I would expect every neighborhood activist to activate against the change. By their nature these people are going to be the loudest to speak up on the decision to remove their platform. They’re the squeaky wheel types anyway. The 95% of the population that doesn’t participate or care about CAC involvement is going to be largely silent.
The perception of this one decision won’t be an election issue if they come up with a plan for wider engagement without the toxicity. I’m going to email Saige to let him know I support the decision and offer up what I would like to see from community engagement. I think feedback on a new system will be listened to, so now’s the time to let them know what we think.
I agree with many of the criticisms of the CACs, but they did offer an opportunity for public engagement. I dislike the way the council did away with them without public debate or an alternative plan. I think the excuse that debate “risked getting bogged down” is weak, especially when the issue is public engagement.
To destroy a (flawed) avenue of public engagement without any public engagement in the name of increasing public engagement seems disingenuous at best.
I support the Council and voted for most of them, but I think they made a mistake on this. I hope they can quickly come up with a better alternative quickly.
My wife quit going to our CAC years ago because she didn’t like “spending her free time sitting around listening to people complain about things for 2 hours.”
Any proposed changes to the system would have been opposed by the anti-development activists. It could have taken years to build a consensus vote that changes are even needed. I honestly don’t believe it could have happened any other way and I think the smart thing for this council to do was to make it happen quickly, so they have time to put in a new system and let it work while they’re still in office.
Can you imagine how it would have been if they had hired a consultant to come up with a public engagement process before making a decision? 3-4 months of the consultant visiting CACs to give presentations, another cycle for feedback. Time to generate a new format, public meetings to discuss the new format, a comment period, revisions, public meetings on the revisions, hearings, then vote? We would probably still be talking about it 2 years from now and how to change things would be the primary election debate topic. Cox and Mendell would be going door to door trying to generate voter support for the current CAC’s, which would again, just energize the NIMBY’s. In the end we could have ended up more anti-development than ever before and strengthened the current negativity seen in the CACs.
There was no good way to do this. As the N&O put it “ripping the band-aid” was a bold move which is the type of decision making I voted for. I think a band-aid rip is better than the alternative scenario, and I don’t think it could have succeeded any other way.
Yes, it can be difficult and time consuming to build consensus, but IMO that is what good leaders should do.
Imagine if the prior council had made a sweeping change that reduced ways for people to voice their opinions with no notice and no input.
I don’t really have a problem with getting rid of CACs, but that I don’t like the methods. In this case it feels like people are giving council a pass bc they agree with the outcome.
Revamping the CAC has been tried for 10 years unsuccessfully. Why would a more “process driven approach” with more wasted tax dollars on yet more studies yield a different result…other than several more wasted years with the same CACs doing the same NIMBY-complaining?
I think the City has been more than patient and tried enough. Time to rip the band-aid!!!
