In many cities, one crucial yet often overlooked event offers a unique chance to strengthen ties between elected officials and the public: the annual city council retreat. This special meeting, typically held outside the formal council chambers, focuses on strategic planning, team building, and goal setting. Unlike regular council meetings, these retreats create a more relaxed and collaborative environment, fostering open dialogue and forward-thinking visioning.
Two aspects of council retreats make them relevant. First, these meetings tend to establish the direction that a city council will take over the next few years. This can become controversial later when residents question why a city council is prioritizing a specific topic, especially if the decision originated from discussions during a retreat. This is a very early opportunity to establish a publicly informed agenda for the various issues and policy cycles that will take place.
Second, public participation or observation in a city council retreat varies based on its structure, goals, and local government laws or practices regarding transparency. In some cases, pre-retreat feedback may be gathered to inform discussions among elected officials and senior staff about goals, challenges, and priorities. While many city council retreats are classified as public meetings and subject to open meeting laws ensuring transparency and public access, resident involvement is typically limited to observing the proceedings.
The council retreat is often considered a working session meant to provide a space away from the traditional working environment, avoiding problems that arise from partisan differences or contentious public meetings and comment periods. That said, such a process should catch the attention of democratic innovation practitioners, political reformers, and the public at large.
These processes should go beyond internal strategic planning and serve as opportunities to thoughtfully integrate public input—before, during, and after the retreat. While they often focus on strengthening relationships among council members, they also present a critical chance to address declining trust in institutions and elected officials. By fostering collaboration between the public and elected leaders, these retreats can help bridge divides, reduce polarization, and create a shared vision for the community’s policy direction and action plan.
Designing a more inclusive, participatory, and publicly engaged city council retreat process requires rethinking traditional formats and intentionally integrating community voices at multiple stages, including:
- Pre-retreat public engagement for understanding community-generated agenda topics and challenges and even mapping the community assets and opportunities that exist. These can include community forums in different neighborhoods to gather residents’ perspectives, or online crowdsourcing, such as surveys, or apps like Pol.is, to collect feedback on what matters most to residents. This can provide an initial baseline of perspectives where the public are included early in the process.
- Public participation during the retreat, including presentations and facilitated breakout groups, where community members learn alongside with council members on specific topics (e.g., housing, transportation, equity) and then generate goal setting ideas collaboratively and brainstorm solutions to key issues. Participants could involve some mixture of open participation, selected outreach to marginalized communities and sortition. This provides an opportunity for small group deliberation which is proven to help build internal efficacy and trust.
- Post-event public participation that consists of public evaluation of the process, as well as an opportunity to engage on the retreat outcomes. This allows for a feedback loop to be created by having the public feel like they are included throughout a decision-making process, both in terms of creating an initial policy agenda but also in terms of participating in council meetings on select issues.
This type of process should be designed for hybrid engagement to increase accessibility for those unable to attend physically. It would need to involve equitable supports like multilingual interpretation services to remove language barriers. A digital component would include real time streaming at a minimum, but also the possibility for public commenting and live polling to allow (in-person and online) attendees to contribute ideas and/or vote on priorities.
The retreat would still include council member-only sessions, providing an opportunity to reflect on input and deliberations with residents while focusing on prioritizing tangible community goals as political leaders.
Keeping with a new spirit of public participation, staff and leaders could further offer an opportunity for the public to reflect on how retreat priorities are being met over the long term. Moreover, an altogether unique way to approach a council retreat would be to create a simultaneous hybrid style citizens’ assembly and elected official body, like what occurs in Belgium’s deliberative committees, or what has happened in Boulder’s recent community and council forum.
Overall, a democratically reimagined traditional city council retreat would then become a collaborative strategic planning event that builds stronger connections between elected officials and the communities they serve.
