Beyond the Town Hall Meeting: Innovations in the Quest for Public Input.

• Author: Barrett, Katherine
• Position: PERSPECTIVE

There's no argument about the value of public input in making important government decisions. According to GFOA, good public participation practices can help governments be more accountable and responsive and can also improve the public's perception of governmental performance and the value the public receives from the government.

But despite their potential, these benefits aren't easy for many communities to achieve. Scores of people have told us that their community's approach to garnering citizen input is limited to holding regular public meetings. That's a popular approach, certainly, and one that's often required by statute, but it may fall far short of garnering the kind of information leaders can use to make hard decisions.

"We often hear from budget managers that at a budget meeting you have the same relatively small group of people who show up and you already know what their input is going to be before they provide it," says Chris Adams, CEO of Balancing Act, which has worked with over 150 cities to create online budget simulations to help get input from people. "While it's important to give residents that opportunity, it's not always useful."

Even though virtual platforms like Zoom are expanding public meetings to a larger group, they won't necessarily attract people who are representative of the community, especially those who live in less affluent areas and have long felt disenfranchised by their governments. "Localities have to do a better job of identifying what the makeup of their community really is to reach out to them. And public meetings haven't typically delivered that kind of representation," said Daniel Bevarly, founder and principal of New Democracy Partners and an adjunct professor at Florida State University.

Fortunately, a growing number of local governments are reaching out to the public to draw opinions from a far more representative population than what's often described as "the usual gang of suspects."

Consider Roseville, California, a city with more than 140,000 residents. Roseville was confronting a $10 million structural deficit and had been borrowing from reserves to make its budget whole. After about 10 years of budget cuts, along with adjustments to compensation and service, "we had done everything we could do without the public noticing," Megan Scheid, Roseville deputy city manager, said. "We had to get public input to help us prioritize."

The solution? "We sent postcards to every one of the 60,000...