Public Comment

We have no voice in city politics. Today, we have a government that is a mirror of the corporate structure, complete with its cultural and ethical corruption, and its backroom deals. Go to any City Council meeting, even a banal one like the last one on Sept. 25, 2018, and you will see all that at work. The work of business comes first, people’s participation, politely called “public comment,” is done for show, and policies are made that turn people against each other.

In other words, the people become nothing more than the raw material which the corporation called city government uses to produce the city as a product. We are economic objects, the props of procedure the output from which is called administration.

You know how you know that politics is the backroom kind? Elected officials don’t talk to each other when deciding on an issue. They talk about themselves, with no time wasted on dialogue because they already hashed it out somewhere else and know how they are going to vote.

It hasn’t always been this way. There was a time when thousands of people on the street forced the forces of corporate comportment to meet the needs of the residents. And as a result, people were elected to City Council that did things for the benefit of the people. No more. Now, the City Council does things for corporate business (telecommunications, advertising, the police, real estate, construction, etc.), and leaves the existence, let alone the well-being, of ordinary humans to be washed away under a flood of money (a new stadium, 18 story hotels, police overtime for homeless encampments raids, and police surveillance technology – Stingray, Automated License Plate Readers, Lapel Cameras). They buy instruments of torture (pepper spray), but won’t recondition the warm water pools to ease people’s pain. 

You would think that, with a flood of money pouring through the town, that some of it would adhere to people, or trickle down. Think again. Whole communities are dislocated and are now living elsewhere out of impoverishment. That’s what corporate economics does, it impoverishes. They pay some people to call it the “income gap,” as if it was just part of existence. But that’s bull. One side does it to the other. 

So, for years, we have had the same old example, which City Council refuses to deal with in a human non-corporate way – homelessness, created by the city’s inability to save people from impoverishing rent hikes and subsequent community displacement. People living on the street need toilet facilities. The city refuses to provide them in order to create hostility in the neighborhoods between the housed and the homeless. The latter end up soiling areas of neighborhoods, creating hostility which the city then uses as a reason to raid the encampments and eject its residents. It’s called social control, and it’s done by a control-oriented government, acting like any other corporate middle-management would act. A human-oriented government would have provided toilets for the homeless out of concern for the neighborhoods. 

At the last City Council meeting (Sept. 25, 2018), the 8^th Amendment argument for why homeless encampment raids are illegal was mentioned by a few people. It is refreshing that it is becoming a household concept. Since the city is not empowered to set aside an area for an encampment, it can’t say that it can still evict an encampment from one public area, to move it to another. Moving homeless people who have committed no overt illegal acts, without offering them shelter as per the 8^th Amendment decision, is a form of illegal punishment as such. But the corporate mentality will look for loopholes in such a prohibition in order to get around its human responsibility. 

We Have No Voice

Here’s how the City Council scenario works. First step, the consent calendar is modified and voted on. The mayor then decides the order in which action items are going to be discussed. Each item is introduced by a councilmember. This generally also involves some extemporaneous remarks on the issue by the Mayor. The Mayor then calls for public comment, and people line up to speak. You get a long series of disorganized monologues, for and against, all vying for space that becomes cacophonous and thus ignorable. After this public comment period, council then discusses the item, and votes on it as a motion. When the motion carries, policy is made. When it doesn’t, a problem is left unresolved (human-oriented motions are generally voted down or turned into money; business-oriented motions generally pass). 

That’s four steps. In each of these steps, the people have no voice, though they get to speak. The irony of corporate existence is that to speak and to have a voice are not the same thing.  

1- Modifying the consent calendar. Any councilmember could take any item off consent, in order to have it discussed as an “action item.” It used to be that if four people from the audience spoke against an item being “on consent,” it would be taken off consent. That rule has been changed recently, so that now, only councilmembers can take an item off consent. The people have lost that tiny ability to affect the agenda. 

What does this mean? Something being on consent implies that the council is favorably unanimous on the item. What the old system did was to enable the people to override council unanimity if the people wanted the chance to speak on the issue, and perhaps call for its modification or non-acceptance. The people no longer have the ability to override that unanimity. We are reduced to begging councilmembers for that small benefice. 

2- The Mayor decides the action agenda. After the consent calendar is passed, what is left is the action calendar, items that might need to be discussed. Items generally fall into one of two categories, those that pertain to the business of governing, and those that pertain to the welfare of people in the city that is governed. The first category is generally uncontroversial unless the business decision will have a serious effect on the people governed. The second are generally controversial because they involve the interests of the people, which is separate from the interest of the government as a structure. To neutralize complication to administrative interest, City Council will very often look for ways to turn the interests of one group of people against those of another. 

For instance, when council voted not to allow the homeless RVs to remain in the Marina area, they were making a problem for whatever neighborhood the RVs would move to (knowing many would move together since they had formed a kind of community among themselves—essential to surviving homelessness). When the council refused to allow the RVs to stay where they were, it was creating a problem for the governed – intentionally. In June, the city booted the RVs out of the Marina area, and in the Sept, like clockwork, neighbors from west Berkeley came and complained about the RVs in their neighborhood. No “RV-land” was identified, so the police were given another chance to torment the “RV-residents.” 

And this is what creates controversial issues. The council knows that such issues will bring many people to the council to speak in their own interest. It deals with this by placing such controversial issues at the end of the agenda. The later it gets, the more people who came to speak will leave, having gotten tired of waiting. This is also intentional. It is called corporate management. You create conflict between groups as a way of silencing people (each voice gets lost in the cacophony of disorganized voices speaking at once), and you create time barriers to speaking, both as a way of silencing people and to erode their organization. 

Controversial issues could go first, based on how many show up for the issue. Council could become a meeting place for people to enter dialogue with each other, and with councilmembers, in order to resolve their problems with each other amicably. The Council refuses to do that, just as consistently as it refuses to recognize the primary benefit for the homeless of the communities they form to take care of each other. Thus, the Council prefers to create an atmosphere of dissention rather than of dialogue, which leaves all policy-making in the hands of council. Because the people have no voice, policy-making is not even representation; it is elite political hierarchy. 

To set up forums of people, right there in the council meeting, as a flexibility of procedure that would allow dialogue between groups, and with councilmembers (no longer elitists behind their podium), would be a powerful move toward social understanding in a democratic fashion. This would give people a voice in resolving conflicts between them. Unfortunately, it would mean that the non-controversial business-oriented items would be the ones to be postponed until later, or to a special meeting. To choose to prioritize the business-oriented items is to intentionally maintain the silencing and the conflicts. 

 

3- After an item is introduced. If "experts" are needed to give a presentation on an item, they go first, and then field questions from the councilmembers. After that, there is public comment. This is the most hypocritical aspect of the City Council procedure. People line up, each getting two minutes to speak, unless there are more than ten, in which case each person gets one minute. One minute is not enough to allow a person to express complex thoughts in a logical manner, or describe a situation in which one has interests. Thought is essentially reduced to sound-bytes. If council was interested in public opinion, or the reasoning of people in describing their real interests as affected by an issue, it would give people more time when many show up (rather than less). In the absence of real concern for neighborhood interests, such as for anti-displacement measures or affordable housing to counteract rent-gouging, the “public comment” period is purely for show. 

But the council is governing a city, in a manner similar to the way a Board of Directors governs a corporation, so it acts in the interests of its structure, rather than those of real people. That’s what it means when councilmembers say we have to reduce speaking time so that each person gets a change to speak. Structure rather than content. Council knows that if people could make policy for themselves democratically, even under council authority, it would undermine the culture of corporate governance that councilmembers as elected representatives have come to depend on. 

Democracy means that those who will be affected by a policy are the ones who make the policy needed. 

 

4- Council then discusses the item. What is both astounding and frustrating at the same time about council meetings is that there is very little discussion or debate or argument between councilmembers. They do not address the issue involved from the perspective of their constituency (whom they "represent"). That would presuppose meetings and dialogues with those constituents, which doesn’t happen. They don’t talk to each other about it. They didn’t ask each other what they think about it. They speak about possible modifications of the item, or amendments to it. It is like people who talk about a map and think they are talking about the land that map represents. In speaking about the item in the terms of the item itself rather than the people they represent, these councilmembers fail to represent. 

For instance, a company came in with a proposal for what it called “IKE Smart City Kiosks.” These would be interactive computer screens set up in public places that would carry advertising for major companies and local businesses, as well as lists of local events. Public comment on the proposal could only be in the abstract because few in the audience had even heard of this until the techies gave their presentations. So public comment could not address the issue of cameras on these kiosks, since they weren’t mentioned. A couple of councilmembers thought they would have district meetings to see if people wanted them in their neighborhoods. But since this occurred after public comment, the public could not bring up the fact that this had not happened with the installation of Ford bike-for-hire racks, so what was going to insure that it happens for these kiosks. Thus, by the time council started to discuss the item, whatever thoughts the people in the audience might have developed were already obviated. And there were important issues, like what effect the federal Telecommunications Act would have on council’s ability to make decisions on these kiosks. 

In general, what most councilmembers said were versions of ooh-and-aah. They had already thought it through among themselves (in a backroom somewhere). And the Mayor would gavel down the kibitzers from the back of the room who saw through the whole thing. 

This is a crucial point, however. It is after the people hear what their councilmembers think about an issue that the people should have public comment. And more than public comment, they should have an ability to dialogue with the councilmembers, so that they can reason with them, speak directly to what they consider to be misconceptions on the part of the councilmembers. Not only would this allow council discussion to occur in the context of community input (in dialogue), but community input would no longer be a cacophony of monologues, but would have the council discussion as its unifying context, something to which to relate specific interests. 

This mutual contextualization is one of the aspects of political decision-making that is missing from the representationism exemplified by this City Council. 

In order for the people of Berkeley to have a voice in its affairs, the structure of council meetings would need to be transformed, as a primary consideration.