Public and accountable: What does it mean?

Mayor Stan Smith of Springdale recently inaugurated a monthly “brown bag lunch” where he talks to people informally about issues in Springdale and the Zion Canyon Corridor. It’s a good idea, and I congratulate Stan for taking the initiative and for the way the meetings are conducted. Stan has made these meetings informative and friendly community discussions, and I think they’re great! But they’re neither public nor accountable.

At both meetings—there have only been two so far—Stan and town manager Rick Wixom replayed their favorite old song: “Show up at Council meetings!” Rick reprised a golden oldie at the first one: “When we pass a two million dollar budget, nobody is there. When we talk about the dog ordinance, the whole town shows up.”

True. But sitting there listening when they pass the town budget doesn’t make a bit of difference. You might learn how much we are paying for our nice, new water tank, but we’ll have to pay it anyway. The reason we have the money for one is that a huge parcel of land north and west of the center of town will disappear under the bulldozer’s blade. Without that development, we wouldn’t need one. That issue is never talked about when we pass an annual budget.

Rick is a virtuoso with a spreadsheet. I have confidence that he’s got the numbers right. I’m convinced that Stan and the council have what they believe are the best interests of Springdale at heart. I’m also convinced that the real issues of Springdale won’t be touched in a meeting where they pass a budget.

Our council and staff are good people! They can vote to approve another budget without me there to watch them do it. It’s the wrong place and wrong time to try to reach hearts and minds about the things that really matter.

The dog ordinance is different. There are lots of different points of view, and if that’s on the agenda, you know that Mrs. Grundy down the street is going to show up and complain. You really do need to be there to defend poor Fido so he doesn’t have to stay cooped up in the yard all the time. People show up if the dog ordinance is on the agenda because they know that they might be able to influence the direction of the community where their real values are concerned.

This gets right to the heart of something I’m calling “Public and Accountable.” Since I was kicked off the Planning Commission for writing news articles, I have been trying to convince our town administration that being public and accountable is a good idea. It has been a rocky row to hoe. As the chain gang boss said in the great old movie, Cool Hand Luke, “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”

Here’s why Stan’s brown bag lunches are not “public and accountable.”

They’re not public

You have to go there to participate. Maybe you have a job in St. George. Maybe you have a hard time getting out of your house. Maybe you just don’t like gatherings of groups of people. Whatever your reason, if you’re not there, it doesn’t help you that Stan has put out the “Y’all Come!” sign. They’re not public for you. Stan has been attracting about a dozen people. They’re the same ones who go to all the meetings.

In today’s age of automated information, “public” means that anybody can access the information anytime with a computer. When I have debated this point with the people running the town, they sometimes say, “Not everybody has a computer. Not everybody knows how to use one.” First, a lot more people have some kind of computer than go to the meetings, and that ratio is getting larger. But second, maybe you can’t bring it up on your tablet (because maybe you don’t have one), but I’ll bet the lady across the street or the kid next door does. The library has lots of computers, and the Springdale librarian, Jeff, is more than happy to help anybody use them.

They’re not accountable

The more important word in “public and accountable” is “accountable.” Town Council meetings are “accountable” because there’s a computer-accessible record of what happened. I make a pest of myself by using my computer to search that record and find things that were said years ago. I bring them up in council meetings and ask about them.

Right now (I just checked), the most recent official minutes are four meetings old. Draft minutes for a meeting three meetings ago are posted. So if you don’t mind waiting for a week or so, you can look at draft meeting minutes on your computer. Town Clerk Darci Carlson works really hard at getting these online as quickly as possible. For a year, I documented Springdale Town Council and Planning Commission meetings at a website. I got to pick and choose what I wrote about, but Darci doesn’t. So I know what a huge job it is. Darci deserves praise for doing the job as well as it can be done.

Trying to get the minutes of a formal meeting out quicker isn’t the answer for the same reason that going to the meeting and sitting in the audience isn’t the answer. The real problem is that it’s not a dialog. It’s one-directional. It’s “them” telling “you” things that “they” think “you” ought to know. You can’t ask questions and get an answer. The issues near and dear to your heart are too easy to ignore. “You” can’t tell “them” anything through meeting minutes.

If “they” answered a question, then you would at least know that the thought went in one ear … even if it immediately exited out the other. When you “write a letter,” you don’t even have that guarantee. Ask yourself, how many times have you heard something specific that somebody wrote in a letter get brought up in a meeting? I have heard Stan (and others) say, “I read every letter! I hear you!” I believe him. But I don’t see the result. It’s not part of a dialog. I can’t find anything later on about Stan’s response on my computer. (Because it’s not there!)

Stan (and others) have said, “My phone rings off the wall. I talk to people constantly. I can’t go the post office without talking to somebody.” (Call him sometime just to listen to his phone message. It’s great!) He’s right. Stan has always been willing to talk to me and explain things. But sound vibrations in the clear air of Springdale disappear as soon as they are spoken. Nobody else gets to hear them, and they’re not accessible later on.

When I created a website to document Springdale meetings, my goal was to provide a place where a “public and accountable” dialog could take place. I had two main rules at my website:

But after a year of inviting people to engage at my website, very few did. Since then, I’ve talked to a lot of people about why they never posted anything. My conclusion is that my website suffered from exactly the same problem that a public hearing has: I never got an answer.

When I documented Springdale meetings, I would scream (in print) questions to the council and staff at Springdale. I never got answers. That single fact turned my website into a personal soapbox, and that was never my goal. I don’t think anyone else was interested in hollering into a dark cave either, so nobody did. I eventually quit.

I didn’t only ask questions at my website, I also buttonholed people personally and asked them why they never answered any of my questions online. One answer I got was that it was against state law. Really! When I was on the Planning Commission, the former town clerk, Fay Cope, and I used to have this debate frequently. So I looked up state law myself. It’s not against state law. Refusing to comment in a public forum online is a choice, not a requirement. (There are issues where public comment isn’t a good idea. Council “executive sessions” are held for these issues. But these issues are few and far between.)

Another answer I got was that it takes too much time. Our newly elected council member Lisa Zumpft told me that she doesn’t have time to write a blog. I’m not asking for one. But if someone asks a question in a public forum, it doesn’t take that long to post a reply. Lisa: Would you be willing to reply to direct questions in a public forum? There is a comments section at the end of this article. A simple “yes” or “no” wouldn’t take that long to write. (Welcome to public elected office, Lisa!)

I don’t get this answer very much from our public officials and staff, but I think that the main reason people with authority don’t reply in print is that it limits their freedom of action. It’s really a pain in the gazoo to have somebody like me quoting something you wrote two years ago. But that’s exactly the point. Your “freedom of action” equates to our “disenfranchised” feeling.

Dialog in a public Internet forum is “public and accountable.” Anybody can read or participate anytime. That’s “public.” And you have to be responsible for something you wrote even years ago. That’s “accountable.”