen Bakery on Thursdays in order to speak with and listen to my constituents. They came. I listened. Better decisions were made.
I also held several town hall meetings where ideas were floated. Yes, the city council has goal setting sessions once per year that the public can attend. But the goals are well established before the meeting begins. The ensuing discussion will be about the agendized goals. No input from the public regarding what they think the goals ought to be.
Back then, we too had goal setting sessions, I solicited ideas before those meetings, so that I could bring the public’s perspective to the table. There hasn’t been a town hall meeting since then. That was 20 years ago.
In the age of electronic media, we should be able to find ways for the public to participate. After all, how do our local leaders know what we are thinking? How can they represent our best interest?
The city puts out an e-news blast. The “news” doesn’t cover the major land use issues happening throughout our town—and there are many. Sure, it’s helpful for us to know about a poetry slam at the library or that the hours of the dog park have changed, but how do we know about major projects in the pipeline if no one is going to tell us? “Check the city’s website,” they might say. An ”opt in” approach rarely works because there is no feedback loop.
Try logging onto the city website, try to find a phone number or email address for a staff member who might be able to answer your question or relay your concern. Almost impossible.
This is not a criticism of city staff, simply a series of observations. The truth is that in order to gain efficiency and streamline the process of governing, civic engagement has been all but eliminated.
Here's a novel idea: The new downtown Burlingame open space currently under construction could be a space like London’s Hyde Park, where anyone can get upon the soapbox and opine to those who care to listen?
How do our local leaders know how we feel if they don’t ask? Perhaps they don’t want to know?
