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Could City Council Be Handling Citizen Engagement Better?
Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.
As City Council sits down to hash out the details of yet another highly contentious agenda (garbage privatization!), now seems as good a time as any to reflect on how City Council goes about hashing things out with the public.
Suppose you felt strongly about a municipal issue that had been in the news. Like, to pick a not-so-arbitrary example, the City manager’s bid to eliminate most of the citizen-led advisory bodies that report to council, which was an actual item on the agenda of April 20’s executive committee meeting and is now under consideration by council at its meeting this week.
If that was something you’d been worried about, you might have decided to give a deputation, which, in the argot of Toronto municipal wonkery, is the term used to describe a short speech by a citizen to a committee of council. (The public can’t speak at full council meetings.) This would have been a fairly straightforward way to make your voice heard at City Hall. It might also have turned out to be a waste of your time.
At the April 20 executive committee meeting, 41 people signed up to speak on that advisory bodies issue. Those who showed up at 9:30 a.m., the meeting’s official start time, waited almost eight hours before the first of them was invited to speak. That’s because the committee reshuffled the day’s agenda to ensure that the item was handled dead last, perhaps perceiving—rightly—that it was going to take forever to deal with.
Since every member of the public gets five minutes to speak, and then can field up to five minutes’ worth of questions from each councillor in the room (not just those who sit on the committee), even once deputations get underway they can last for several hours if the issue in question is contentious enough. On this particular occasion, the meeting didn’t wrap up until nearly 12 hours after it had begun. In the end, the committee voted exactly as it was expected to: in favour of scrapping the advisory bodies, and against the nearly unanimous sentiments of the 28 deputants who stayed long enough to claim their five minutes of floor time.
True story. That’s why, for all the virtues of civic engagement, the deputation system, at least in cases where there are more than 30 or so people on the speakers’ list, is broken. It tests the patience of councillors and observers with speeches that grow repetitive, especially when all or nearly all the deputants fall to one side of an issue. And more importantly, it breeds cynicism by making passionate members of the public feel as though they aren’t being listened to. Not getting what you want, politically, is just an inevitable part of democracy, and it happens sometimes. Not getting what you want after sitting for 12 hours? That’s routine for any politician, but to an ordinary citizen it may seem harsh.
Other recent committee meetings have played out in similar fashion. Rob Ford isn’t the first mayor to face public outcry over his policies, but he is something of a lightning rod, and deputations stand to become more popular the longer he’s around.
This isn’t to say that residents shouldn’t be able to speak to councillors. But in a city that prides itself on creativity and technological prowess, shouldn’t we be able to come up with some better ways of managing the lines of communication? Ways that don’t involve trapping citizens, politicians, and journalists in the concrete bowels of City Hall’s committee rooms, where the fabric on the office chairs makes farty noises whenever councilors shift their bodies the wrong ways and the fluorescent lighting has been known to sear eyeballs out of skulls? (Okay, only one of those things actually happens.)
We sent some emails to city clerks in other North American municipalities of Toronto’s approximate size and standing.
In Los Angeles, we’re told, speakers at committee meetings get just two minutes per item, as opposed to Toronto’s five minutes. Also, L.A. doesn’t permit its councillors to question speakers, like Toronto does.
Boston, San Francisco, and Philadelphia all say they leave speaking times at their committee meetings entirely to the discretion of a committee’s chair. Technically, this same system could be adopted in Toronto without any legislative change. While five minutes is the default time limit, City bylaws permit a committee chair to set a different one.
Calgary handles things pretty much the same way Toronto does. Vancouver’s and Chicago’s city clerks didn’t return our messages.
Toronto could deal with the sometimes repetitive nature of mass deputations by following the examples of some of those other cities and shortening ours by a bit, say from five minutes down to four, or perhaps trimming the time allotted to questions asked of deputants by councillors.
But even setting shorter time limits wouldn’t address the fundamental problem, which is that people want to be heard and councillors have limited time during which to listen.
The City already encourages people to make submissions electronically, using email, but there’s clearly still an unmet demand for face time with politicians.
So here’s a radical proposal: why don’t we use the internet in a slightly more up-to-the-minute way?
Toronto has a burgeoning community of web and mobile app developers. Hire some of them to create a website that keeps track of the progress of the speakers list during a contentious committee meeting, where there are more than, say, 20 speakers on a given item. People interested in speaking could refresh the website to see where their names were in the queue. They could monitor the site from their homes, or from their smartphones, and manage their time accordingly. If we truly wanted to leverage the internet for everyone’s convenience, we could even have deputations over Skype.
We’re just spitballing here, and certainly the idea of the City spending money on any of this is far-fetched. But if we could save time and make City Hall more hospitable to citizen input in one stroke, that would be great.