Sharon’s Take… A Sharon Byrne column on the cover of the Santa Barbara Sentinel
Thinking about reforming our current government model and all its inherent problems can quickly overwhelm the average citizen. Where to start? Contribution limits? One could spend years on Maplight.org tracking campaign contributions immediately before the vote to see how government officials are bought and paid for. Overturn Citizens United? Shorter legislative sessions?
There’s a lot of terrain. Rather than despair from overwhelm, let’s bite off what we can chew.
In this first installment of shaping a Government 2.0 model, I want to first look at ways in which our participation in government is limited, and find solutions.
Public Input: The Dreaded Public Hearing
The average citizen can’t take hours off work, or abandon picking the kids up from school, often repeatedly, to sit in a lengthy public hearing at 2pm so he can submit his two minutes of public comment. We can also surmise that those two minutes, or the email sent before the hearing, aren’t likely to influence outcomes, as it’s highly likely that staff has a firm direction they want to go in. Elected officials come and go. But staff stays. So the place to watch for agendas is in staff presentations.
The public hearing is more theater than anything, especially given you have to sit through the gadflies with nothing else to do but rant via podium every single session.
Then there’s the public hearing that’s not actually attended by the public, but by a coalition with an agenda of its own – the ‘Pack The Hall’ strategy. A good example of this is the recent hearing on the gang injunction.
I attended, but recognized few faces. The hall was loaded with activists, many non-local, and UCSB flacks shouting the evils of the injunction but proposing no useful substitutes. I searched the crowd for neighbors who have suffered gang violence and intimidation.
They weren’t there.
I don’t blame them. It was a hostile crowd to folks actually struggling with gangs.
When I heard one councilmember thank ‘the public’ for expressing its views at a public hearing in which no action would be taken, I laughed.
Political theater at its best.
Not everyone wants to participate fully in government affairs, but wants to weigh in on something that affects them, or make their opinion known on an issue of civic importance. There’s no real way for them to do that, other than by sending an email and hope it got read, or the dreaded public hearing(s). The public hearing is a very ancient way of doing public business. But it need not be so. There are some modern technologies available that could help.
When government sweats a contentious decision, they sometimes hire a polling firm to take the public pulse on the subject. Let the polls tell us what we should do. No sticking one’s neck out that way.
Since they take that road already, instead of spending $30,000+ on a one-time consultant for a single issue, what about installing a real-time citizens polling mechanism instead? That could be used repeatedly?
Cell Phone Voter Registration
When you register to vote, register your mobile too, one mobile phone per voter. There can still be full public hearings, or multiples of them, as is often the case. But instead of scanning the newspaper for hearing notices in government-ese, or agendas via email, now you get a push message to your mobile about the hearing, the subject to be discussed, and text your response – yea or nay, with comments within a certain timeframe before the hearing, say, a week. Cut off mobile voting the day before the hearing so results can be tabulated. There’s probably software that can receive incoming texts, check against registered mobile phones in the city voter database, and filter out the non-registered and duplicates (in case someone tries to game the system by texting multiple times). Tally the valid mobile votes from registered voters, and you’ve got an instant real-time read.
You can sign up to follow topics, like you do on Twitter, so you get hearing notices of interest to you, whether your issue is public safety, potholes, planning, permits, parks or parking.
We can easily find two minutes within a week to send a text message on what we think in response to a mobile push message from our government. No time off work needed, no ridiculously long hearing, and we had our say.
The county could easily provide a similar mechanism. Voter registration data can be sorted by district, so state and congressional representatives could do this too. Mobile voter polling would provide air cover for representatives, ensure staff knows how the public feels, and increase transparency in government.
That would be a huge improvement over present (archaic) conditions that limit citizen participation, and would cost less than ballot initiatives. Why wait months and mount ridiculously expensive campaigns to find out how people feel today?
The next job will be for the government to properly frame issues for an active citizen engagement model.
That will be covered in a future column.
Students Big Winners at Annual Awards Dinner
Last Thursday’s Blue & Green edition of the Santa Barbara Independent was down to 68 pages. In its hey day, the Independent had weekly page counts between 120-128, pages. The publication is down to roughly half its former size.
Sharing is on the rise. Seems like a silly claim to make, it having been an integral part of the human community for millenia. But the trajectory has been towards private property, everyone owning their own…well, everything. Now, some have acquired enough and are more willing to lend it, share it, or borrow something instead of buying their own. It also may be, that a sharing economy will make survival possible, as there won’t be enough resources in the future without it.
