It's the public comment _process_, where these Public Comments are given special status and power, that acts as a general drag on governments allowing anything. It's not _democratic_ because these Public Comments skew very unrepresentative. It's a sort of veto power granted mostly to people that don't have better things to do.
The clear alternative I see is to simply empower elected representatives/leaders to make these decisions.
Which may not may not be true, but you could say the same thing about votes on a referendum, or names on a petition. One side or the other is in most cases more likely to turn out. That is just how democracy works. You can’t divine the true will of the people, you can only act on their public participation.
Anything else is just a license to politicians to push through anything they please.
A company is trying to push through a very large wood burning power plant a few miles down the road that will impact air quality for half the state. If people convince politicians that dissenting voices are overrepresented, that’s one less tool we have to stop things like this.
I don't think that's a charitable reading of what tptacek was saying. I read it as: ideally, democracy should give everyone an equal voice regardless of age, political views, or economic status; local political participation as it exists today skews heavily toward negative affect and toward older, wealthier homeowners, giving those groups a disproportionate voice in the process. We should move toward alternative processes that make it easier for everyone to participate, not just people who have the luxury of showing up to a town hall.
>local political participation
Voting skews older as well. If you don’t participate you don’t get a voice. We can’t try to divine the public’s true intent.
We should be making it easier to participate, not giving politicians an excuse to ignore those people who do participate.
I’m saying do things like hold town meetings multiple times at different times of day so people with different schedules can attend.
Not try to guess about people really believe. Give them easier opportunities to tell you what they believe.
I’m this very thread he is asserting that we should get rid of the public comment process which in many cases is just filling out an online form because it is biased towards naysayers.
The naysayers inherently feel more strongly, and so are more likely to make their feelings known regardless of the process. What other alternate is there than making a (maybe educated) guess.
What would we call such a thing‽
Even for emails and form submissions to members of Congress a 2021 study showed that congressional staff frequently review their correspondence records before writing speeches and drafting legislation.
To the extent that it is ignored, we should be encrusting legislators to listen not telling them to ignore comments because they skew negative.
That's not true at the local level! Public comment is a much bigger deal locally.
Sure but it’s also the easiest, so from a cost-benefit perspective, it’s an attractive option.
> That's not true at the local level! Public comment is a much bigger deal locally.
That’s a good thing. Giving people thw ability to meaningfully participate in the process beyond voting every 2-4 years is a feature. Even if it sometimes slows progress or reduces efficiency.
I will tediously continue to point out that this is not one of my hot takes; it's an extremely au courant policy argument in 2025-2026; maybe one of the biggest ones. It's hard to see how anyone could be paying attention to domestic US politics and not have confronted it already. Barack Obama dedicated some of his 2024 convention speech to it!
Is it possible we're just talking past each other because you're not American? I have no idea who you are and in these kinds of conversations one failure mode is assuming everyone's coming from the same political tradition.
Then you need to fix that.
If your case is that we should strive for a social/economic state where everybody is equally capable of taking a couple hours to go stand in line and have their voice heard at a governmental public comment section, you have my vote.
But I don't think any of the folks here have the ability to "fix" the reasons that today, the people most able to do that skew heavily towards the old and the wealthy.
To the extent that it does require showing up, we should do things like hold multiple sessions at different times of day.
But none of those issues is what the OP is talking about.
“public comment process, which sharply biased towards negative comments structurally”
He’s saying public comments are inherently biased towards no even given equal opportunity to participate.
The stats in TFA are such that it makes you wonder what the total numbers are, for that there are different methods (for instance, surveys).
A few years ago they were planning a massive overhaul of a roundabout nearby. Half the neighborhood showed up (weekday, after work), pretty much all of my neighbors were there. Some out of interest to see what was going to happen, others for input. I made the case that I thought that the sight-lines for bicycles were terrible with the way they had planned the new roundabout, traffic would be going faster than before (which was the goal of the change) so it really would relieve congestion but it would make it much less safe to cross the road there. There were two options, one would have been very costly (a bike tunnel under the road, also not without problems of its own), the other was more practical and required a change in the angle of the bike path and a change in the design of the center of the roundabout. They listened, took notes, redrew the whole thing, had a second round of feedback and that too was incorporated as much as possible within the budget. Then they went ahead and implemented the change. Everybody reasonably happy. Note that this was not even a municipal thing, technically that roundabout is just outside of the municipality but they had this hearing anyway (and on the other side of the road, so everybody going there had to cross it which really helped my argument, they had all just experienced how hard it is to see if there was a car coming).
This kind of process can work. They could have done it online as well (and during COVID that is how such meetings were held here). I'm sure this is not typical and that there are many examples of where objections were overruled by this was one case where I felt I was both heard and that something was done with the feedback. Nobody said 'no' to anything, not the locals, nor the province who govern that stretch of road.
Now, if you planned on putting a datacenter in between the village and the highway I'm not so sure that would get the same kind of constructive feedback. Because there wouldn't be any plus for the locals that they could perceive so likely they would be categorically against it. But that position would be fairly broadly shared unless some jobs would be created.
If you set up a process that selects for people who can show up at random times on random days and that samples exclusively from people who pay unusual amounts of attention to policy and have high-amplitude opinions, you are going to get disproportionately older, wealthier, whiter, owner-class participants who are sharply skewed towards opposition.
You don't have to take my word for this; you can look this up in the literature, too. But I was just at a large public meeting about a rezoning we're doing; turnout around 150 people, and I was one of the youngest in the room.
Today is a Tuesday and it’s not a work holiday for almost everyone. So what are you talking about?
I continue to notice how many people are bumfuzzled by this point. It's not like I'm the one who came up with it. Public comment process being problematic is an extremely widely-held position among political thinkers and social scientists. This is not news. It is not a spicy take.
Early voting doesn’t prove your point; it’s the opposite of what you were alleging about elections! Not specific days, not a uniform process. Perplexing counter-argument.
Take an American at random out of this thread and estimate: how many local public meetings have they attended, in their entire lives? The reasonable guess is zero.
Should I speak on behalf of my young kids and say they might like to live there in twenty years?
This isn't a hot take or anything. It's well documented in the social science literature. It just happens that you can intuit why it works this way as well.
???
What about “town meeting” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_meeting)?
None of this is true for your local congressional rep, and certainly not for your senator. But those people aren't voting on local development projects. Your alderman or trustee or councilmember is doing that. If you haven't learned what they're about and how they get elected, that's on you.
(None of this is to say that you're going to get your way with your local electeds! They may very well not care much about what you have to say --- because they're elected by a bloc of local constituents that they serve and that reliably turns out for them. That's democracy! The good news is: you can often organize and replace those electeds. I live in a relatively high-end inner-ring suburb of Chicago, and I ran a successful campaign for a friend there for $5000 all-in.)
Public comment is anti-democratic. It's an intrinsically low-turnout off-cycle process; it's specifically intended to amplify the influence of concentrated special interests. We have a democratic process already: it's called "elections".
Two alternatives: - Trust our representative system and have our elected representatives make decisions (ha! Although perhaps people would pay attention to local elections more if they had more direct consequences…) - Randomly select people to comment, like jury duty.
It’s not impossible to think of systems that take public opinion into account that are not the exact system we have now.
With public comment, politicians will still just do whatever they want without accountability
This is very obviously not true to me. Is there really nothing in your area that’s been cancelled or interminably held up by the public comment process?
Where I live data centers are extremely unpopular with the general population simply because the process around the decision making for these is opaque, the benefits do not seem to be shared with those that suffer the consequences and we've been telling people for the last 40 years or so that they need to conserve energy because of global warming. In that climate (heh) pushing data centers is an uphill battle, and it probably should be.
Also, electricity being publicly owned (as in: everyone within a town is a shareholder with 1 share of the public utility company with the ability to get information about its running, fire the board with enough votes, etc) would be great.
The common narrative is state-owned vs privately owned, but what about community owned? What if the people the utility directly affects were shareholders? They might be incentivized to actually upkeep it well and keep costs low.
And into this scheme when investment in new technology is needed, you then could have open meetings and plans on how the state / gov money is to be used, instead of going into the black hole of utility companies that are dramatically inefficient and corrupt.