The Power Of Talk

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when the town’s business was conducted far more informally than it is today. It seemed like everyone knew everyone else in town, and meeting rooms routinely filled up with people who appeared to have only first names and who needed no invitation to speak their minds no matter what Roberts Rules of Order prescribed for the moment. Everyone had a say whether anyone else was listening or not. Arguments circled back on themselves, got second winds, and took off with new vigor toward the midnight hour. It was democracy raised to the power of lungs.

In recent decades, the agendas for those meetings have changed. They are a lot longer now, and the issues they address seem more critical to the quality of our lives. For that reason, a new formality has insinuated itself into the proceedings that organizes and impels the process with all due expediency. Things get done, and for the most part everyone gets home the same day.

But as we are finding in so many quarters of our multitasking, texting, twittering lives, something gets lost along the way. When things move so quickly, so efficiently, we sometimes get the sense that something is slipping by us — or getting slipped by us. In so many public meetings, the public is quarantined in the isolation of an agenda item called “public participation.” The word “participation” suggests a state of being related to a larger whole, but that relationship as practiced in most public meetings these days is largely unrequited. The Board of Education, for example, appends a paragraph of rules of behavior to each of its agendas for those who would presume to actually speak to their elected officials. They are instructed to “be concise and respectful” and to “avoid repetition,” and to speak “no more than three minutes.” Questions are allowed, but answers are not — at least not at the meeting. Answers are promised later, after the Citizen’s Request for Information Form is filled out and submitted for the board’s consideration.

There is a point at which all the formal processes and proscriptions placed upon the public’s ability to comment on and question the work of elected officials begins to look like a moat around the castle. So we were heartened last February when the Board of Selectmen, at Selectman Paul Mangiafico’s urging, decided to schedule occasional informal meetings with nothing on the agenda except public discussion, where people could ask questions and get answers with no clock ticking, no minutes taken, no other pressing thing to get on to. The first such session did not take place until last week. It was poorly scheduled (5 pm Thursday), poorly publicized, and poorly attended (three citizens showed up). But the talk was lively and lengthy. The “public,” such as it was, found it could talk back to the selectmen and demand answers, and the selectmen found they could talk back to the backtalk, answering mincing criticisms with broader context and hearsay with chapter and verse. Fortunately, the selectmen have promised to do a better job of scheduling and publicizing their next conversation with the public.

Similar sessions exclusively dedicated to public discussion could enrich the debate in every area of local government. Even the school board has found the format useful in the rare instance when it tried it last October; it engaged the public fully and freely just a week before a request for additional funds for the high school expansion went to a referendum vote. Even though the funding request narrowly failed in that vote, the school board made a strong case for approval at the meeting and helped recast its image of isolation going into a key political test.

Talk is cheap. Trust is dear. Yet in the currency of public discourse, the former buys the latter. In the marketplace of local politics and governance, there is no better bargain.