Last Monday night, going to the school board meeting, I encountered a couple outside the door before the meeting started. It was a good 15 minutes before the board’s annual tax levy hearing, and the gentleman told me he hoped there would be a bunch of people there.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that, unfortunately, that was pretty unlikely.
I felt much the same way recently when I saw a Facebook comment complaining about this or that decision made by the city council. I happen to be familiar with the man who posted this comment, and I can say with 100 percent certainty that his face has not brightened the doors of the council chambers during a single city council meeting in the past five years. Not once.
I’m in a position to know. I have missed only a handful of city council and school board meetings in the past, oh, let’s call it 17-ish years. I’ve missed one or two due to vacations or whatever, but most of the time I’m there. And looking around the room at 98 percent of those meetings, I see the same faces over and over.
At the school board meetings, the audience typically consists of a few students or staff who are being recognized for special achievements, building administrators and….me. City council meetings are populated by department heads, a rotation of pastors who open the meetings with prayers and…me.
Don’t get me wrong. I attend these meetings for a reason—because you, the readers, don’t always have time to do it. But you have a vested interest in what goes on at those meetings, and you deserve to find out what happened.
But I think many people would have a much different view of the way their local government operates if, once in a while, they took the time to attend a meeting themselves. Even if there’s not a big issue to be discussed or decided. Maybe even ESPECIALLY when there’s not a big issue to be discussed or decided.
I’ve learned a lot of things in meetings over the years—too many things to list here. But one overarching thing that I’ve learned is that when you attend meetings, hear the conversations and listen to the votes as they’re taken, you get a very different view of how local government works.
In fact, that’s probably true of government at every level. But while it’s pretty inconvenient, even downright difficult, to find time and money to travel and sit in on a meeting in Jefferson City or Washington, D.C., it costs almost no money and only an hour or so of your time to attend a meeting here in town.
Attending a meeting of local government not only gives you an up close and personal view of your local tax dollars at work, but it also lets you get to know a little something about the elected officials and the city or school employees that put their decisions into action every day of the week.
You learn which school board or city council members raise concerns about one issue or another, which of them ask tough and critical questions, who among them make the effort to explain their viewpoint to others who may not agree and which ones vote “no” at the end of the discussion—or, perhaps more importantly, which ones give a grudging “yes” because they’re not completely happy with the end result, but they believe it’s ultimately for the best.
Over the years I’ve seen our elected officials make some great decisions. I’ve also witnessed them making some decisions that I believed were truly awful. And in many cases, I’ve watched some often heated discussions that led to the decisions, good or bad.
I agree with some of what they do, and disagree with some. But being in the audience while they hash out the details of their business, one thing I have to admit is that, even when I disagree, I understand how they came to that conclusion. And try as I may, in a lot of cases it’s really difficult to portray those discussions fully in print. When you read about it, you don’t get the little nuances of personality and the minor differences in arguments that you learn when you’re actually in the room.
I know we’re all busy. I know that attending a city council or school board meeting is probably the last thing you want to do on a Monday night. But I guarantee you that if you come to these meetings even occasionally, you’ll have a better grasp of who is governing our community, and what they are all about.
And your presence also puts the spotlight on our elected officials, which keeps them under scrutiny and helps guarantee that they’re making the right decisions for the taxpaying public. You owe it to yourself, and your community, to witness your government at work.