Do community meetings still....happen?

Your local municipality will have a public meeting – usually once a week. Generally, they’re to discuss the public’s thoughts on a new construction project, but there’s often time for open-floor discussion.

I used to write the agenda, and hide in my cubicle during the actual meeting. As one of the ‘enemy forces’, I was not about to get in the way of the senior citizens protesting the new WalMart.

@Seek_Kolinahr So it is usually just about new infrastructure or construction?

Well, that’s the meetings I’m familiar with. I worked for the planning department.

I think the Chamber of Commerce has a public meeting as well, and so does the School Board.

If you’re looking for something like the church-house meetings on Little House on the Prairie, where everyone gathers to discuss whether we should buy corn seed from Memphis or Cincinnati, no, I don’t think those occur anymore

They happen all the time. It’s just a majority of citizens don’t care enough to seek out the information (times/locations/discussions)

And they’re quite interesting to attend. They can also be very entertaining!

Here’s a little example from my neighborhood:

June 30, 2010 – Residents React to Plans for New Ravenswood Metra Station Last night residents of the 47th Ward gathered at Bethany Retirement Community to review plans for the new Metra station…Some neighbors expressed concern about the new station…residents discussed issues of traffic flow and parking….Other concerns from residents include the Metra’s abundant loudspeaker announcements and the fate of nearby trees and community gardens…

July 30, 2010 – Metra Scraps Plan to Move Ravenswood Metra Station …The impetus for this change was community feedback. Center Square Journal first reported on residents’ concerns at an open house last month. Metra spokesperson Michael Gillis said that at that forum “the feedback was pretty clear.”..

Do they generally make a difference at all?

I mean is it like you show up and hey guys were gonna talk about this today and then leave….yay.

Is there actual progress? Does say maybe the mayor or political figures there who even care to listen?

Being a rural area with a small population (1600 people) we have an open meeting every other week of the town Board of Supervisors – six people and a chair. There are always a few members of the public there for routine matters; when the topics are hot, such as zoning, assessment, school taxes and road surfaces, the little hall bulges.

The Board always listens. When the time for re-election occurs, every vote matters. We have had people win these seats by 10–15 votes.

We all care because every issue is, indeed, our indivual backyards.

Well, Homeowners’ Associations often meet, discuss issues that are important to them, and construct a “battle plan” for introducing their ideas to the municipal board.

It’s easy to ignore one letter from a pissed-off individual. It’s really hard to ignore three letters a week from each adult living in a 500+ home neighborhood.

@gailcalled Interesting, do you feel in more populated places that the impact is not as much because of the tight knit feel of say like you said of a small 1,600 people is not the same in cities with bigger populations? Less connection and understanding?

@Seek_Kolinahr It is more a rally the people to side with you sort of feel to make your point heard?

@Steve_A: Yes, we all know each other and how we vote, in general. We are careful to be tactful friends and neighbors, but the intimacy brings a clear understanding of grass roots politics.

Our POVs range from “my family has been here since the revolutionary war and I can do what I want with my land” to “I have a second home here, pay a disproportional amount of real estate taxes, believe in conservation and global warming and expect to have my voice heard.”

The two cultures live together carefully and for the most part, respectively.

Yes, communities still meet. Recently my community blocked a new shopping center being built. I was in favor of it. Well, I was more accurately indifferent. But, I was there during many of the meetings.

We also have a civic club in town that does community events, they meet over pot luck dinners and discuss issues and events in the community. They do things like a Christmas parade, and give a christmas award to the house with the best decorations in our town, and do a summertime picnic and field day, and some other community things. They also discuss what might be coming up before the planning commission.

@gailcalled See that is something I worried about. There is perhaps surely just not where I live if not many places I would think, that it comes to why should I care, if no one else cares? If what I say does not matter and is not heard why bother? That effect stacks upon itself I believe anyways. (I often this way with issues in things whether it be local or in the world.)

But it could work the other way around too. Power in numbers they say.

@JLeslie Now that they blocked it, what is their plans now?

If you don’t mind me asking why was it blocked anyways?

@Steve_A well, the owner is going to sue the city from what I understand. There was a parcel of land for sale, and a developer here was interested in buying it and developing a shopping center, it is less than a half a mile from me. The location is considered to be more or less the geographical center of town. From where I live all supermarkets currently are a minimum of 5 miles away, and the city and this developer thought it would be a neighborhood convenience to have a commercial center there. Moreover, there is already approval, all permits are already done, for a new private school to be built across from where this center would go, which seemed convenient also. So, this developer bought the land, feeling he would be able to build a shopping center.

The problem was, one of the roads that would border on the south side of the shopping center would have to be widened and that would mean very increased traffic on what is a rather quiet road right now, and that road has trees arching over from either side, which would be lost, and the people who live on that road were flipped out. My town takes it’s trees very seriously. Very. Also, there was concern that the lights from the shopping center would interfere with our night time skies. We actually do not allow up lighting on our houses, to keep the sky as dark as possible for starry nights.

See, there is going to be major development near our interstate exit, just a mile and a half from me, and people argued that would be sufficient, that creating a new city center aside from that was unnecessary, and not worth how it would change the character of the community.

When the developer bought the land, he asked the planning committee if they would be open to a shopping center, and they said yes, and they were, and they told him they would be strict about how it looked. I saw what he presented at the meetings and he did put effort into making it beautiful. I went to the meetings because I wanted it to not be a big parking lot, I wanted it to be conducive for people to walk outside, eat al fresco (there are no restaurants near me, except for at the interstate exit a waffle house and cracker barrel) and if a grocery store went there I did not want another Kroger. But most people at the meeting were not like me, they simply did not want a shopping center at all. The city officials and the developer did not count on such strong negative feelings from the community.

So after my long story, to answer your question, nothing will go there. He can sell the land and someone could build a few houses, or he could, but the land is worth much less as residential land than commercial. I don’t see how he can win the law suit, because he had nothing in writing really. Not sure.

I think that almost every community still has meetings, the difference is that most people don’t seem to be interested in attending and being involved anymore. I was the clerk/treasurer of a very small municipality for a few years and we had trouble even getting the board members to show up until we made it a paid position (only $35 a month). After that the board members were there but there were very few residents who showed up unless, of course, they had a problem with something the board had done. When I moved, I started to attend the county commissioners meetings in my new location (I live outside of any municipality limits) and I found that it is almost the same situation, people rarely show up for meetings unless there is a problem.

I’ve been to several community meetings. Yes, they still happen. The degree to which people are actually listened to and heard varies. Neighborhood boards are the first level of organized government. There is one for every community, representatives that live in the district are elected, and they meet regularly to discuss community issues. Then there are grassroots community meetings that basically form to address specific issues. If organized properly, these can be highly effective.

Of course they do. We have a city council meeting every week, each authority like the water and sewage, airport, and other working groups have regular public meetings. We even have a recreation committee meeting to discuss work and improvements in our three public parks, and baseball fields. Then there are school board and PTA meetings. I expect that you could do to a meeting every day of the work week. If I retire I expect to attend regularly.

The only problem is that most of the meetings are at 7:00 P.M. and it is hard to schedule. We also have numerous county meetings that are open to the public for questions and comments.

There is still a town meeting style of government in parts of New England.

We not only have weekly town meetings, but also monthly zone meetings for 5 different zones in town, for a more local touch.

They happen every week where I live and I attend many of them.
I regularly attend school board, village council, planning and zoning, chamber of commerce, and township board meetings.
Just like @gailcalled said, it depends on what is being discussed or decided, how many of the public show up.
Sometimes I am the only “member of the public” there, sometimes the room if full.

In addition to zoning and school board meetings, we have neighborhood organization meetings for our inner city communities. An example would be that there is a stretch of city development along a major city street. Grocery, video store, 2 drug stores, several banks, restaurants, that sort of thing. Kroger wanted to buy a defunct video store, raze it, and put in a gas station. The property backs up to residential property, and connects to a two lane road that has a lot of traffic, and a lot of pedestrians, especially children. The neighbors didn’t want the added traffic from the gas station, especially since two other gas stations closed within the last 18 months that were within ½ mile of the same location. There was a huge turnout for the neighborhood meeting, and then for the zoning meeting.