Elected Officials Need To Show Their Work
Vol. IV, No. 54 - Why do we allow elected officials to just give a vote and not back it up?
Monday night, City Council met as a Comittee-of-the-whole. An opportunity for all members to weigh in on the West Main Street roundabout and give direction to the administration on which alternative to work towards. The discussion turned out about a half dozen residents.
Like most government dicussions, the most interesting point wasn’t necessarily the main point of the meeting. The roundabout took second chair to a shorter, but fruitful discussion about the discussions that take place in the chambers and in front of the public.
Many council members made a fair point during the discussion: they want residents showing up, speaking at the podium, and giving input on the decisions in front of them. That’s a legitimate ask, and it shouldn’t be dismissed. Public comment matters. Constituent calls matter. A council member fielding a dozen calls about a project knows something about its local reception that a consultant’s charts and spreadsheets can’t tell them.
But the same logic runs in reverse, and that’s the half of the equation that got lost in the meeting’s hand-wringing over “keyboard warriors” and empty audience seats. Residents don’t just show up to be heard. They show up to hear. They come to committee meetings and full council sessions to find out how their representatives are actually thinking through decisions that will shape their commute and their community.
At the end of the meeting, when the straw poll was taken of where council wanted to go on the project. This is where an opening was missed. When a council member says “roundabout” and stops there, as happened repeatedly during the vote, residents in the room get the outcome but nothing about the reasoning that produced it. Even the discussion that lead up to the final vote was a series of questions that didn’t provide much analysis on anything that was new in the discussion — it was more of a rehash of the issues that were discussed a few weeks earlier in front of a larger crowd at the Hobart Arena.
Silence Creates the Cynicism Council Complains About
Here’s the mechanism worth naming plainly, because it explains why residents stay frustrated even when every town council in America insists it’s listening. When an elected official skips the explanation step, that silence doesn’t land as neutral. Residents don’t shrug and assume there must be a good reason they’re just not privy to. They fill the gap with an inference, and in local government, that inference almost always collapses into one of two familiar and unflattering shapes.
Either the official is a rubber stamp, someone who defers reflexively to whatever staff or the administration recommends because pushing back feels uncomfortable or costly. Or the official is a reflexive naysayer, someone who blocks or slows anything that smells like progress because saying no is easier than doing the work of saying why.
Neither read is fair to individual council members who may, in fact, have real, carefully considered reasoning sitting behind a one-word vote. But fairness isn’t the resident’s job to extend on faith. If the reasoning was never spoken aloud, residents have nothing else to go on, and they shouldn’t be blamed for reaching for the explanation that’s actually available to them, even if it’s an oversimplified one.
This is exactly the trust erosion worth watching for: residents don’t need every decision to go their way, they need to see the thinking behind it, and when that thinking is absent, distrust fills the space it left behind.
Why This Cuts Both Ways in the Roundabout Debate
Apply this standard to the July 13 meeting and it becomes uncomfortably specific. The council members who said “roundabout” with no elaboration during the straw poll invite the rubber-stamp read almost by design, because their stated position matched American Structurepoint’s slide deck recommendation word for word, with no visible daylight between the consultant’s conclusion and the elected official’s own, even when a closer analysis of the data showed a recommendation that wasn’t so much an obvious choice, but a choice made by more subjective means.
That’s not proof they didn’t think about it. It’s proof they didn’t show their thinking, and those aren’t the same thing, even though residents will often treat them as if they are. If this was a high school algebra test, they’d get the question wrong for not showing their work, even if they got the answer correct.
By the same tokn, the standard has to apply symmetrically, or it isn’t really a standard, it’s just a way of scoring points against whichever side loses a vote. Councilman Schilling raising the delay-math objection, pointing out that a 61% reduction sounds dramatic until you realize it’s 67 seconds dropping to 26, while the corridor carrying the bulk of the 23,000 daily vehicles will actually see more delay, is legitimate scrutiny, not obstruction. But imagine if he’d simply voted no without walking through that math. Residents would have no way to tell the difference between a council member doing the hard work of interrogating a consultant’s model and a council member who just doesn’t like change. The explanation is the only thing that separates genuine deliberation from theater, and it cuts the same way whether the vote lands yes or no.
The Standard This Actually Sets
None of this requires every council member to become a traffic engineer or deliver a dissertation before every vote. The bar is actually much lower and much more achievable: when a decision involves a real trade-off, name the trade-off. Say what specific piece of information tipped the scale for you personally. If a colleague raised an objection you’re setting aside, say why it didn’t change your mind, even in one sentence.
That’s the difference between a vote residents can respect, even when they disagree with it, and a vote that just deepens the sense that the outcome was decided somewhere else long before the meeting started.
Residents at these meetings aren’t looking for agreement. They’re looking for visibility into the reasoning that got their representatives to yes or no. The West Main Street discussion is a clean, well-documented case of what happens when that visibility is treated as optional instead of expected, and it’s worth watching whether the final legislative vote does anything to close that gap or simply repeats it.
Announcing our July Community Survey!
Every other month, this publication takes time to ask our readers how they feel about the happenings in their hometown! What are the challenges? What are the opportunities? Is your hometown headed in the right direction? Our survey is the easiest way for you to express your thoughts. Next month, this publication will report out on the results.
Thanks for your time and your participation! It is greatly appreciated!
This is what it looks like when residents stay informed. If you find value in this work, share it with a neighbor, a colleague, or anyone who cares about this community. Paid subscriptions keep it going — $5 a month.
Civic Capacity runs on one thing: readers who believe local journalism matters. If you want to support this work without a subscription, you can now make a one-time contribution through Buy Me a Coffee — or in my case, Buy Me an Iced Tea. Click the button below. Every contribution goes directly into the work you read here every day.